4 SEO Strategies to Boost Holiday Traffic and Sales

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Las Posadas, or even if you are someone who doesn’t celebrate any of this, the holiday season is bound to involve a lot of shopping. But the holiday season this year is nothing like the previous ones. So much has changed over the years- technology is evolving rapidly, digital transformation is in full swing, brick-and-mortar shops are losing their sheen, and the world is slowly recovering from the aftermath of the pandemic outbreak.

What does this mean for the sellers? They simply can’t turn a blind eye to all these shifts. Even with the pandemic almost reaching its tail end, customers are still hesitant to come out of the safety of their homes. They prefer shopping online. And why wouldn’t they, when shopping online is much more convenient, simpler, and safer?

As sellers, you need to quickly adapt to this rapid transformation. A such strategy that will help you with it is SEO. By tailoring a winning Search Engine Optimization strategy, you will be able to stand out while capturing more traffic and sales.

Here are four tried and tested SEO tips that will help you boost holiday traffic and sales:

Study Last Year’s Trends

Before creating an SEO strategy, you must analyze the trends and patterns from the previous year. It will help you unearth key details in customer behavior from last year’s holiday season. With this information, you can predict their future purchase patterns. It will also help you understand which keywords to target in order to drive content creation and on-page optimizations.

As you already know, keywords are crucial for an SEO strategy, and they bring a high volume of searches that are relevant to the business you own. Once the apt keywords are identified, you should group them into themes based on user intent and map them to your existing landing pages. You can also use these keywords to fill the content gap from last year’s holiday sales, which will eventually increase your sales.

Design Holiday Landing Pages

Two of the major shopping events that come along with the holiday season are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, collectively known as BFCM. After studying the previous year’s trends and patterns and identifying the keywords, you need to create landing pages for the BFCM sale first. Optimize the SEO elements and page content using targeted keywords. Also, insert internal links to the new landing pages. It will increase the search rankings of your page and will result in substantial growth of website traffic.

The below snaps are from the homepage of the online retailer Target. Look how they have created holiday landing pages for the Cyber Monday sale event. They have also added internal links that will redirect the user to the Cyber Monday special deals.

Optimize Deal Pages

Once the holiday season starts, the customers will start pouring into your online store thick and fast. Creating separate landing pages will not be simple as you will need a lot of time and resources. If you haven’t started the prep works for it yet, an easier alternative is to optimize the existing deal pages using the holiday keywords.

Deal pages are more likely to have a good PA score (Page Authority score) since they might have been live for a longer period. It means they will be ranked better on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Optimize your deal pages with titles, heading, descriptions, and body copy to leverage this advantage. Ensure that the relevant keywords are present throughout and also, if possible, do the optimization a few days prior to the holiday season. It will allow the search engines to crawl and index the content.

Let’s consider a simple example. The American video game, consumer electronics, and gaming merchandise retailer GameStop has a well-designed deal page with a relatively good PA score. By optimizing this deal page for the upcoming holiday season using targeted keywords, GameStop can generate increased traffic and sales and save the time and resources required to create a separate landing page.

Update Pages With Holiday Messages

The most straightforward SEO tactic to improve your website’s performance during the holiday season is to update landing pages with holiday-related message content. By informing the customer about holiday discounts, offers, and deals through different means like titles, meta descriptions, and open graph elements, your brand will be able to stand out amongst the competition. It will also give you a significant jump in search rankings - this means your website or online store will be able to attract a large number of users.

You can update holiday messages in the home, category, and PDP pages. They should emphasize the most important value propositions like free shipping, curbside pick-ups, and more.

The below image shows that IKEA’s website has been slightly revamped with holiday messages. From special category pages for the winter holiday season to highlighting the discount offers and sales, IKEA’s website is the perfect example for understanding how to use holiday messages to boost sales.

Summary

The holiday season is a stressful time for sellers. The last thing you want to worry about is your SEO strategy during this period. So, it is absolutely essential to start formulating your SEO strategies beforehand. Be proactive, understand your strengths and weaknesses (example - your website’s loading speed), and do compatibility tests on different devices. After that, move on to the SEO strategies – learn from the last year’s data and form trends, identify keywords, tailor your website content as per the keywords, and move up in the search rankings while gaining large organic website traffic this holiday season.

We can also help. We will help you build your eCommerce mobile app and tap into the massive potential of SEO. Sit back and witness your sales skyrocket this holiday season. To know more, contact us now.