Your Holiday SEO Playbook: Strategies to Boost Traffic & Sales

Between November and January, there is a shopping frenzy all over the world. This period, which we call the holiday season, is the time when digital marketing methods are used most actively.

In this period, businesses want to reach their target audience in the fastest way possible with all kinds of digital marketing methods. SEO is among the important areas of digital marketing efforts. Creating a holiday season SEO strategy will make your business stand out in the digital world more than your competitors during this period.

In this content, we will guide you through the holiday season SEO period, from a solid keyword strategy, to mastering the art of content creation and discovering the importance of link building. We will also share how to measure SEO success as a result of these efforts.

Unveiling the Magic of SEO During the Holiday Season

SEO, one of the digital marketing methods, is a game that gives performance in the long run. You can see hundreds of tips about SEO in the digital environment, even if you apply all the recommended tips in one day, the volume of organic traffic unfortunately does not double overnight. However, the earlier you start the optimization process before the holiday season, the higher you can rank in the SERP and gain visibility for more keywords.

Read on to optimize your brand and website to get more traffic for the holiday season!

Test and Optimize Your Pages for Speed Performance

The pages of your website need to load fast not only during the holiday season, but at all times of the year. According to a study conducted by Google, "The average mobile webpage takes 15.3 seconds to load." This time is quite long, especially for an e-commerce site.

Page Speed measures how long it takes for a web page to load and how long it takes the user to interact with it.

Search engines like Google also use page speed as a ranking factor. According to a study conducted by Google, the probability of bouncing increases by 32% as the page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds. Websites with poor website performance, especially between November and January, when there will be intense shopping, will lose potential customers to competitors.

Page performance is important not only for SEO but for all marketing efforts. According to another study;

"People who have a negative experience on mobile are 62% less likely to make a future purchase - no matter how beautiful or data-driven your marketing campaigns are."

For the reasons mentioned above and due to the research done, you should definitely improve your website speed before the holiday season. Check the following steps regularly to improve the technical aspects of your website pages:

• Optimize the speed of your website's landing pages, category, product detail, cart and checkout pages.
• Check the mobile compatibility of your landing pages and especially your cart & checkout pages.
• Check broken URLs and content inlinks within the site.
• Check canonical tags if you want your campaign pages to be included in search results.
• Check that there is no noindex tag on the campaign pages.
• Update outdated, missing or unnecessary website pages.
• Review the website architecture so that users can navigate the website more easily
• Link to campaign pages in a way that users can easily access them from within the site, not just from search results
• Check that your web page and its resources are served over the https:// protocol.

Apart from suggestions, check for UI/UX gaps that will maximize the user experience.

Tools to Maximize Site Speed

You don't need to be an SEO expert to check most of the checklists we wrote above.

• Google PageSpeed Insights: You can check the important pages on your website with this tool. You can forward the suggestions the tool gives you to the technical developer team.
• Google Mobile Compatibility Test Tool: With this tool, you can easily check the mobile compatibility of your website.
• Index Coverage Report: With this tool on Google Search Console, you can get and analyze information about your important landing pages.
• Screaming Frog: It is a tool you can use for technical and On-Page SEO audits.

Analyze Last Year's Data to Predict SEO Traffic

To predict where your traffic will come from through organic channels during the holiday season, be sure to review last year's Google Search Console and Google Analytics data.

When reviewing last year's data, consider the following:

• Which of your pages received the most traffic during the same periods last year?
• Which queries did users use before visiting your website?
• What are your top converting pages for the same period last year?
• What are your paid queries that converted during the same period last year?
• Check the referral traffic sources that brought the most traffic to your site last year. Make sure to actively use the same sources this year.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are very useful tools, even if they seem complicated to you at first. If you are not very experienced in using these two tools, Orphex offers you very useful information with the information obtained from both tools.

Identify Relevant Keywords to Use During Shopping Periods

One of the most important steps in the success of SEO strategy is keyword research. Targeting irrelevant keywords that do not meet the search intent for the blog, category or product pages on your website wastes your efforts.

To create your keyword strategy for the holiday season, be sure to check the past year's data for the keywords that bring the most traffic and impressions from the Google Search Console tool. GSC shows data for the last 16 months at most, but you can back up your data in your GSC account with BigQuery. In this way, you can access your old data even after 5 years. You can also use tools like google trends or google keywords planner for your keyword strategy. With these tools, you can choose the keywords you can target during the holiday season.

When choosing the keywords you can target for the holiday season, targeting keywords with high search volume and competitive keywords may not give you the performance you want during this period. Instead, prioritize long-tail keywords with high search volume and low competition.

Create Custom Landing Pages for Holiday Periods

To rank for search queries related to Single Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, we recommend creating landing pages that target relevant keywords.

During these periods, users often search for keyword combinations such as \"brand name + product\", \"brand name + holiday season + deals\", \"brand name + discounts\" or \"brand name + promotion\".

By using Google Trends, Google Search Console and Google Ads data, you can identify the pages that brought the most traffic and conversions during the holiday season in previous years. In this way, you can create special landing pages for relevant pages that are valid during the holiday period. For example, if you have received traffic and conversions from the query \"black friday calvin klein\" in the past years, a landing page valid during the black friday period can be opened.

Make sure that the relevant landing pages are included in the XML sitemap, that they can be crawled by search engine bots, and that they are linked within the site so that users who visit the site can easily find them.

Unify and Leverage the Power of All Digital Marketing Channels

It would be a big mistake to rely only on one digital marketing channel to make the Holiday Season more successful. In order to manage a successful process, you should use all digital marketing channels in harmony with each other. The information in each channel can offer you different insights.

In the user buying journey, you can create awareness for your pages that will take place during the holiday period with social media or email marketing. With paid advertisements and SEO efforts, you can create interest for your website and attract users to the website so that it can turn into sales.

Holiday Season SEO Checklist

For the holiday season SEO Checklist, be sure to check the steps below, apart from general SEO methods:

• Check the performance of your website's category, product detail, cart and checkout pages.
• Add internal links to the pages opened for the holiday season so that users and search engines can access them more easily.
• If you have old and irrelevant content, be sure to update it.
• Create landing pages for the relevant period during the holiday season.
• Be sure to announce your landing pages that will take place during the holiday season to your users 1 week in advance with the help of your social media and e-mail newsletters.
• Add detailed structured data to your product pages. Be sure to include information such as product color, category, shipping cost, shipping time, return process, etc.
• Instead of opening a holiday season page for every year, prefer evergreen content. For example, instead of /black-friday-2023-discounts/, you can choose /black-friday-discounts/.
• If you have a local store, optimize your Google business profile.
• Take advantage of free product listings in Google Merchant center.
• For your out-of-stock products, optimize the user experience with the \"Notify When Arrived\" button or different related products.
• Add S.S.S. for your products and shipping processes.
• Find out from the website developer if it can handle possible traffic increases.

Make Your Holiday Campaign a Success With Orphex

When the year-end shopping madness kicks off, only those armed with unfiltered truths stand tall. Are you brave enough to confront the reality? With Orphex, dive deep into the untapped potential of your campaigns. Elevate beyond mere participation, dominate the sales arena, and see the stark reality of your ROI, cost-efficiency, and time savings.

It's always good to look back on past strategies and think about what you could have done better. As the end of the year approaches can you face the unseen oversights, missed opportunities and money slipping through the cracks? Uncover the truth behind your campaigns and turn those revelations into a smarter, more profitable strategy with Orphex.