Holiday season SEO starts weeks before November: speed up your category, product, cart and checkout pages, use last year's Search Console and Analytics data to pick long-tail holiday keywords, and publish evergreen landing pages (for example /black-friday-discounts/) that are in your sitemap and linked from your site. Organic rankings move slowly, so the earlier you start, the more holiday demand you can capture.
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.
When should you start holiday season SEO?
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.
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. Google's own research found that the probability of a bounce rises by 32% as mobile page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds (Google/SOASTA research, 2017). 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.
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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 run most of these speed checks.
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.
Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights: Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test in December 2023; use Lighthouse (in Chrome DevTools) or PageSpeed Insights to check mobile usability.
Page indexing report: This Google Search Console report (formerly Index Coverage) shows whether your important landing pages are indexed and why others are not.
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.
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 Google Trends or Google Keyword 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 steady search volume and low competition.
Create Custom Landing Pages for Holiday Periods
To rank for search queries related to Singles' Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, create landing pages that target the 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.
Why should SEO work with your other holiday 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.
What belongs on a 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 an FAQ section for your products and shipping processes.
Find out from the website developer if it can handle possible traffic increases.
It's always good to look back on past strategies and think about what you could have done better. Orphex connects Meta Ads and Google Ads data and shows it in one dashboard, so the paid side of your holiday campaign is visible in one place once your accounts are connected.
