August 22, 2024

5 SEO & Holiday Marketing Tips to Give You an Edge This Shopping Season

What steps have you taken to position your business for a successful holiday shopping season? 

It’s better to plan for the holiday season too early than it is to be late to the game.

December, November—and, increasingly, October—are the best months for the vast majority of B2C businesses, particularly e-commerce brands. In 2023, holiday shoppers combined for over $222 billion in online sales during December and November.

Want a piece of the pie? You’ll need to leverage every possible advantage, especially if you operate within a hypercompetitive vertical. 

When expertly implemented as part of an ROI-oriented strategy, organic search marketing can drive the online visibility, traffic, and conversions necessary to hit your brand’s targets this holiday season.

It certainly isn’t too early to get started on holiday marketing and SEO—in fact, many of your competitors already have. 

Take the first step today. Read on to learn about the key aspects of organic search and what your team can do to set your brand up for success as the holiday season approaches.

Leverage Holiday Marketing Keyword Research

Hopefully, this isn’t your first foray into keyword research. But if it is, don’t worry—there’s no time like the present to dive in and take a targeted approach to enhancing your brand’s online visibility.

Certain paid keyword research tools make this process a breeze, especially if you’re new to it. However, before paying for a tool, be sure to set up Google Search Console (GSC). 

Learn From Last Year’s Holiday Shopping Keyword Data

If you’ve been up and running for more than a year, you can use GSC to check your historical data and identify the keywords holiday and Black Friday shoppers used to find your brand during the previous holiday season.

Start with a list of keywords based on traffic and visibility. Review the Queries report for each of your revenue-driving pages, and add the top two or three keywords for each page to your list.

When you’re done, review your list and remove any outdated keywords (for example, due to a discontinued product) or duplicative keywords. Then, you’ll narrow down this list even further to maximize the ROI of your holiday marketing strategy.

Select Efficient Keywords to Attract More Holiday Shoppers

Not all keywords are created equal. Typically, those with the highest search volumes are all but impossible to rank for in the near term. 

But that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. By carefully selecting keywords based on relevance, search volume, and difficulty, you can significantly increase your brand’s visibility and achieve your goals. 

The best keywords will be those with an optimal volume-to-difficulty ratio. Choose keywords that have a high enough search volume to contribute meaningful traffic, and a low enough difficulty score that you can expect to start ranking by early or mid-Q4. 

Choose Keywords Aligned With Your Holiday Marketing Objectives

Looking to build awareness and gain impression share? Choose top-of-funnel keywords that can help your brand surface on SERPs as users browse results, even if they aren’t ready to make a purchase. 

On the other hand, if you’re focused on purchases and other conversion events, pick long-tail keywords. The longer a keyword, the more specific it is. Long-tail keywords are typically used by people closer to the bottom of the funnel and ready to make a purchase. 

By optimizing your pages to establish relevance for appropriate long-tail keywords, you can gain visibility on SERPs frequented by shoppers ready to make a purchase. Choosing keywords with transactional intent is key for brands looking for more conversions.

Optimize Keywords for the Holiday & Black Friday Shopping Season

Emotional engagement and limited promotional offers are the two most significant drivers of spending during the holiday season. 

As you tailor your keywords for the season, consider how you can use these two factors to your advantage. 

When it comes to emotional drivers, think of the meaning different audiences would assign to the holidays, and how your brand fulfills a need by demonstrating those meanings. 

Many consumers are drawn to products that evoke nostalgia or can help them make cherished memories with their loved ones. Do any of your offerings fit into these contexts? If so, consider how emotionally-motivated people might search online for products or services like yours.

Deals are the other major motivator. Nobody wants to overpay, and in many cases, that means waiting until holiday sales begin to make certain purchases—especially larger purchases such as tech, home appliances, and vehicles. 

This elevated purchase intent makes the period surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday an ideal time to offer discounts and drive holiday sales.

Businesses running holiday promotions will want to add key terms such as “deals,” “sales,” “discounts,” etc. to product/service keywords, as shoppers will be looking for not just your offerings, but the deals themselves. 

Start Creating Content for Holiday Shoppers Now

You’ve likely heard the investing axiom, “Time in the market beats timing the market.” This may or may not be your financial strategy of choice, but it’s certainly true when it comes to organic search marketing. 

That means there’s no time like the present to start working on your holiday content. 

Publishing holiday-focused digital content early and often is key to attaining the online visibility necessary to drive results, particularly against established competitors on competitive SERPs.

Ideally, you’ll start with a content map designed to build topical authority for your brand around priority keywords based on the research we discussed previously. 

Content creation is an investment of valuable bandwidth, so establish a set of criteria for writing and editing your content. 

Remember, Google has been emphasizing the importance of helpful, high-quality content for years now, and it was supported in the recent Google algorithm leak. That means it’s more important than ever to identify the best content out there for each of your keywords, and then create content that’s 10 times better.

What Should You Consider When Writing Holiday Marketing Content?

Use each of these tips to create winning content ahead of the holiday season.

Stay On-Trend and On-Topic

Q4 is a time of new product releases, seasonal trends, and exclusive offerings. Avoiding wasted motion is crucial to maximizing your holiday digital marketing efforts.

That means focusing on the products, services, USPs, and promotions designed to drive revenue during this peak season—especially if your business depends on the results.

Pursue Meaningful Placements

Generating brand awareness ahead of Q4 is essential if you want to maximize conversions during the holiday shopping season. 

Earlier, we discussed the common practice of consumers waiting until the holiday season for large purchases.

That means these folks have plenty of time to research their purchases ahead of time. This gives brands like yours ample opportunity to educate, inform, and build awareness through helpful content.

There is a wide variety of content marketing tactics to pursue here, from influencer marketing on social media to syndicating content on high-domain authority sites. 

The longer funnel gives you more time to turn users into customers, but you should expect your competitors to take the same approach. 

That’s why you can’t settle for anything less than best-of-web content as you demonstrate to users that your brand is the one best suited to meet their needs. 

Give Content Time to Gain Traction

Google has come a long way since the days of the 10 blue links, but its systems still need time to evaluate your content and decide how to rank it. 

The earlier you start publishing content, the better. Again, think “time in the market.”

As more users interact with your content and demonstrate to Google that your content is, in fact, valuable and worthy of ranking highly, you’ll see improved SERP visibility. 

In addition, your rankings will likely solidify over time, so you’re less likely to lose traffic due to volatility or ranking fluctuations. 

Strengthen Content with Internal Linking

Content is an effective tool for enhancing funnels via internal linking, especially content designed to help people shop based on different use cases. 

This type of personalized content speaks directly to the pain points and goals of your customer personas, making it an effective way to build a deep connection with these users. Then, they can follow the links you added directly to your product or collection pages. 

But don’t forget to also include links to other relevant blog posts, individual location pages, and authoritative industry sources to support your claims about product performance or USPs.

As with keywords, you don’t want to include too many links. However, by including just the most relevant internal links, you can build each piece of content as a resource that delivers the utmost value to your site visitors while also driving conversions.

Keep Holiday Shopping Content Seasonal, But Evergreen

Creating and optimizing content for the peak holiday shopping season doesn’t have to be a slog. When done properly, it can help your marketing team operate more efficiently in each successive Q4.

Content that’s seasonal and evergreen may seem like a paradox. Think of it this way: As you write, speak to the season, but not the year.

That’s not to say you can’t include certain mentions of noteworthy events from the current year, but you should do so in a way that makes those mentions easily revisable or removable. That’ll keep next year’s content clean-up to a minimum.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is to avoid putting the year in your page URLs. 

Use the year all you want in your heading tags, copy, and even the page title and meta description. It’s acceptable to use in these elements because they can all be easily revised.

However, changing a URL is a more involved process that must be executed properly to avoid significant SEO problems. 

One final note: Be sure to apply these tips in alignment with the latest best practices for digital content creation. Here’s a quick refresher on the important dos and don’ts of writing helpful content. 

RELATED: Informative E-Commerce: 5 Keys to Selling Through Helpful Content

Renew Your Focus on Technical Optimizations This Holiday Season

There isn’t really a fun holiday spin to put on technical SEO, but Q4 is certainly when you’ll see the greatest payoff from your site performance and page speed optimization efforts.

First and foremost, delivering a premium experience to your site visitors is key to pushing them through your funnels. If your site is difficult to navigate, takes forever to load, or is visually unappealing, the only thing you should expect in your stocking is a higher bounce rate.

As the song goes, Santa sees you when you’re sleeping, and he knows when you’re awake, right? Well, Google knows whether your UX is bad, great, or somewhere in between. 

“He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” It’s the rule for kids hoping to unwrap great presents during the holidays, but it also applies to digital marketers and the company website. 

And no, the week of Thanksgiving is not the right time to task your dev team with a site audit. Better late than never, sure, but the earlier you start, the more thoroughly your team can optimize your site before traffic begins to pick up ahead of the holidays.

If you haven’t conducted a site audit in the past year—or if you don’t know the last time your team performed a site audit—prioritize this task immediately.

Technical SEO isn’t just crucial to delivering a world-class user experience for your site visitors—it’s also a factor Google considers when determining organic rankings.

If your pages are slow, not mobile-friendly, or unsecured, Google will push them further down on SERPs. 

Remember, Google’s mission is to deliver the utmost value to every user for every query. If Google sends a user to a page with a terrible UX and the user can’t find what they’re looking for, that user may not return to Google for their next search. 

There are many different aspects of organic search marketing. A robust, natural backlink profile is vital, along with best-of-web on-page content and optimized title tags.

But all too often, on hypercompetitive SERPs where established brands devote considerable resources to these elements, technical SEO proves to be the overlooked area that makes all the difference. 

In a scenario where your page and your competitor’s page each have optimized on-page and off-page elements, technical SEO will decide which page enjoys the higher organic ranking as well as the increased CTR, conversions, and revenue that go along with it.

RELATED: 8 Critical Elements of User Experience You Can’t Ignore

Set Yourself Up for Success Next Holiday Shopping Season

With these tips in mind, you can prepare your website for an outstanding peak business season. But before you move on to what’s next, it’s important to take stock of your work and the results. 

Once your team has finished making their New Year’s resolutions, collect your data and conduct a thorough review to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what can be done to drive even better results next year. 

Even if you don’t inspect your holiday efforts at a forensic level, you’ll at least want to come away with a spreadsheet of the blog posts that drove the most traffic along with your top-performing product pages.

If you altered certain collection or product pages with holiday-themed content, don’t just delete it—store it so you can pick up where you left off next Q4.

Once you’ve reviewed your data, sit down with your team to outline an action plan for the next holiday season so you can get an even earlier head start next year.

Capitalize on the Holiday Shopping Season With Help From VELOX Media

Leveraging organic search is an excellent way to increase revenue during the all-important Q4. But why settle for a single outstanding quarter when you could use SEO on an ongoing, year-round basis to build a healthier business and achieve exponential growth?

At VELOX, we conservatively target 400-800% ROI in our organic search campaigns. We strategically tailor each campaign based on individual clients and their business goals, then use our New Revenue Model to precisely forecast the revenue contribution you can expect as we push your key rankings into the coveted top organic positions on Google Search.

Discover the power of our New Revenue Model for yourself. Contact VELOX today and let us chart a course that will help your business scale.