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Get your ecommerce site ready for the holiday season. Learn how to attract shoppers and drive revenue during peak shopping periods.
Peak shopping periods like Black Friday, Halloween, Christmas, and other holidays attract millions of shoppers online.
They also present prime opportunities for ecommerce and retail brands to drive incremental revenue and traffic for the holiday season.
According to the NRF, the 2024 holiday forecast is consistent with its forecast that annual sales for 2024 will be between 2.5% and 3.5% over 2023. Some noteworthy mentions:
One differentiating characteristic from last year’s holiday shopping season is that the shopping period between Thanksgiving and Christmas will be six days shorter, totaling 26 days. Additional contributing factors this year could include the economic impact of Hurricanes Helene and Milton; even though the 2024 U.S. presidential election will take place during the winter holiday season, it is impossible to measure its impact on current or future spending.
According to Statista, in the U.S., a lot of holiday consumers intend to buy products for 2024 for the holiday celebration, with 97% for Halloween, 92% for Thanksgiving, and 96% for Christmas.
Since sales are expected to be up year over year, what are the best ways to optimize your site for the holidays? When should you start, and what should you do? Let’s explore.
One of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for the holidays is planning.
If you build landing pages now for Christmas and expect them to rank for competitive terms, it won’t happen.
Always build out your content calendar in advance (i.e., two to three months or more ahead of time).
Make sure you do your keyword research and start planning which content you need to create, get approvals for, deploy, etc.
Create reusable URLs for promotions that you can use year after year. You can mention the date or year in the page title or copy and then change it each year, but don’t use it in the URL.
I can’t tell you that, in my 20 years of doing SEO, I saw a lot of big brands make the mistake of either taking down their landing pages or adding the year to their landing page URL for seasonal products.
The good news is that most big box retailers are doing this correctly now.
For example, Target has a dedicated landing page for its Thanksgiving TV deal at https://www.target.com/s/samsung+tv+deals+thanksgiving.
Now, if it were to put in a year, it would have to redirect the page every year, but it is following a good SEO strategy. This allows the pages to age, secure links, build authority, and be used for internal links.
We live in a world where AI has changed user behavior, and people ask questions about your brand and our product.
Unfortunately, SEO keeps getting pushed down further and further down the page.
You must work with your paid search team to build a blended strategy for ranking competitive keywords and owning the entire SERP.
For example, a search for [what is the best TV to buy for thanksgiving] has transactional intent. The SERPs show sponsored listings first, followed by videos and People Also Ask (PAA).
Having both a paid ad and ranking organically is key to capturing more clicks and potential sales.
Paid search can also create holiday-themed ad campaigns targeting your trophy keywords and drive more sales.
Build out content that uses the PAA strategy. This feature in the Google SERPs provides end users with additional questions related to their search query and quick answers.
Reddit has been showing up in the SERPS for questions regarding holiday queries.
This represents an opportunity to get in front of your target audience, so make sure to follow Reddit’s best practices, which include:
Make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices, loads as quickly as possible – preferably under 3 seconds – and passes Core Web Vitals.
It’s important from a user experience perspective, especially because most shopping will be done using a mobile device. Avoid big holiday hero images, interstitials, etc.
Display promotions on your homepage to drive incremental clicks and sales.
If you had holiday pages from last year, you might want to refresh the content so that you can update it in time for the holiday season with new and popular products, seasonal messaging, and images.
Product descriptions are especially important and can improve your ecommerce site’s visibility during the holiday shopping season.
Using relevant holiday keywords can help your products appear in holiday-related research and make them more appealing to shoppers looking for relevant products.
After you conduct your keyword research for your holiday terms using your favorite tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc., produce a list of terms including:
Highlight holiday use cases. Describe how the product can be used during the holidays or why it makes a great gift, and add videos.
Use seasonal modifiers; add holiday-specific adjectives to your product titles and descriptions. Example for clothing:
While email marketing doesn’t directly impact SEO, it can indirectly help your SEO efforts during the holiday season.
Having targeted email campaigns can bring previous customers back to your store, as long as they’re personalized based on previous purchases, browsing interest, and limited offers.
With the recent events in the world, i.e., U.S. port strikes by 45,000 dock workers, wars, hurricanes, an uncertain presidential election, and the fact that COVID is still around, there are still some issues with the supply chain.
You always need to have a plan if your products aren’t available if something happens.
In this case, it is recommended to stock up on products that have sold out in previous years and make sure your inventory management system is integrated with your website in real time.
Other alternatives include:
Social platforms are critical to engaging customers and driving sales.
Creating useful and shareable content, holiday giveaways, and social media deals can drive engagement metrics and promote your holiday SEO content to attract links and social endorsements. In addition, shoppable posts facilitate discovery and purchases on social platforms.
Adding in a site search, if you don’t have one, can significantly improve user experience, increase conversions, and indirectly benefit your SEO efforts.
Users like to search using on-site functionality.
With the number of cyber security threats, data breaches, and incremental web traffic during the holidays, always run a technical audit on the site and make sure:
Use structured data (i.e., Product schema) so Google can understand your products and show product discounts and sales prices, which could have a positive impact on rankings and clicks.
While not exactly pertaining to SEO, having a checkout process that is hard for users to navigate can have a detrimental impact on your online sales.
You need your checkout process to be quick and easy to complete a purchase, which will help:
There is nothing better than visiting a website that puts you in the holiday mood.
For example, with Halloween approaching, Target does an excellent job updating its imagery to match the Halloween theme.
It’s also an innovative idea to build out gift guides, holiday FAQs, and holiday categories and optimize them to improve your customer experience, drive customers deeper into your website, and increase product purchases.
Don’t forget about your product reviews. It is highly recommended to have detailed reviews of your most popular holiday products, showcasing why they are needed, useful, and relevant and make great holiday gifts.
To make sure the holiday season is a success, start by reviewing your KPIs such as:
The holiday season presents an excellent opportunity for ecommerce businesses to drive more sales and build customer loyalty.
To capitalize on the holiday season, it’s crucial to plan ahead and create an exceptional customer experience.
Work with your paid and social teams to develop a blended marketing strategy, run technical and security audits, and ensure a smooth checkout process.
Also, leverage email marketing and other tactics to drive incremental revenue and traffic while building lasting relationships with your customers for years to come.
More resources:
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
Winston is a strategic problem solver who drives growth and revenue through innovative SEO and digital marketing strategies. With over …
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