Improve Your SEO During the Holidays

The holiday season is a busy and productive period for e-commerce retail brands. Make sure your brand is present when users are searching for holiday gifts and deals online by following these tips.

Build Holiday Landing Pages

During popular holiday periods (Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc.), it’s important to have a designated holiday landing page in place on your site to promote any holiday deals you’ll be having. Holiday-specific landing pages help drive brand aware consumers that already have purchasing intent from the search results to your site. Not having landing pages during peak holiday shopping periods can lead to missed traffic opportunities, and to competitors getting that traffic instead.

Tips:

Ahead of the holiday months, make sure your landing pages are live and indexed by Google.

Choose descriptive URLs for your holiday pages (www.example.com/cyber-monday), and use the same URL every year to build search engine value overtime.

The content on your holiday pages should be current and provide relevant information to visitors. You can include sales or discounts, any special deals you will have, free shipping notices or email sign-ups. All are great ways to fill the page with content that users will care about reading.

Target does a great job with their Black Friday page, filling it with product deals and sales during the Black Friday period, and keeping it live during the off season with an email sign-up for visitors to stay in the know. Keeping this page live and filled with relevant content year round is great for building up search authority overtime and improving organic rankings.

Like Target, Amazon also does a great job of keeping pages live with relevant content, even when products aren’t yet available.

Sneak Peak and Coming Soon pages allow you to get the content on the site earlier.

In addition to on-page copy, your meta data should also be current and relevant. Make sure optimized title tags and meta descriptions are in place when the pages are built, and are updated as needed.

Create a Holiday Gift Guide

Like holiday landing pages, gift guides also provide value to your customers and can enhance your SEO efforts around the holidays. Your gift guide can be a single page or a group of pages, and should cater to your customers and what they are looking for on your site. When relevant, consider incorporating “Gifts for Her” and “Gifts for Him” pages into your gift guide, as well as pages that target a particular price range, like “Gifts under $50” and “Gifts under $100.” Macy’s holiday guide offers gift ideas for various groups, giving their customers a wide range of gifting options.