The holiday season is a time that is essential for many small businesses. The moniker “Black Friday” comes from the fact that holiday sales are the reason that a lot of companies make a profit for the year. That shopping day is the day that the business moves “into the black,” or into a profitable status.
How do you maximize your sales and profits over the holiday season? One major way is to make sure that your website, sales pages, and offers rank highly on search engines. In fact, online sales on Black Friday in 2018 was 26.4% higher than the year before, while in-store shopping was down 9%.
Do you know how to implement SEO strategies that will help you get the most customers possible during this key shopping season? If you’re looking for ideas, you’re in the right place.
Let’s dive in to how you can sharpen your SEO this season.
Start With SEO Essentials Early as Possible
SEO can take some time, so you want to start your holiday optimization as early as you can. If you’re concerned that you’re running out of time, consider combining SEO with other strategies like Google Pay Per Click.
Your normal SEO strategy, which you should be implementing and building up all year, will help somewhat. But remember that during the holidays you’re focused on gift-giving, which means your keywords will focus on what gifts your target audience gives – or the people who give them gifts.
Don’t feel like you’re too late and all is lost. There’s always something you can do to boost your SEO.
Find Holiday Keywords
Finding ideal keywords for your holiday marketing strategies doesn’t mean just taking your normal keywords and tacking “Black Friday” or “Christmas” onto them. Instead, you want to find the keywords people are searching during this time of year
You can get keyword ideas from a variety of sources, including Google Trends, Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and more. The tools you normally use for your SEO should be perfect, as long as they show search volume by month.
Hone in on the search terms related to your business and industry that are popular in November and December. Use those to build your content and product pages. When you do, you’ll have a much better chance of ranking well for those terms.
Create Specific Holiday Landing Pages
The holidays are a special time of year for everyone, so you can’t address it as “business as usual.” You need sales copy, blog posts, landing pages, and deals that speak to this specific time of year.
Again, that doesn’t mean putting reindeer and Santa figures everywhere, but it does mean creating content surrounding the topics that are on your readers’ minds. How can you tie your business into concerns about food, home, family, and gift giving?
Sales promotions that talk about your clients’ specific concerns at this time of year will be much more effective. Keep in mind this is true all year long – which is why SEO is not a one-and-done process. It should constantly be refined and improved.
Boost Your Backlinks
Backlinks are an important part of proving to search engines that your website is high-quality and authoritative. They are hard to come by, though, so you want to make sure you have a strong strategy to build them.
Links to your website not only help boost your search results, but they can get new eyes on your website. If you can get some guest blog spots around the holiday season, you’re exposing your business to a whole new audience – at exactly the time they’re most likely to buy!
Pay attention to what content is trending in your industry during the holidays, and then think of ways you could create that for someone else’s blog or business website in return for an incoming link. Whether it’s cooking, technology, or helping entrepreneurs prepare for the new year, there’s an angle that makes sense during the holidays.
Think About How Your Products Can Be Gifted
This ties in with what we said earlier about creating holiday-specific landing pages. You want to not only appeal to your ideal customer, but to the people who give gifts to your ideal customer. After all, they may decide to buy your products!
It’s also possible that your ideal customers will be giving gifts to like-minded friends and family and may consider your products as an option.
So, think about how you can group your products or services into gift guides. Don’t assume you have to be in a B2C space to do this. Businesses give and receive gifts as well, or you can frame your offerings as a way to get ready for a successful new year.
To increase the chances of your gift pages ranking, be sure to use strong internal linking. This will help Google understand the relationship between different pages on your website, and it will also raise the visibility of specific pages and help drive people who read one guide to another one.
Update Existing Content to Fit With the Holiday
Do you have existing content that is relevant to the holiday or new year? If so, you can rework it a little to make it current for this year. That can give you a lot of “new” content that boosts your website with very little work.
To make this happen, find old blog posts that are high-quality and fit well with the season. Update the titles and meta descriptions to refer to the current holiday season and reshare them on your social media profiles.
You can get new traffic and new rankings for existing content with just those simple steps. Couldn’t be easier, could it?
Share Like Crazy on Social Media!
Social media isn’t just a place where most of us spend our time, it’s a place where we share ideas with others. What do we do with an item we’d love as a gift? Share it on Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, of course!
One of the top holiday marketing strategies is to be active on social media. The more active you are on these platforms during the holiday season, the more likely it is that your holiday content will be noticed and shared. This can boost your traffic, sales, and profits over these important months.
Don’t be shy about telling people to put your posts or products on their wish list. If people talk about wanting what you have, their friends and family may put in on their lists as well!
Use the Holiday Season to Launch New Products or Services
Obviously this one needs to already be in the works if you want to use it this year, but even if it’s not, it’s a great idea for the next holiday.
Holiday time is a perfect time to offer new products and services. People are primed to look for things to buy, and flashy ads catch more attention ahead of Black Friday than any other time. A launch during the holiday season can be a smashing success and help boost both your revenue and your brand’s profile.
Take Advantage of the Right Essential SEO Tools
Optimizing your SEO is often not something you can do on your own. You need the right tools and expertise to ensure you don’t miss any critical details. Perhaps you have a digital marketing department that focuses on keeping your website and SEO up to date.
If so, great!
However, most small businesses don’t. So why not give yourself the peace of mind of letting an expert take over? Our team has over 40 years of combined SEO experience, and helping you succeed is our top priority.
If you’re interested in how we can help boost your SEO and digital marketing results during the holidays and all year, contact us for a free consultation today!
