When it comes to preparing your e-commerce business for the holidays, it’s easy to overlook the critical role that SEO best practises can play in driving customers to the website. SEO is a long-term game with long-term rewards, which means it must be engaged from the start and should never be an afterthought.
Fortunately, we’re here to assist, and we’ve compiled a list of 12 key considerations for your Christmas planning.
SEASONAL LANDING PAGES
Creating landing pages for major seasonal events such as Christmas and Black Friday is critical if you want to compete for Christmas and Black Friday-related keywords. Even if you’re a smaller business and ranking for those terms isn’t feasible, you should have a landing page for customers searching for your brand name + Black Friday, for example.
The creation of this landing page should only be done once – if it is simply deleted after the seasonal period, all of the SEO value and link equity gained during that period will be lost – the best thing you can do is remove the page from the navigation and keep it live all year. This same principle should be applied to all seasonal pages, such as Mother’s Day, Easter, and so on.
GIFTING
Gifting is an important part of Christmas, and the search volume associated with gifting-related searches reflects this, especially during the holiday season. Conduct thorough keyword research and select keywords that accurately reflect your product offering and company size. As appealing as the high search volumes may be, keep in mind that if you’re a small e-commerce business, you’re unlikely to be able to compete with John Lewis and Not on the High Street for competitive terms like “gifts for her” or “personalised gifts.” If you sell jewellery, you should aim for something more specific and tailored to your product offering, such as “jewellery gifts for her” and “personalised jewellery for her.” This way, you’ll capture customers further down the funnel and have a better chance of competing in organic search.
CHRISTMAS PARTIES
If you are a retailer of clothing, shoes, bags, or jewellery, we see large volumes attached to party-related keywords during this time period, so using the same methodology as stated above, this is another area where you can have an impact.
TRENDS ANALYSIS
In addition to completing keyword research, it’s critical to include a layer of trend analysis in your planning. For example, in 2020, the Christmas party attire example above is unlikely to generate as many conversions as it did in past years. We’ve also seen fads peak for a year and then go away. Personalization has been steadily growing over the last five years and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, and new emerging trends like “letterbox gifts,” which has surprisingly picked up during lockdown, as well as “sustainable gifts” and “experience gifts,” which have also been growing in recent years, are all opportunities.
TAXONOMY
To make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for on your website, the taxonomic structure of your website should be obvious and logical. Customers are more likely to become upset and leave a website with a chaotic or unclear structure, which is a red flag to search engines and can result in them reducing your keyword ranks.
Aside from that, search engines will index any relevant material about a product or topic using the taxonomic structure of the site to identify and comprehend the hierarchy of your website. Don’t forget to use your keyword research and trends data to create customer-friendly naming conventions and categorisation, which will help you rank higher in search engines for those terms.
CONTENT
Create a content centre in your blog section that focuses on the numerous Christmas-themed informational or question-based searches, such as “Christmas gift ideas” or “Christmas gift ideas 2021.” In this sector, the possibilities are unlimited, so keep your emphasis narrow and concentrate on what’s important to your company.
SOCIAL MEDIA LEVERAGE
The use of social media to share information is not only good for public relations, but each link and social sharing acts as a “like” signal to search engines, giving the article (and thus the website) a modest boost in authority and gradually pushing it up the SERP rankings (search engine results page).
STRUCTURED DATA
Structured data, often known as schema markup, allows search engines to not only crawl but also understand your website. Rich snippets, which are short pieces of information that appear in search results, are generated by search engines using structured data on a page.
The following are a few of the most sophisticated schema markups for e-commerce:
- Customer feedback and star ratings
- Offers and prices
- Articles for the blog
Structured data can improve your CTR (click-through rate) from the SERP, as well as make your listing more appealing and provide you more control over what terms your products appear for. According to studies, websites with structured data receive a bump in rankings across the board.
GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
To minimise dissatisfied consumers and poor reviews, make sure that store opening hours are updated to reflect any changes during the holiday season.
MOBILE OPTIMIZATION
In 2019, mobile devices accounted for one-third of all UK shopping, with data indicating that mobile commerce sales will continue to rise in the following years. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that Google adopted mobile-first indexing in 2020. This simply means that Google will index and rank mobile versions of web pages, and so 2021 will likely see more mobile traffic than ever before.
SITE SPEED
Site speed is important all year, not just during the holidays. However, if there’s ever a moment to optimise your website for speed, it’s before a massive flood of potential clients.
For example, sites that load in less than two seconds have a 10 percent bounce rate, whereas pages that load in five seconds have a 39 percent bounce rate. Consider how many visitors you might lose due to slow site speed during the holiday season. Furthermore, a one-second delay will lower consumer satisfaction by 17%.
If you’re still not convinced about the value of having a fast website, consider this: site speed is a Google ranking factor, thus a slow website might hurt your keyword rankings.
POWER OF THE 503
While site downtime is the last thing any e-commerce site wants during peak season – and hopefully, you’ve already invested money in making your site crash-proof – it’s occasionally unavoidable. Consider how many major stores, including John Lewis, Game, and others, experienced site failures during the Black Friday shopping season. When this happens, it’s critical that your website is set up to respond with a 503 error code. This will inform search engines that the site is temporarily unavailable and to return later so that they do not attempt to crawl the site while it is unavailable, which could result in significant ranking reductions. Consider using creative designs for your 503 response to help customers remember you.
Conclusion
Finally, for most e-commerce enterprises, the Christmas season is the most critical time of year, and SEO should not be forgotten. If you do not properly prepare, you may lose a significant amount of traffic and revenue. A good Digital marketing agency can help you run a proper campaign with good strategies of SEO. try to make your site with the best SEO tricks of 2022.
