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Preparing Your Business for the 2019 Holidays
Ah, the middle of summer. It’s the perfect time to host a barbecue, road trip to the beach, and … plan your holiday SEO? Yep, you read that right.
If you want your eCommerce brand to rake in the revenue this 2019 holiday season, it’s time to start working on your SEO tactics.
Follow these holiday eCommerce tips and you’ll be well on your way to a holly jolly sales season.
1. Build Your Holiday Content
Sure, there are gift-buyers who know exactly what they want to buy their loved ones this holiday season. They’ll type in the keywords for those gifts, and if your brand doesn’t offer them, you’re out of luck.
But, those sure-minded searchers only represent about 30% of holiday shoppers. The other 70% are undecided, and according to Google’s research, they’re searching for gift guides to help them find what they need.
Curate your product catalog into themed gift guides to attract various shoppers: mom and dad, pet owners, outdoorsy types, tech nerds, movie fans, and more. Consider the various types of audiences who might enjoy your products as a gift, and create a gift guide to help their friends and family buy it from you.
Bonus Tip: Include keywords like “2019,” “gift ideas,” and “gift guide” in your title. Including the year helps your content look fresh, which Google loves. Next year, you can create a new guide and 301 this old post into it, keeping the SEO momentum going year after year.
2. Find Your Holiday Influencers
Your eCommerce website is just one place that can rank well for holiday queries. To maximize your SEO wins this holiday season, you need to be leveraging other websites too—particularly those of influential bloggers.
If you’ve already invested in influencer marketing, fantastic. Start brainstorming now with your influencers about how they might write product reviews of your top holiday sellers, or how they can feature your products in their own gift guides.
If you haven’t begun an influencer marketing program yet, now is a great time to start. You still have plenty of time to suss out their potential for driving customers to your website. Once you’ve found your rockstars, begin the holiday brainstorming process with them.
3. Develop Video Content
Bloggers can expand your SEO visibility on the world’s biggest search engine: Google.
Vloggers can expand it on the second biggest search engine: YouTube.
Many of us are visual learners, so we prefer to get our gift ideas in video format. If your eCommerce brand sells products in any of the following categories, you could particularly benefit from being featured in YouTube gift guides.
Video marketing can leverage many of the same formats as your written content. Influential YouTubers can include your brand in a video product roundup (featuring gifts from several brands around a common theme) or in a dedicated video where your product is front and center.
Unboxing guides (where an influencer films themselves opening and unboxing your gift, talking about all the great features as they discover them) are particularly popular during the holidays:
Shoppers love watching these videos because they get to see your product in action. The fact that the person putting your product in action happens to be their favorite influencer is what gets them to convert.
Bonus Tip: Turn your written gift guides (yes, the ones you wrote for tip #1) into video gift guides for an added SEO boost to your branded YouTube channel.
4. Optimize Your Product Listings
You’ve created holiday content that ranks well and includes links to your product pages. Now, make your SEO efforts go even further by optimizing those product pages themselves.
While you won’t want to make these changes now (as the holidays are still a ways off), you can start preparing the changes you want to make, so it’s simply a matter of uploading them when you’re ready to launch for the holidays. Review each of these elements on your product pages and consider how you can improve them for the holidays:
- Title Tags: Retitle your title tags so they’re relevant for the holidays, specifically. For example, “Charcoal Men’s Zip-Up Hoodie” may become “Men’s Zip-Up Hoodie | 2019 Gift Guide.”
- Meta Descriptions: Take the same approach with your meta descriptions. Make sure to include phrases that attract holiday clicks—like “best,” “gift,” “cheap,” “holiday sale,” or “exclusive.”
- Product Descriptions: How SEO-optimized are your current product descriptions? Beef them out with the keyword-rich content shoppers are looking for. Provide care instructions, expand on your product details, and explain how (and for whom) each item is a great gift.
- Product Photos: Do you have just one product photo, or multiple showing the product from different angles and in various settings? We’ll let you guess which one is better. Add more photos, perhaps even a holiday-themed one, and make sure you optimize them for fast-loading (more on this in the final tip).
All done? Great, now repeat this process for your product category pages too.
Bonus Tip: Stay ahead of the competition with Google’s Shopping Insights tool, which includes daily search data for more than 55,000 products, 45,000 brands, and nearly 5,000 categories. Gain insights like how people search within your product category; which states show the highest interest in your products, brands, or categories; or how products are rising or declining in your category (with free trend reports so you can monitor it all).
5. Take Care of the Technical Stuff
Once you’ve handled the customer-facing elements, goose your holiday SEO engine by tackling the back-end ones too.
Make sure your site is not only mobile-friendly, but mobile-easy. It should be just as easy for shoppers to browse and buy on your site on their smartphone as it is on their computer.
Speed up your site. Page speed is one of Google’s top ranking factors, and it’s one that can really work wonders if you put in the work to fix it. Optimize all your images for fast-loading, and resize them to smallest (but best-quality) size possible. Review all your third-party plugins and remove any you’re no longer using. Set up browser caching.
For help knowing where to start, pop your domain into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Google will happily provide a task list for you:
Finally, review your hosting plan. If you’ll be hosting any flash sales or promotions where you expect serious spikes in traffic, make sure your host will be able to support it. Nothing squashes sales faster than a site that won’t load.
Create Your 2019 Holiday SEO Plan
Need a little help getting in the holiday spirit? Let Your Marketing People be your SEO elves. For one of our automotive clients, we developed a holiday marketing strategy that increased organic traffic by 24% and email marketing revenue by 175%. Learn more about our holiday SEO services.
