The holidays pose tremendous potential for many industries, which are often met with increased ad spending, targeted messages, and unique strategies to capture the public’s interest in gift-giving and partying.
Most companies understand the potential the holidays have for their business, but what about when it relates to your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? What steps does a company need to take to convert the hundreds of thousands of customers who headed to the Internet for their buying and information?
Here, we break down everything you need to know when using SEO for the holidays.
Is seasonal SEO worth it?
The first thing you’ll want to analyze before you begin adjusting your strategy is whether your efforts will be worth it. SEO is fundamentally geared towards performing well in the long run, so it may take extra effort and careful timing to take advantage of seasonal SEO.
Depending on whether your business relies on a lot of sales from the holiday season, you’ll want to determine whether the increased effort will provide a reasonable return. To give you an excellent start to making this decision, here are some industries that will likely benefit from seasonal SEO.
5 industries that benefit from seasonal SEO
The five industries that benefit the most from seasonal SEO include:
1. Ecommerce
With many people opting to skip the traffic and crowded malls, ecommerce is a popular choice for shopping during the holiday season. With a great influx of shoppers online, seasonal SEO is critical to companies in the ecommerce industry.
2. Retail
Retail is still a driving force of holiday sales.
If you operate a brick-and-mortar store, you can expect that many of your customers will be doing their research on their shopping sprees. Online information, such as product details, store hours, and events, will be sought out by your in-person customers.
Seasonal SEO will allow you to present this info to your customers upfront and will give your customers the perception that you are a credible holiday source for gifts.
Many popular gifts for the holidays get purchased in retail stores, so by targeting your SEO strategy for the holidays, you can take advantage of this preference. Items such as wine, liquor, greeting cards, candy, and video games, often fit this preference.
3. Personal services
Personal services are popular during and after the holiday season due to family and friends getting together. Businesses, such as photography studios or mailing companies, will tend to notice better business around the holidays and should take advantage of it. Other services, such as spas, can likely take advantage of targeting SEO as well.
4. Travel
The travel industry is insane during the holidays.
There will be an incredible amount of people traveling, and the chance at getting those pricey tickets is reachable for most companies, with the right SEO targeting. Airlines, bus companies, taxis, or even trains can benefit from seasonal SEO during the holidays.
5. Restaurants
While home cooking is still a treasured tradition, the restaurant industry prevails by providing great food with no hassle or worry. Restaurants can take advantage of seasonal SEO to promote their seasonal dishes, events, or specials of their menu favorites.
Determine your level of seasonal SEO
Often, your business or industry is not cut and dry when it comes to your decision to implement seasonal SEO practices. For many of the above sectors, and those not mentioned, there will be varying levels of adjustments in strategy for the holiday season. That’s okay. What’s important is that you gauge the importance of the holiday season for your business, and then put in the applicable effort.
Don’t forget the basics of SEO
Before diving into the many different tips and strategies for seasonal SEO, it’s important to note that SEO basics should be adhered to first and foremost. Many of the strategies you can implement for seasonal SEO will be much less effective without the core of your SEO doing well.
One way to think about it is this. The holiday season will likely increase traffic on website browsers (and in the above industries, drastically increase traffic). Your effects of ignoring basic SEO practices will only get magnified.
To start, make sure that your SEO campaign’s fundamentals are in place so that your campaign is completely taking advantage of the increased traffic. If there are some major issues here, it may be better to focus on fixing them before trying seasonal SEO.
Your timeframe for seasonal SEO
One of the most important things to keep in mind for seasonal SEO is the timeframe. While some believe that the magic number of days is 45, it depends on when you want your content to get noticed.
If targeting Thanksgiving or Black Friday shoppers, posting content on your site should happen at least by the start of October. If promoting an event, a week ahead usually is best practice.
As you can see, the number of days largely depends on what you are doing for your seasonal SEO, but it’s important to keep timeframes in mind.
How to create seasonal content for holiday SEO
Seasonal content is one of the best ways for you to focus your SEO practices for holiday buyers. Any content that relieves a holiday pain point in your industry will especially do well.
For example, in the retail industry, many shoppers struggle to decide what to buy their loved ones.
Rather than leaving that decision up to them, why not publish content on specific gift ideas that cater to particular demographics. For example, someone with a partner would love to read content on “2021’s best gifts that your partner will love.” Gift guides are also hugely beneficial in leading to a conversion.
Updating page and product information
Small changes in a page’s content and information can often make a big difference in whether your content ranks during the holiday season or not. By gearing your popular gift products to holiday shoppers in their description, you’ll be able to rank better on Google and captivate the interests of users for a win-win!
Another helpful strategy is updating your most popular meta descriptions with your unique selling proposition or a deal you are running, so that way, your site stands out among the competition!
Time-saving hacks
One of the best things about seasonal content is its potential to be used every year. Keep in mind when creating your content that the general theme and purpose will likely get used from year to year, so make the content as evergreen as possible.
For the little bits of information that will change every year, such as trendy gift or date ideas, make sure to update the page, rather than create a new one. This ensures that you keep your link equity and save time!
3 best practices for seasonal SEO
To wrap up, here are some best practices when creating your seasonal SEO campaign.
- Start early and ensure that your timeframes will allow the campaign to be effective.
- Make your content as evergreen as possible to ensure extended use in future years.
- Don’t prioritize seasonal content too much — understand the level of effort you want to put into it from the start
Are you interested in taking your SEO efforts further with seasonal content?
Get your free quote here to transform your SEO practices in the upcoming holiday season!