Holiday SEO: How To Maintain Rankings for Seasonal Products

Holiday SEO: How To Maintain Rankings for Seasonal Products

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a slow but stable process, taking months to get your website ranking at the top of Google for your chosen terms. So how can you get this to work for seasonal product ranges, such as Christmas products, which appear and then disappear within just a few months?

The holidays are busy and stressful for everyone – especially for small business owners who are trying to capitalize on holiday promotions to bring in additional revenue while keeping up with the day to day operations. Because of that rush, it’s understandable that holiday SEO isn’t likely a high priority for you, but the right strategy can help you bring in more customers during the holidays.

In this blog, we will uncover the most useful tips and techniques to stay on top of the rankings, in the next coming weeks.

What is seasonal SEO?

Seasonal SEO is a branch of traditional SEO. It utilizes the same basic strategies that SEO uses, but instead, looks at the seasonal popularity of different products or services. The goal of seasonal SEO is to drive conversions in a small period of time.

There are two main types of seasonal SEO strategies:

• Time-based: This type of SEO focuses on larger seasons within the year. This can be a specific season, such as summer or winter. It can also be a certain time period, like a month.
• Event-based: Event-based seasonal SEO centers around specific events that happen that trigger people to purchase products. Some common event-based occurrences include Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day.

These two categories are the main focus of seasonal SEO. You will often find yourself optimizing for both, as many event-based factors go hand in hand with the season.

Why does seasonal SEO matter?

Seasonal SEO emerges as a pivotal factor in propelling your business towards heightened conversion rates. By strategically aligning your product or service promotion with periods of heightened demand, you inherently amplify your sales potential. The resultant surge in transactions not only elevates revenue but also ushers in fresh tributaries of income, thus fortifying the financial landscape of your enterprise. This synchronicity between search optimization and seasonality holds the key to unlocking multifaceted growth avenues for your business.

You want to market your products when they are most likely to be purchased, especially if your products are a seasonal item. Rapidly selling your products during peak times will help balance out the months where product sales are low.

Review Your Current SEO Performance

Before making any significant changes to your approach, take time to review how things are currently going. You may find specific pages are doing well, and you don’t want to fix something that isn’t broken. Instead, direct your attention to places where improvements can be made.

Conduct Keyword Research for Better SEO

Use Google Trends and other keyword research tools to find new words and phrases to target. With Google Trends, you can look at the historical performance of a keyword, so you can start to make predictions about when those keywords may increase in popularity and work that into your strategy. Doing so ahead of time gives you the ability to plan a strategy that lets you capitalize on that increased popularity.

SEO Loves Content – Create Holiday Content that Fits Your Business

So, by now you should have a good idea of the keywords that you want to rank for. Narrow them down. We can all agree that it’s tempting to use all the popular keywords, but those will be hard to rank for. Furthermore, they won’t necessarily provide the best possible benefit to you.

It’s the relevancy of the content that will do you a lot of good in terms of ranking and reaching a targeted audience of people who are more likely to buy your products and services.

Ensure your content exudes authenticity while seamlessly weaving in your holiday messaging. The art lies in harmonizing these elements with your brand ethos and business identity. Content that deviates from your established brand narrative risks disorienting your audience, rendering your efforts futile and jeopardizing your search ranking. To navigate this, crafting content that resonates with your brand’s essence not only preserves your hard-earned reputation but also safeguards your standing in search results, solidifying the value of your endeavors.

Add Seasonal Visuals

Similarly, to the content strategy, seasonal visuals add another dimension to your website.

It helps get people in the mood for the season and makes your products more relevant. As you market different products for the season, ensure that you’re using visuals that convey that message.

For instance, if you’re trying to start marketing your winter hats and scarves, a picture of a woman in summer wear on your homepage won’t make sense. People don’t want to see swimwear when they’re looking for scarves. Instead, optimize the images on your page to focus more on winter attire.

You can do the same with videos, too. Your videos should have a seasonal tone to them, whether it’s set with a beachy background or wintery background. When you convey the feelings of the seasons through images, you make people more inclined to check out your products.

Need ideas and inspiration for creating holiday content?

Did you know that holiday marketing campaigns don’t have to be overly complicated and can deliver great benefits to your business?

Think about the specific products or services you want to promote, and then use that as the basis for creating content. Showcase the things that make your business stand out, highlighting whatever it is about your offerings that make it an excellent gift – or focus on the sale and promotional items. You can also take a look at what the competition is doing and look for ways to mimic that approach while keeping it different or improving upon it.

A great suggestion is to start writing blog posts surrounding the keywords that you want to rank for. Share your blog on your social media to gain a better reach and use it to boost your SEO at the same time.

Each blog post gives you content to share on your social media channels and increases the likelihood you’ll earn some backlinks, which are also crucial to your search engine visibility.

Need more content ideas? Read our blog: 4 WAYS ENTERPRISE BRANDS CAN ENGAGE WITH THEIR CUSTOMERS DURING THE COVID-19

Create New Pages for the Holidays and upcoming sales dates

While working on your SEO strategy, you may find keywords that are worth setting up new, holiday specific-pages to drive more traffic to your site. For instance, you can create a page to feature you’re recommended, “Top Holiday Gifts for Mom” and highlight the products or services you offer. Then, the page will be there for the next season so that you can update it every year.

When you’re creating these new pages, it’s important to make sure you’re optimizing the pages for specific keywords. Your page titles and meta descriptions should fit with the holiday theme, and you should make sure your product pages are optimized with the appropriate schema.

No matter the specifics of your SEO strategy, you should go beyond creating the content based on your keywords and goals, to develop a content promotion strategy. This way, you can do more to promote the content and drive additional traffic to your site, as it can take some time for everything to rank and bring you organic search engine traffic.

Promote the content on social media channels, your email list, and other marketing channels you have – and encourage your followers to share the content.

Last Words

Most holiday shoppers start with a Google search. If your content is buried somewhere on your site no one will ever see it, and it’ll be worthless. So, give shoppers what they are looking for!

Seasonal SEO will help you boost your seasonal products to reach more leads when they’re ready to buy.

Identify holiday-specific keywords and phrases that shoppers are searching for. Keep in mind that holiday shoppers are not shopping for gifts necessarily as much as they are searching for gift ideas! Use this information to your advantage when planning content. But don’t simply target keywords based on data from last holiday season; it may be outdated by now. Instead, we recommend using terms that you would be searching for if the roles were reversed.