20 Must-Know Holiday SEO Tips for Your Business

A holiday season is often incomplete without some shopping. Now, how about capitalizing on this idea to improve your Google rankings, accelerate your sales and expand your profit margins incredibly? That’s why holiday SEO is here.

Let’s get to it right away. Holiday SEO comprises SEO strategies that are specifically tailored for holiday seasons. 

With increased searches related to festive products and services and online shopping, these are ideal times for your business to shoot up to higher standings on Google and grab a nice big market share in your industry.

If you know how to do holiday SEO the right way, it is no longer a Herculean task for you to beat your competitors all the way up to Google’s top rankings.

Going forward, I’ve compiled a list of 20 holiday SEO tried-and-tested tips you must know to achieve success in holiday SEO. Let’s begin.

20 Must-Know Holiday SEO Tips for Your Business

As a business owner, you know how important it is to boost sales during the festive season. The way you choose to promote your products and services plays a vital role in driving results for your business during holidays. 

That’s why you need a solid holiday SEO strategy in place to turn the table in your favor. So, without much ado, let me tell you how you can execute it practically.

Understand the Shopping Landscape

To achieve significant sales during the festive season, it is more than important to understand customer behavior and trends during the given season, especially in connection with the product or service you offer.

The holiday season doesn’t mean just the holiday. It begins well ahead of the holiday itself. In fact, according to Google, about 21% of holiday shoppers finish their seasonal shopping by the middle of October.

With the arrival of AI chatbots like Bard and Bing AI, users go beyond shopping ads and rely on Google’s Search Generative Experience to find products and services.

Discounts are the next big thing. According to a recent survey, 66 percent of Gen Z shoppers and 67 percent of millennials are willing to wait for lower prices before a purchase.

With all these said, you have to craft your holiday SEO strategy in such a way that it aligns with the altering shopping trends and customer behavior. That’s how you can make your holiday SEO campaign a grand success.

Study Previous Trends

So, where do you begin your holiday SEO? It’s okay if you have this question in mind. As things can be clueless when you begin, I suggest you start by evaluating the trends of the previous years.

This should give you an idea of how industry trends have changed over time and what will work better at the moment.  You can use Google Trends to identify seasonal trends.

For example, when I searched for ‘Halloween’ on Google Trends, I noticed a spike from October to November for the last 5 years. After that time of the year, the curve was all flat.

That means Halloween-based keywords can be advantageous for SEO during that time of the year. That’s how you identify seasonal trends using this tool.

However, just because people often start searching for Halloween stuff only in October it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start your holiday SEO activities till then. As a rule of thumb, the earlier you start, the better it is for your holiday SEO. After all, SEO isn’t an overnight magic. 

Research Seasonal Keywords

When you do holiday SEO, it is important to know which keywords people use at what time of the year. That’s how you will be able to use keywords that align with the particular festive season in your content.

If you are running an online electronic shopping website, you may have to consider keywords like “black friday electronics deals” or “winter photography gear sale” which are terms that your target audiences are likely to use during that particular season.

Using appropriate holiday keywords in your content allows your site to appear for seasonal searches, thereby boosting your online discoverability, traffic, conversion rate and sales. 

Use trusted keyword tools like Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner and Semrush to simplify and streamline your seasonal keyword research.

Leverage Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the goldmine to attract relevant traffic to your product pages and boost conversions. According to a study by Backlinko, long-tail keywords attract 1.76 times more clicks in the organic SERPs compared to short-tail ones. Long-tail keywords can be a lucky potion, especially during the holiday season. How?

Unlike seed keywords and short tailed keywords that are used to perform a broader search related to a topic, long-tail keywords are highly specific and are more likely to match user queries exactly. 

Shoppers who perform searches using long tailed keywords are most likely to have already done their product research and have a specific product in mind. For example, someone who has decided to buy an Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max will search using queries such as ” iPhone 14 pro cyber Monday deals” (which is a long-tail keyword) rather than searching vaguely for iPhones on Google. 

As long-tail keywords are often descriptive, they drive qualified traffic to your site, which you can translate into profitable business.

Make sure you include long-tail keywords that match the user intent in appropriate places across your website to attract the right crowd.

Create Holiday-Themed Content

If you want your website to show up more during the Halloween season, for instance, it actually has to talk about Halloween, right? It is as simple as that.

To prompt your website to show up during festive seasons, make sure you create content that reflects the specific occasion. 

A majority of holidays, including Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, fall in November and December. Maintain a consistent calendar and create particular holiday-themed content accordingly. 

Create blog posts, articles, product pages, infographics and more that feature holiday-themed content to bolster your holiday promotions.

Here is a dedicated landing page that we designed during Halloween for promoting the discounts. 

Craft your content in such a way that it resonates with the festive mood of your target audience. Leverage web spaces to tell your target audience how your product or service can add more colors to the festive season.

The holiday-themed content can be anything, including gift guides, festive recipes, decoration ideas, exclusive holiday offers and discounts and more.

Alert: Timing is paramount when it comes to holiday SEO. Publish your content strategically so that it offers maximum support to your holiday sales strategy.

Optimize Landing Pages

It is great to create new holiday-themed pages on your website. However, it is also equally essential to optimize your existing pages with holiday-specific keywords. 

This way, you can improve the chances of your existing pages appearing for holiday-based searches on Google and other search engines. Also, this can be a time-savvy option for SEOs gearing up campaigns for the festive season.

 But BEWARE. Don’t overuse keywords in an attempt to increase your search appearances. It may look manipulative to Google and that may bring a negative SEO impact on your website.

Update Meta Tags

Your meta tags are one of the first things people get to see when your web page appears in search results. They tell the users and Google what your page is about. How about using them to make the first best impression?

Keep your title and description crisp and to the point. Make sure the meta description carries less than or equal to 155 characters. If not, Google may hide the rest beyond the character limit with ellipsis. 

Include holiday-specific keywords in your meta title and description to highlight that your page is relevant to the search. Make sure the meta description aligns with the main content of your web page. That’s because neither Google nor the users are particularly fond of click-bait content.

Use Link Building

What if I told you you can actually use professional link building services to bolster your holiday SEO efforts?

Start building backlinks to your holiday landing pages from other external sites relevant to your niche. As backlinks are a top Google ranking factor, they can boost the online visibility of your important holiday pages incredibly.

Plus, they can bring qualified referral traffic to your website and complement your conversion rate as you share a common customer base with the sites you earned backlinks from.

Sounds great, right? Start early to get the most out of holiday SEO link building this festive season.

Repurpose Your Content 

Looking for efficient strategies for holiday SEO? If you’re short on time or resources, content repurposing could be your best friend this festive season.

Here’s the thing: you don’t always have to create brand-new content for your holiday SEO campaigns. Instead, you can smartly repurpose your existing content to make it holiday-appropriate.

For example, if you’ve written a detailed blog post about ‘Summer Beach Essentials,’ you could turn it into a quick infographic for social media, summarizing the key points. Another idea could be to take an old ‘Christmas Gift Guide’ and update it with new product links and images.

The key is to make sure your repurposed content retains its original essence, ensuring it remains valuable to your audience. By doing so, you’ll not only save time but also maximize the impact of your holiday SEO efforts.

Add Internal Links to Your Holiday Pages

Internal links play an integral part in holiday SEO. In general, connecting relevant pages within your website allows Google to understand your expertise in the particular subject matter and rank your site higher for relevant searches. 

The good news is you can use this strategy to your holiday SEO advantage. By interlinking relevant holiday-specific pages within your website, you prompt Google to show your website for holiday-based searches. 

As for the users, when they visit one of your holiday pages and find that they can navigate to more relevant holiday pages from there, they are likely to spend more time on your website. This will increase user engagement for your website significantly.

Get Your Landing Pages Technically Right

Your website’s technical health matters as much as the content it features. 

I mean, if your website loads at a snail’s pace, most people don’t care what it offers and may exit your site abruptly. This will increase your site’s bounce rate, which is, of course, a negative SEO signal. 

Monitor your website’s performance from time to time and fix technical issues, including slow page loading speed, broken links, unsupported image formats and others at the earliest to stop them from hindering your holiday SEO success.

If you have a large website and are running short of time to fix all technical bugs while the holiday season is fast approaching, let me share a fair trick with you.

Prioritize technical fixes for your pages based on the trending products or services in your catalog and your holiday-specific keyword strategy. This way, you can ensure that your holiday pages perform well and don’t hinder your SEO progress.

If you create new holiday pages, ensure that you add them to your XML sitemap in order to prompt the search engine spiders to crawl and index those pages faster. 

Additionally, make sure that the URLs of your holiday pages are evergreen. For example, keep it www.yoursite.com/christmas-offers/ and NOT www.yoursite.com/christmas-offers-2023/. This will allow you to update specific festive deals on the same page every year and help build backlinks to the page consistently while improving page authority.

Don’t Miss Out on Paid Search

Do you know that 79% of brands believe that paid search is a primary driving factor for business? Yes. If you ignore paid search, you are missing out on something big.

A blend of SEO and PPC can help you nurture leads, accelerate conversion and boost your business ROI, especially during the holiday season.

That said, along with your other SEO efforts, try to invest in paid search platforms like Google Ads, Amazon PPC, Facebook Ads and more based on your marketing budget to make a big difference for your business.  

Run Email Campaigns

Email marketing can work wonders and bring more prospects your way this festive season if you know how to do it efficiently. 

Send holiday-based emails highlighting festive offers to your potential prospects. 

Make sure your subject line and main content are persuasive and not blatantly promotional. Rather than talking directly about offers and discounts, tell your prospects how your product or service can benefit them and how they can unlock the benefits at a slash price this holiday season.

Include interlinks to one or two of your important product pages so that they can visit your site directly from their email inbox.

Boost Mobile Optimization

These days, a vast majority of shoppers browse on mobile devices, including mobile phones and tablets, to make holiday purchases.

Also, with mobile-first indexing, Google predominantly crawls and indexes the mobile version of a site with the smartphone agent.

Given the scenario, you need to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly and compatible with widely used mobile devices.

This will help you beat your competitors who don’t have a mobile-friendly site and be easily visible to your potential customers on mobile devices.

Optimize Images

Unoptimized images on your holiday pages can affect their loading pace and lead to poor user experience. Never let it happen.

Ensure that your holiday-themed images are optimized with relevant alt-text and are compressed for faster loading. See to it that the image quality and resolution don’t get affected in the compression process.

Maintain a standard image size for all your images and opt for widely supported image formats like JPEG and PNG.

Leverage Social Media

Promoting your holiday content is great for achieving a wider reach. However, it is essential that you do it in the right places where your target audiences get to see it.

If you aren’t sure where to begin, social media is an ideal choice. After all, anyone and everyone is active on social media in this digital era.

Create official social handles for your brand on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others to share your content and attract followers. Encourage social engagement like comments, likes and shares to boost your holiday SEO.

Update Local SEO 

Are you running a local business and want to gain customers from a specific geo-location during the festive time? Local SEO is your go-to option.

Create location-specific holiday SEO pages on your site to appear for local searches and magnetize traffic from a particular location.

Create your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) listing and ensure that it is up to date with your business information, the products and services you offer, contact information, relevant holiday promotions and festive discounts.

This way, you spread the word among the local audience to spike up your sales during holidays.

Use Product Listings on Google Shopping

Google Shopping is open to product listings from 2020. With billions of searches happening in the holiday season, it is necessary to get your products on Google’s product listings, especially during this time of the year.

If you run an ecommerce business, this free feature can come in handy for your holiday sales. But how do you use it?

To show your products in Google Shopping’s organic listings, you need to have a Google Merchant Center (GMC) account.  Enter the required information and get your products listed on Google Shopping.

Start Early

Nobody wants their holiday SEO efforts to go in vain. Unfortunately, that may be the result if you are late for the show during the festive season. Again, no time is too early for holiday SEO.

Being an early bird helps you stay ahead of your competitors when it comes to holiday SEO. That’s because Google and other search engines require time to crawl and index newly created holiday content. 

Starting as early as you can allows you to get maximum holiday pages crawled and indexed. Only after indexing, your pages are eligible to appear in search. So, make sure you begin your holiday SEO efforts well in advance to reap significant benefits.

Monitor & Adapt

How do you know if your holiday SEO campaigns are up to the mark? That’s why you should have a constant eye on their performance.

Subject your holiday pages to A/B testing to see which versions perform better. You can also use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Semrush and Ahrefs to track the performance of your holiday SEO campaigns.

Make sure you have a keen eye for emerging holiday trends and tweak your strategies in place if necessary.

Wrapping Up

Shopping is part and parcel of the holiday season. That said, holiday SEO is your trump to achieve higher Google rankings, gain more web traffic and boost sales during the festive season. 

Remember, while it’s important to optimize your website for holiday SEO, make sure you say no to unethical practices, from keyword stuffing to low-quality link building, which will otherwise harm your site’s SEO. 

Follow the best practices to integrate holiday themes naturally into your content to get fairly rewarded by Google and reach new milestones in your business this holiday season. 

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