With the holiday season already upon us and Cyber 5 looming, creating, maintaining, and finetuning your SEO holiday promotions is crucial. This year, customers are looking for the best deals online and are not necessarily loyal to any specific brands. The coronavirus pandemic shifted consumer loyalty for a multitude of reasons, such as availability, website navigation, and more. As such, consumers are searching for the best deal, the safest option, and the optimal delivery choice for them.
Ensure your brand and products are there for them when they search by creating holiday-specific landing pages.
Packaging Holiday Landing Pages
To increase your chances for visibility on key shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, create targeted landing pages with researched keywords well in advance of the days themselves. Consider creating a separate page for each broader category of product for which you plan to offer a discount rather than a general, blanketed page stuffed with too many deals.
Broaden your holiday SEO content strategy beyond simply the products you have. Package your products into easy-to-navigate landing pages that are catered to specific demographics, key areas rising on Google Trends, and strategic messaging from trending terms and keywords you found success with last year. While this year is unpredictable and uncertain, you did have a winning strategy from last year – expand upon your victories, big and small.
How can you package your products effectively? Start with your customer personas and target audience. Based on this data, consider segmenting your products by:
- Gender, like “Best Gifts for Him”
- Profession, like “Best Gifts for Teachers”
- Price, like “Best Gifts Below $25”
- Interest, like “Best Gifts for Outdoor Enthusiasts”
See what’s trending and what products you already have that could easily fit into trending categories. Keep your buyer personas in mind, as well, so as not to optimize for customers who aren’t converting to your website.
Once you have your packages neatly tied in a bow, use your product categories to create gift guides and blogs that list out your top selling products remarketed, for example, as Best Gifts for Mom. (If you have customer reviews of these products, even better! Customers love peer reviews. Consider working these packages and testimonials into your social media strategy as well.)
Your Holiday SEO Strategy
Ideally, these promotional holiday landing pages should be made ahead of time. Create pages before the holiday season crunch and use 302 (rather than 301) redirects wherever applicable. This is useful for holiday- and promotional-specific versions of a homepage. This pre-planning is twofold: one, you have time to optimize the pages fully based on your trends and keyword research, and two, search engine crawlers have time to scan and redirect points only during the appropriate time.
When creating landing pages, consider placing them prominently in top navigation in order to drive traffic from the homepage.
Drive Urgency for Your Holiday Promotions
Pre-planning your sales serves a third purpose: whetting the appetite of your loyal customers and alerting new customers on what to expect. Early announcements will drive users to your site as they start planning out their purchases and researching ahead of time. Using regular announcements (think once a week starting a month in advance to each day the week of) in tandem with a live countdown on your website will drive urgency in shoppers.
Your holiday promotional schedule could look like:
- 45 days in advance: Leverage your website calendar, social media, and any emails or newsletters to start driving traffic and garnering interest
- 7 Days in advance: Begin leveraging the above for daily posts
- 1 Day in advance: Make your onsite countdown prominent to focus on your upcoming deals
Download a 2020 Holiday ECommerce Sales Calendar to coincide your marketing strategy with the anticipated high volume sales days.
Promoting your landing pages increases its ranking in SERPS. Beyond sharing the link to social, try writing blog announcements that highlight your product packages and new features of your holiday landing pages. These social and organic posts boost backlinks and generate greater exposure to your existing audience. Furthermore, such blog content, just as the landing page, can be used year after year through simple updates, making it evergreen.
For example, take Royal Caribbean, who has a blog they just add to every year so you can see how their Black Friday deals evolved over the years. Their blog ranks number 2 for high volume term “Black Friday Caribbean cruise deals.”
Your Technical Holiday SEO Checklist
- Start sooner rather than later
- Check your site for any issues that could affect performance
- Study last year’s trends and take note of ones that could be useful for your business this year
- Identify relevant keywords for your niche
- Create landing pages specifically for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals
- Coordinate SEO with your other marketing efforts
- Track and measure success frequently and adjust your strategy to focus on what’s working
