Ecommerce SEO for Holiday Gifts & Seasonal Product Pages
The holiday season is fast approaching, and many retailers are looking forward to their most profitable quarter of the year. The shift from brick-and-mortar to online retail has been taking place gradually over the last few years, but we are predicting that this season will set a new precedent in holiday ecommerce.
Brands can take advantage of this surge in online holiday shopping by promoting seasonal deals to their customers through search marketing tactics. That said, it takes time to see SEO results. If you want your holiday gifts and category pages to rank, you need to plan ahead and publish them early. That means your seasonal ecommerce strategy needs to begin now.
Read on for the best seasonal product marketing practices that will keep your site’s SEO rankings high while boosting your holiday sales potential.
Consider Your Existing Pages Before Creating New Ones
Seasonality is important, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel with your content marketing plan. Do you have an old holiday landing page from last year? If so, this is a great starting point—just update the content and products for the holiday season when you are ready to launch it, instead of creating a new one from scratch.
This will allow you to retain any seasonal keywords that are associated with the old page while making it relevant for the current year. For example, if you have a page that already has some SEO value for keywords like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Christmas gifts, you will see much faster results by updating that page than you will by starting from square one. This tip applies to seasonal and holiday category pages, gift guides, landing pages, and more.
Are you offering holiday discounts on some of your usual products or categories? Rather than creating a brand new page, consider updating those existing category pages and product pages to include holiday sales content and visible price slashes. It’s true that you may miss out on some holiday keywords with this strategy, but you will also reduce the risk of creating duplicate content across multiple pages, which could hurt your SEO.
If there is any risk of running out of some of your best-selling products or most popular gifts during the holiday rush, use this time to craft a plan for dealing with out-of-stock products that will protect your SEO.
Get Any New Holiday Category Pages Up Early
So, you have decided to build a new holiday product or category page for your ecommerce website. Great! But how long will it take for you to start seeing traffic? While there is no definitive answer to this question, data shows it usually takes a few months (an estimated 100 days on average) for an optimized landing page to fully rank with the search engines.
In order to make your holiday ecommerce strategy as SEO-friendly as possible, you will want to get your landing pages up early. Don’t wait until just a few weeks before Black Friday to publish your holiday gift guide create a new seasonal category page; if you do, it likely won’t rank in time for users to find it through Google.
Concerned about customers seeing your holiday deals prematurely? There is no need to promote your page or link to it on your site navigation; if it's in your site’s structure, the search engines will be able to pick it up during their regular site crawls, even if it’s hidden from users.
Use the Holiday Landing Page as an Email Target
While not directly related to SEO rankings, email engagement can drive qualified leads to your targeted holiday pages, signaling a more engaged audience to the search engines. This can help lead to social shares and backlinks from other websites, which is a win-win for SEO.
Additionally, holiday landing pages were practically made for supporting multiple email blasts. The key to a successful holiday marketing campaign is staying top of mind from the beginning through the end of the season. An SEO landing page gives you a great home base that you can continuously drive all seasonal traffic towards.
Make sure that your pages follow the basic design principles for ecommerce websites to achieve higher conversions.
When the Holidays Are Over, Remove the Page From Users’ View
The holiday season has come and gone—so now you’re done with your seasonal ecommerce work, right? Not so fast! Holiday SEO keywords can rank year-round, so it's a good idea to leave any holiday gift set pages live on your website.
However, you don’t want users continuing to make purchases using any seasonal specials, so step one is to disable those as soon as your seasonal promotion period ends. Then, remove all holiday landing pages, product pages, and category pages from search, your navigational menu, and anywhere else the users could potentially find the page.
By the time the next year’s holiday season rolls around, all you have to do is rinse and repeat: update the content on the page for the current year, link back to it from elsewhere on the site, and let the search engines drive targeted holiday shoppers to your ecommerce store.
Final Thoughts
Holiday gift pages and seasonal products can be a big boon for your ecommerce business. For many retailers, Q4 drives a huge percentage of their annual sales. Planning ahead and pushing the right content at the right time is the key to success—but of course, that’s always easier said than done.
Building out your holiday ecommerce strategy with the help of an expert is the best way to grow your traffic and revenue during the holiday season. Contact the ecommerce experts at Whitecap SEO for more information and a free quote.