The festive season brings with it cheer and holiday spirit for every retailer who stocks up their inventory in the hopes of having customers scramble for last-minute gifts before Christmas. The season also serves as a prime time for many consumers looking forward to retail discount offers on various days from online retailers. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Midnight Madness, Half of Half, and many others are some of the most awaited retail sales events offered during this season. The period serves as one of the most prime times suitable for consumer acquisition and conversion with high street and online retailers using the most out of their investment to focus on such opportunities.
The holidays call for intense seasonal campaigns by online retailers for purposes of increasing their profitability, thus put in place a large number of digital strategies. This sees many retail brands majoring on direct sale channels such as AdWords, Email marketing, Display, or PPC to try and increase their sales revenue. In the event, many of them tend to forget about organic traffic, a method in which many brands fail to acknowledge its importance. Focusing on organic strategy by using event and seasonal based keywords can help any retailer boost its profit margins and introduce a new market to its brands during this season.
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Proper timing is essential for any retailer in getting the most out of the holiday season. As much as one may be aware of seasonal SEO keywords and may want to invest in it by creating blog posts around them, procrastinating until around November is a dangerous game. Search engines have a typical habit of delaying when it comes to the indexing pages accurately, and this is mainly dependent on the web website’s authority. One may thus wait until November, but due to such inconveniences, their efforts may bear no fruits. It is, therefore, best to plan for Christmas using SEO keywords.
The Baseline of Seasonal Keywords
These are keywords focused on consumer-related holidays and events such as Halloween, birthdays, valentines, weddings, or the oncoming Christmas holiday. The keywords are purposed at increasing demand for goods and services related to the closest holiday. They are typically created concerning famous terms used for various holidays and events when searched on Google. For Christmas, the most common and expected type of keywords revolve around “gifts,” or “presents,” The keywords could also be based on gender or family members, for example, “The best Christmas gift for my daughter.”
The other type of keywords that may be relevant around this season is “price” or “offers.” These are derived for stocking fillers and offers on gifts leading to prices under $30. Such keywords attract a higher customer intend for many retailers and should thus be included as part of the brand’s 12-month strategy.
The right time to start your seasonal SEO strategy
Waiting until November could prove to be a lethal move to the brand of any retailer with reasons that had been explained earlier in the context. One is expected to plan an advance move as early as six months before. This helps ensure that any blog pages or websites created might be indexed and appropriately ranked within the search engines. A minimum of 3 – 4 months of campaign strategy should be created in advance of the holiday to help a brand or retailer gain adequate visibility among the search engines.
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Finding the Keywords
The most appropriate and efficient way of finding a keyword would be to consult with Google. Using the Google keyword tool for their keyword research, a retailer is capable of getting an estimation of the search volume for a specific keyword at any season of the year. Optimizing for broad traffic keywords would have a massive impact on the profits of a retail business around Christmas. This is also one of the reasons why acknowledging seasonal SEO is very important.
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Maximizing on the keyword visibility
There are several ways in which one can maximize their visibility during the seasonal holidays and especially Christmas, to gain much traffic. Such techniques may include:
Create specific and unique landing pages
These are Christmas-based strategic pages that one needs to establish on their sites and should revolve around terms related to the season. A retailer would also be required to identify several products on their websites with which they can combine to form a unique landing page based on the keyword, for example, “Christmas gifts for neighbors.” After creating the pages, the retailers are capable of promoting them to be used as landing pages for Email campaigns or PPC for them to catalyze conversion rates for specific keywords.
Create a Christmas gift-list blog
These blogs are enjoyable to create and read once the keywords on such pages are optimized, thus capable of attracting a large amount of traffic to the website. A list blog can be made more attractive by focusing on the format, which can be modified through different categories for the available gifts, thus driving more traffic towards the intended website. A retailer can also make their blog posts downloadable as guides that buyers would use as reference points when they start shopping for the holidays.
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Create links and advertise on Social media or through email marketing
One can also build specific links and promote them in various ways, such as reaching out to their loyal customers through email marketing or using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Such platforms are a hub for people looking for information that would assist them in acquiring the specific type of presents they may be interested in.
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What a retailer can do with their content or blog after the end of the season?
After the season is over, it is normal for the traffic to die off from one’s site or landing page. Many a time. Companies and brands tend to take down their blogs or redirect them to other web pages. However, it is advisable to keep the pages live and set up holding pages containing links to essential pages on the main site. This is because such blogs or landing pages will be crucial next year, and one would not want to lose indexing on the search engines.
Conclusion
Using seasonal keywords may not be suitable for all companies but are significant for any eCommerce site. Proper and prior planning, as well as research, are essential elements to doing it the right way and ensure that the Christmas season is profitable to the brand by making use of SEO traffic.
