While holiday pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are common practice, many businesses fail to recognize the potential to rank organically for holiday searches using a strategic search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.
Although some businesses may not directly benefit from the seasonal spike in search traffic around the holidays, e-commerce sites are typically in the position to use this holiday shopping season to their advantage. Even though 2008 saw a 3% decrease in holiday spending from 2007, online sales still climbed to over 25.5 billion over the course of the holiday season.
As early as September, search volume for holiday keywords begins to increase dramatically. If you haven’t started your holiday SEO campaign yet, it may be too late for you to really capture a strong share of the holiday search volume in 2009. However, you should be creating your strategy for next year. With the right strategy, you’ll be able to drive organic traffic in addition to your PPC traffic and reap the benefits of the holiday season for years to come.
Holiday Keyword Research
A holiday SEO campaign, like any SEO campaign, begins with keyword research. This is a long-term endeavor, so you’ll have to pick your keyword strategy carefully. If you have the time and resources to implement year-round link building for your holiday campaign, then it may be worth it to go straight for the keywords with the highest search volume: the prime real estate. However, if you have fewer resources, you may want to consider more long tail variations of your primary keywords and begin to ramp-up for next year’s holidays.
Be sure to choose keywords that are specific to your products. While that may go without saying, many campaigns end up targeting products you might not actually sell. This is a bad tactic for holiday shoppers. They’re looking for something specific, and a misleading result leads to fewer conversions. For example, while the term “holiday drinks” has a much larger search volume than “holiday house coffee”, the latter would be a much better choice for a retailer that only sells coffee. The term “holiday drinks” implies other products such as eggnog, punch, and hot chocolate. To rank for the term “holiday drinks” would require more effort, and would yield a lower conversion rate than a more specific term would.
That being said, over the years you may find yourself in a position where you need to begin targeting new keywords to grow your holiday business. If your site has established a strong ranking for more specific terms, you may be in a good position to go after broader keywords.
Custom Holiday Landing Pages
Because your SEO efforts depend on building up the authority and credibility of your site in the eyes of the search engines, it’s important that you build custom landing pages for your target keyword phrases as early as possible. The longer you spend building links to your holiday pages, the better they will fare in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To get the full effect of custom holiday landing pages, use the same landing pages year after year. Over time, your pages will accumulate the authority and credibility they need to reliably capture holiday searches.
When creating your landing pages, consider the keyword research you’ve done. Then, create custom URLs to match your target keywords. Our example coffee retailer may create a URL structure like this for one of its landing pages: http://www.coffeegroupie.com/262-pumpkin-pie-flavored-coffee.html.
Using target keywords in the URL of your holiday pages lends them weight for searches around those terms, but in order to truly establish your page as a search result, you’ll need to ensure your page has keyword-rich content throughout. Never sacrifice usability for the sake of keyword density – the search engines can identify your holiday terms without twenty repetitions of your keyword.
All of these things are important to climbing the rankings for valuable holiday searches, but they are ultimately meaningless if your visitors don’t convert to customers. The foundation for a successful holiday landing page is to have strong calls to action, such as holiday sales and vivid paths to purchase, combined with emotionally compelling content that puts your visitors in the holiday spirit.
A successful holiday campaign requires sustained activity throughout the year to build and develop your pages in the eyes of the search engines, which means that your holiday pages will need to have a constant, though minimal, presence on your site. In spite of the long-term nature of holiday SEO campaigns, there is an element of timeliness. As fall approaches, begin to integrate your holiday pages into the main structure of your website with links from your home page and other important pages. Holiday sales, promotions, and creative content on the site should all direct activity to these pages.
Improving Your Holiday Pages with Social Media and Public Relations
Once you’ve built your holiday landing pages, it’s time to put them into action. A truly complete online presence incorporates a successful use of social media, public relations, and search engine marketing.
When the holiday season rolls around, use your social media presence to build the buzz around your holiday landing pages. Whether it’s by announcing a holiday sale on Twitter, or creating a seasonal app for Facebook, an effective use of social media will not only result in traffic and conversation around your brand, but also in links that will make your pages relevant to holiday searches for years to come.
The holiday season presents unique opportunities for social media, but it’s also a great time to build your brand’s image. Many businesses choose to form partnerships, give to charities, and launch unique products during this time. If that’s the case with your company, go ahead and add to your online efforts with a well-crafted press release that is easy to share through social outlets and is optimized for SEO. If your press release is picked up, it can often generate results in Google News which can help to increase timely traffic to your holiday pages, and may increase your inbound links, which would benefit you in the next season.
Conclusion
Ultimately, when creating a holiday SEO campaign, long term planning is crucial. While it may seem like a burden, the benefits are definitely worthwhile. Although a holiday campaign incurs a sustained cost throughout the year for only a short season of revenue, that season is undoubtedly the most important time of the year for many merchants. Many people have been saving their money to buy gifts for their loved ones for the holiday and will spend more during this time than any other. Additionally, every successful holiday campaign builds upon the last, delivering stronger and stronger results. By creating a well defined keyword strategy, incorporating custom landing pages, maintaining year-round link building efforts, and supporting your pages with social media and PR, you’ll reap the recurring benefits of ranking for your customer’s holiday searches.