The holidays may be more than just a few weeks away, but as an ecommerce site, you need to prepare for this busy season in advance. Putting ecommerce SEO strategies in play this early helps ensure your website is the first ecommerce site your target audience clicks on when they shop for presents and other holiday treats online. If you haven’t read our previous post yet, you should check it out – it’s a good primer for ecommerce SEO.

I want to share how we prepare ecommerce sites for the holiday seasons with our SEO services. We’ve already begun implementing these to let our clients reap the benefits once the holidays arrive.

Holiday Pages, Categories, and Content Planning

Why You Need It: The first thing to do is to examine your previous ecommerce activity and determine which days leading to holidays get the most traffic and generate the most sales. This reveals consumer-purchasing behavior during different seasons, and helps us plan a content strategy around the peak ecommerce visits and sales days.

How We Do It:

Determine the holidays that you want to target. By studying previous traffic activity, we can pinpoint when you get the highest conversions and cross-reference it with the nearest holiday season.
Create your holiday landing pages and promotional materials early. We will optimize the landing pages with the keyword research we conduct for your brand – more on that in a bit.
Plan your content around the holidays. What things do your customers want to learn more about? What promotional offers will you be running throughout the season? Where’s the best place for your content to be published to reach your audience effectively? These are only some of the questions we’ll be answering when planning your content calendar.

Holiday Keyword Research Product Selection

Why You Need It: As I’ve previously mentioned, you’ll need the keyword research to optimize your holiday landing pages. This also ensures gift-buyers and holiday shoppers see your ecommerce website when they search for gifts and other items online.

How We Do It:

Our Keyword Research team drills down on gifting and holiday keywords, checking sources like Google Analytics, Google Trends, and your in-site search data.
Keywords will be chosen based on competition, relevancy, and market trends.
These keywords will be presented to you in a report, and together, we can select the terms to be used for your campaign.
Based on the keywords selected, you can choose the products to feature in each category. For example, if your keyword is “Christmas gifts for children,” you can choose to feature a variety of your bestselling toys for boys and girls.

Publishing Holiday Landing Pages

Why You Need It: Studies show that 30% of holiday shoppers begin their purchases before Halloween. Here in the Philippines, it’s even earlier – Christmas season begins as soon as the months ending in –ber arrive. Publishing holiday landing pages earlier lets you get the market share for these early holiday shoppers and establishes your presence to those who will be doing their shopping closer to the holidays. It also takes time for search engines to index and rank new pages – publishing them early will make sure they’re present on the SERPs in time for the peak holiday shopping season.

How We Do It:

Our designers will create mock-ups of your ecommerce holiday pages, subject to your approval.
We will create optimized landing page copy based on the keywords selected and the products you choose to offer throughout the season.
Our developers will take care of conversion, implementation, and publishing online.

Product and Category Keyword Optimization

Why You Need It: Optimizing your title tags, your meta data, and your URL helps search engines identify what your content is about and makes indexing and ranking your holiday pages easier.

How We Do It:

Add titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords following Google’s guidelines. We will be using your keywords to select the main URL for the holiday landing pages.
Create product descriptions that incorporate keywords relevant to the products featured in each landing page.
Add the appropriate rich snippets for added value – review snippets, pricing, and store hours (if you have a physical store) are good snippets to begin with.

Content Distribution and Promotion

Why You Need It: A good ecommerce marketing SEO strategy takes into account both on-page optimization and off-page promotion. Distributing your holiday pages to the right channels ensures that you will be seen across all platforms. It also serves as a good source of links for your backlink profile.

How We Do It:

Distribute your links through social media sites
Feature your holiday offerings in your official blog and other guest blogs
Announce your holiday promotions through email newsletters

We’d be glad to help you prepare your website for the upcoming holidays. Contact us today and let’s talk about your ecommerce marketing and SEO strategy.