It seems like the holiday shopping season sneaks up on us every year, whether you have an ecommerce store or are a shopper yourself! Sometimes it arrives before we’ve had time to plan, and are playing catch up amidst the hustle. If you find yourself in a mad dash and in need of last minute SEO advice for the holiday season, consider these five ecommerce SEO tips to get you through this shopping season.
1. Research Previous and Latest Trends: The next time you go shopping, pay attention to how many products have the word “free” or “new” in their names. Businesses are always looking for an edge, and they know that consumers have buying habits that can be exploited.
2. Advertise Sales Early: Give your customers a sneak peak of sales you are planning by publishing sale and related site content early. There are plenty of early bird shoppers looking and scouting for items on their shopping lists, so you want to do everything you can to capture the attention of those shoppers. Leverage keyword rich content in the page copy and in the page meta data. Using keyword strategy can help you highlight new products and gifts. Also, make sure you are being indexed for your holiday gift specific terms and keywords.
3. Consider Teaser Pages: Many retailers may have items on-order that haven’t arrived at the store yet. To create interest in those items before they arrive and pre-sell them, consider creating a “Coming Soon!” page or create ‘Item Previews’ to generate interest. For example, if a product isn’t available in stores until 11/24, post it online a few weeks ahead of time to gain an advantage on seasonal SKUs. Putting your holiday items online ahead of time also provides the opportunity of making the items content shoppable, accelerating the path to product. Also tease the products on your social media accounts linking back to your “Coming Soon” page. Link your page to other pages that have great content for the holidays with strong keywords to help get your page indexed and ranked.
4. Give Shoppers Advice: Many shoppers, online or at the mall, don’t know what they are looking for until they find it. Use the power of persuasion and advice and help them with gift ideas! Consider creating a Holiday Gift Ideas (or Holiday Gift Guide) section or area on your site. Include products that make great holiday gifts or products you are promoting for the holidays. Be sure to add content that explains why the items are great gifts and who the target gift recipients are. This strategy works great for trying to sell unique, hard to optimize products in front of your website visitors. By creating a specific area on your site, it gets your content and product detail pages closer to the home page so the search engines can easily crawl and index the content.
5. Blog Products and Giveaways: If you have a blog, author a post about Holiday Gift Ideas and link to some of the products featured on your site. Also, provide a giveaway to a blog reader that shares your blog post on social media sites or with friends or links to it. Promote and highlight the giveaway through your social media channels, on the home page of your web site and in your newsletter if you have one.
These tips are just a few to consider for your last minute Holiday ecommerce SEO strategies. If you find yourself overwhelmed with the rest of the holiday season to-do’s, or want to get ahead of the ecommerce and SEO curve for next year or other online shopping seasons, call DoubleDome Digital Marketing. We’ve been helping clients excel online for 20 years.
