The last two months of the year can be a great time to sit-back, relax and enjoy the holiday season.
However, if you own a web-business and are focused on increasing leads and revenue from your site, it’s a great time to work on search engine optimization.
Here is the Step-By-Step Guide to SEO for The Holiday Season
1. Build Content For Popular Holiday Search Trends
The first thing to do to find popular holiday search trends is use Google’s Keyword Planner.
If you have a hard time brainstorming ideas, it’s always a good idea to check out Google Trends.
2. Optimize for Mobile Search
As you can see in the chart above, mobile traffic (specifically from smartphones) is where the vast majority of growth is. It would be highly ignorant to ignore this traffic source during one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year.
According to Google, 3 out of 4 consumers are more likely to visit a store if their local search results were helpful.
Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/how-digital-connects-shoppers-to-local-stores.html
Here are some action steps to help you get started with mobile SEO
- Check for mobile friendly status using Google’s tool.
- Implement Smart Banner meta tags for iOS app promotion.
- Generate mobile-specific reports.
- Review Mobile SEO best practices.
3. Improve Site Speed
If you only have time to do one-thing for SEO, I would highly recommend you focus on site load times. Bounce-rate is a HUGE factor in search-engine optimization.
Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.
Page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions.
You can analyze your site’s speed using Google’s Page Speed Tester.
Most websites stand to shave a few milliseconds off load time by implementing some quick fixes:
- Minifying scripts
- Optimizing images
- Gzip compression
- Cache optimization
4. Improve The Copywriting On Your Site
SEO copywriting is all about creating useful, compelling, and valuable content, which targets specific keywords so that other people will gladly promote it on social media platforms.
This increases the authority and relevance of your content and improves its ranking in Google for the selected keywords.
One of the most helpful things you can do to attract people to your content is create an engaging headline. Use the tool below to generate some ideas.
If you need actual writing help for SEO I highly recommend the CopyBlogger’s blog. It’s an extensive blog that is full of exhaustive resources on copywriting.
Ask
My wife and I love olive oil – yea, I know it’s a little wierd. A local olive oil store asked us for advice on how he could get his current customers to buy more.
I told him to solely focus on getting his customers on his email list so he could be communicating with his customers about any exciting new products and announcement he had.
My wife told him to start keeping track of all the interesting recipe’s he was using for olive oil and to give recipe recommendations with all the olive oils.
The absolute crazy thing is this guy actually implemented both ideas and sold his store for millions of dollars! The point is, ask your customers (people who are already spending money with you) what they want and give it to them!
You might be wondering what this has to do with SEO. Actually a lot. Did you know that the Frequently Asked Questions section is one of the highest ranking pages on a lot of websites? This is because people post millions of questions to google everyday. If your site answers these questions you will rank higher.
Measure
Here are some reports you should be looking for to stay on-track of your SEO duties and the results of this work:
- A report on the three top-performing keywords, including search volume, target pages, and dwell time.
- A report on the top-performing holiday-specific keywords.
- A report on the percentage of mobile traffic vs. desktop traffic for the year-to-date.
- A report on the top-performing content pages for their closest competitor.
A report on traffic increases since July.
Summary
Instead of just coasting into the holiday season with eggnog and in-laws, accelerate your business. At Spectruss, we provide a lot of the services listed above for all of our customers.
If you need help implementing any of these ideas let us know! We would be glad to help.
