While we’ve addressed broader search engine optimization (SEO) concerns in the past, the impending holiday season warrants a bit of a deeper look at how the practice affects sales during prime shopping windows. Specifically, we’ll look at the importance of ranking in product listings and setting up unique/dedicated pages for holiday shoppers; these are probably two of the most important changes to the way you should handle SEO for the holidays.
Organic Product Listings
In 2020, Google and Microsoft both added free, organic product listings to their search results (previously, results were paid only). The importance of this feature and its use to retailers is hard to understate given the sheer number of people that use search engines to shop or find specific products that they intend to purchase soon. Having your storefront’s listing appear in Shopping results is an almost guaranteed way to increase sales (or, at the very least, foot traffic if you have a brick-and-mortar location).
Appearing in these results is essentially the same process as appearing in normal search results, but some specific tailoring to the shopping environment is necessary. Among these, properly implemented products feeds are the most important. If your catalog items and their accompanying information aren’t structured in a manner that makes them visible to search crawlers, your pages will either be under indexed or missed entirely—in short, you either won’t appear as high up on the list as you ought to, or you won’t appear at all. Neither is a desirable result.
It’s also possible to use Google Analytics to help with holiday SEO. In the short term, they allow you to see where the traffic on your site is concentrated and where it’s coming from so that the visitors can more readily be directed to your holiday content. Moment-to-moment snapshots of activity as well as monitoring conversions when they happen to know what parts of your strategy are working (and what’s not).
The Importance of Dedicated Pages
Setting up dedicated pages for your holiday inventory and/or special deals (or categories of deals) is a relatively easy, effective way to boost your search visibility over the course of the season without hindering your results outside of it. Take Black Friday sales as an easy-to-digest example of this. Around the beginning of November, numerous keywords and phrases that include “Black Friday” start to see increasing numbers of searches as the day approaches. By adding unique pages to your site that have meta-information and text catered to those searches, it’s more likely that you’ll capture some of the traffic from them.
It’s also important to make sure that these unique pages are being linked on your social media and in your blogs since repetition and crawler-friendly setups are some of the essential tenets of SEO. You’ll also find that, when they’re done well and have professional design, these kinds of unique holiday pages can generate new backlinks from other sites (deal hunting or couponing websites are a good source for these links around the holiday season)—which feeds right back into your place in the search rankings.
There’s no reason to lose out on web traffic and the holiday business it brings. Every day from now through the end of the year, customers are actively looking for organizations like yours. Don’t let them stumble onto a competitor first. IDMI.Net’s SEO services will push your website closer to the top of relevant search results, now and the rest of the year. We’re here to be your partners in success.