Before the holiday shopping season approaches us, online retailers should be making the necessary amendments to their website and refreshing their content to maximise their organic visibility as interest surges.
Amazon’s Prime Day has just gone, but there’s only a month or so before Black Friday is upon us and then Christmas, so there’s still plenty of time to implement all the tips and techniques within this blog so that you don’t miss out!
So let’s take a look.
Create product pages specifically for holiday shoppers
At this moment in time (as well as the upcoming months), shoppers are likely to be searching for specific deals so you will want to ensure that they can find your deals as easily as possible. Therefore, by extending your holiday focused optimisations to the product pages on your website, you will be able to achieve this goal.
It’s recommended to create category pages that will reflect how shoppers on the internet are searching. The “high-value” category pages should be optimised with the relevant keywords for each holiday (i.e. Christmas, Black Friday) and this can be done by updating title tags, meta descriptions, page content and more.
As new category and product pages are created, it’s important to consult with your marketing teams to ensure SEO is not affected and to help drive links to those pages.
Use Google’s free product listings
In a major shift back in April, Google Shopping has opened up to accommodate for free product listings and Bing also did the same more recently in August. This means free exposure for retailers and for shoppers, they will now see more products from a variety of stores who were never shown on this platform before.
To be eligible to show up in Google Shopping, you need to upload your products into a feed in Google’s and Microsoft’s Merchant Centre. However, if you have a physical store then you can use a separate programme in the merchant Centre called “Local Surfaces Across Google” which shows product availability in Search, Images, Shopping, Maps and Lens.
When using this, it’s important to keep track of your performance to enable you to make more strategic decisions within the campaigns for the future. However, the reporting for the organic listings is not as “sophisticated” as the paid campaigns. Bing does not yet have reporting for this but Google does. In Google Analytics, these free Shopping listings are categorised as organic traffic meaning that it isn’t possible to split between these and your traditional organic search listings. However, there are multiple workarounds for this.
Refresh your content
Evergreen content is the term for content that doesn’t go out of date. This type of content can be a resource for your prospective customers all year round to continue to serve your business year after year.
It’s highly recommended that companies create evergreen content that they can link to internally throughout the year but can feature more prominently during the holiday seasons. This allows you to gain links every year rather than removing pages and starting fresh each time.
It’s also important to reposition your content each year during the holidays as things change. For example, those buying your products or services during the year may be different from those who actually purchase during the holiday season. A good example of this kind of activity is video games. For the majority of the year, the main buyers of these are the players of the games but when it comes to the holidays, it’s usually a very popular gift bought by others.
With this example, the content will need to be shifted to take advantage of existing rankings and to address any queries of this new consumer. Answering any questions that the purchaser may have such as the rating, what other people think and so on allows you to target them specifically rather than selling the actual gameplay/specifics of the product which may be already targeted towards the user actually wanting to play it.
In addition to the content, revising page titles, descriptions, headlines and so on to be relevant to the buyers will help you to attribute more clicks during these times and also convert the traffic that reaches your site.
Add structured data
Google has introduced a lot of new Shopping features to its search results which are called “structured data-powered features” such the Popular Products carousel and Knowledge Panels.
The Popular Products carousel is something that mobile users may encounter when they’re hunting for fashion/clothing items. This enables users to filter through product categories, read reviews, view different colours and compare prices without having to even click on the advertiser’s website first.
By marking products up with the product Schema, you can get your products into this carousel. You can also submit a product feed in the Merchant Centre to do this too.
With this being said, if you’re looking to learn more about how to take advantage of the holiday periods then get in touch with our team of SEO experts. We can also help you with PPC Management, Social Media and much more!
