The season for shopping has started. If you are in the SEO industry or doing any form of SEO campaign for your own business, it’s important to plan ahead so you can take advantage of the holiday season. This is especially true for ecommerce websites, as this time of the year has the potential to bring in huge sales. Using seasonal content is a great way to optimize your site for this yearly opportunity.
But it’s only September. You have plenty of time, right? WRONG. As you may already know, there is no magic spell to improve your rankings overnight. You need to start optimizing as early as now if you want your rankings to remain consistently high in the holiday season. Here’s how to go about it.
Look at what you already have
Start with a review of your existing seasonal content. If you have articles, posts, or blogs for the holidays from the previous years, you may want to update and use them again to save time and money. Doing this can help you improve your rankings in the next few months. For instance, if you have a holiday gift guide for 2018, you may want to update that for this year to bring in organic traffic to your website.
Study the current rankings
It’s important to examine the SERPs for the keywords/phrases that you want to target. This will let you assess the competition and difficulty of ranking for those terms. Is the first page showing well-known brands? Do they have high-ranking, good-looking pages with well-written content? If you answered ‘yes’ to both questions, it may be challenging to rank for the same keywords.
Click on the top-ranking pages. They can give you a clearer idea when it comes to the intent of your target customers—what they are looking for and why. Analyze the search results, which may include review pages and definitions, so you can understand what searchers are seeking.
You also need to look into how the top-ranked pages are formatted. Perhaps they share certain elements that make them rank well. For instance, if multiple results are accompanied by a video, you may want to consider applying a video to one or more of your pages, too.
Find opportunities
See how your previous seasonal content is currently performing by looking up relevant keywords attributed to it. Determine what search terms it currently ranks high for and focus on optimizing for those words. This can help your content climb much higher, possibly even reaching page one.
There’s also an opportunity to rank higher based on the number of people searching for those keywords. Look at the search volume to determine potential traffic. But do keep in mind that ‘more’ isn’t necessarily better. Some keywords bring in a low volume of monthly searches but are still worth optimizing for because they are targeted. Even these small amounts of traffic can rapidly add up and have a huge impact on your sales.
Once you have identified opportunities, proceed to analyze your page to determine what needs to be optimized and updated.
Optimize your content
Simple measures like updating the headings of your seasonal content to include relevant keywords and using bullet points can already make a big difference in allowing search engines to crawl your page easily.
You can also take advantage of the ‘People Also Ask’ section on the SERP. It can give you an idea about what potential customers want to know about your products or services. You can then write new content or sections that can give them the answers they need.
Get professional help
Want to optimize your website for the upcoming holiday season? SEOValley can create seasonal content based on trends and opportunities that can bring top-quality traffic to your website. Talk to us today.
