We all gripe about the Christmas decorations and advent calendars popping up in supermarkets. Every year it seems that the Christmas period gets longer and longer. This phenomenon sometimes referred to as the ‘Christmas creep’ or the ‘Holiday creep’; is the subject of more than one comedian’s set and your dad’s chief complaint for two months before Christmas Day. Even sites like Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary are full of great definitions including this one;
“the inexorable tendency for the commercial aspects of Christmas to appear earlier every year”
Christmas creep exists because of marketing. Plain and simple. Competition is high, online and on the High Street, so turning heads to your sale before your competitors is the best way to win as much Christmas traffic as possible. Preparing your store or website for the holidays needs to be weeks and months in advance, especially if you want to see your website at the top of SERPs. Whether Black Friday, Christmas, Mothers’ Day finding visibility quickly can be tough.
We’ve put together some useful tips to help you optimise your website for sales and raise your profile before the Holiday creep.
Use Google
Google’s shopping tab is a revelation for e-commerce. You no longer need to drive traffic direct to your site to complete a sale. Instead, rank for the right keywords and your products will show up organically to millions of search engine users. All you need to do rank in the organic shopping listings is upload your product feed into the Microsoft Merchant Center and Google Merchant Center.
Brick and mortar stores can use the Google Merchant Center. These products will then be visible across several Google applications including images, shopping, maps, search, and Lens.
You can also keep track of your products’ performance with helpful analytical data.
Create content and revise old copy
As ever, ranking in SEO relies on good-quality content. With the promise of increased sales in a few months, there is no time like the present to create new content and tailor it to holiday-specific keywords.
A great way to create evergreen content is to plan a gift guide. This list of products can be expanded and updated every year. This provides you with an evergreen article laden with holiday keywords and SEO value, and it allows you to add new products without having to write a whole new article.
Make a space on your site for holidays
A new tab or category page only requires a few hundred words and some fresh imagery to offer customers a whole new experience. A new page with a holiday-themed URL and high-value keywords such as ‘Black Friday Deals’ or ‘Christmas Crackers’ can help you capture more clicks and conversions. During holiday periods, users are actively looking for holiday deals so updating your meta information, creating a new section on the website, and adding a few reindeer go a long way to helping you reach your market.
Make the sale before they even reach your site
Structured metadata can make the shopping experience seamless. We often think of the meta-description as one of the motions of SEO. But this little line or two can really help you complete a sale. Adding product schema is a great way to add authority and trust your search result while providing all the information people need to make a purchase. You can add price, reviews, and other information such as sizes or colours available. Prospective customers will appreciate having all the information to hand and are more likely to click through.
With holidays approaching and the Holiday Creep ahead of it, its time to optimise your SEO. At Fifteen we have spent years mastering the mystical arts of SEO and can help you reach new heights. Whether you want more bookings, sales, or even just visibility we can assist you with market-leading expertise. Contact us today to find out more.