Table of Contents
Devising a strategy for using the right target keywords
You could use tools such as Google Analytics to identify the keywords that are searched for the most for different products and ensure that the product page content includes such target keywords. Try to unearth those specific keywords that have proven to make an impact in the holiday season in the past, and could be expected to do so in the upcoming one. In particular, be on the look-out for long-tail keywords that you could incorporate, as they are easier to rank for by the search engine bot, as an estimated 70% of web traffic is driven through such long-tail keywords.
Additionally, you would want to give the search engines sufficient time to discover your pages through such target keywords, so you need to plan for the holiday season marketing well in advance and begin implementing the same on your website around a month before the actual event.
Landing pages for holiday offers
A great way to generate excitement among target customers is to build pages dedicated to holiday offers and designing them in a way to specifically incentivise sales. Along with providing information about the product through the use of the target keywords as mentioned above, the pages could also include meta-descriptions that include those meta-keywords that would be targeted towards closing the deals with customers, such as Free Shipping’, or 3-year warranty’, or Buy One Get One Free’. Such pages could also include timestamps such as ‘Coming Soon’ or include countdown timers, to build excitement and anticipation among customers regarding the upcoming offers. According to a survey conducted by BrightLocal, 85% of consumers place equal credence on online reviews as with personal recommendations, and 73% respondents said they trust a business more when they read positive reviews. Thus, the landing pages could flash genuine customer reviews to boost product attractiveness.
Cross-platform marketing tactics to complement SEO
A website, for the most part, is a one-way communication channel from the brand to the consumer, however, social media does not provide you with the opportunity to advertise your holiday landing pages, but you can also get to know consumer reactions and appropriately modify your marketing campaign strategy in the run-up to the actual holiday event. With 60% Instagram users saying that they learn about products on the platform and 75% stating that they take action such as visiting the product website, and 40% people discovering brands over Pinterest, clearly, social media and E-mail marketing cannot be overlooked when it comes to promoting offers. In particular, the email open rate has shown to increase massively, such as a reported 60% on Black Friday. A side-effect of such promotions is the word-of-mouth generation, which by itself tends to generate brand trustworthiness, translating into higher sales.
Latent Semantic Indexing
Holiday deals are fleeting events, and therefore, it is essential to land customers onto your website with as much urgency as possible. Latent Semantic Indexing might help you in this case, except, the way most marketers go about it (using synonyms of target keywords) is wrong. This article will help you understand why you need to specifically avoid the LSI tactic as has been conventionally attempted to be used. However, what you can do is to search for those other relevant keywords that might land someone who searched for a different but related product on to your website. For example, if someone is searching for ‘sexy lingerie’ and your product is a ‘comfortable chemise’, you can include the phrase comfortable yet sexy lingerie’ in your product description enhance your search ranking for the other keyword as well. Of course, a caution that you need to exercise is to not appear misleading with regard to the product description, in order to minimise negative reviews.
Activating under-performing pages
As a rule, you should look to identify and improve any under-performing page in terms of page views, and this is particularly imperative in the build-up to the holiday season. You could use Google Analytics and Google AdWords to identify which web pages are generating the least conversion rate and lead generation. Once these pages are identified, you could look to arm them with the inclusion of holiday-specific target keywords as mentioned above. Other aspects that you could look into are using SEO-friendly URLs and creating mobile-friendly web pages.
While taking care of issues such as fixing 404 errors and resolving broken redirects as also improving page loading speed are basics that you want to focus on in general while dealing with SEO, the above tips will enable you to place your links at a prominent rank on search engines, thus achieving higher number of clicks and sales.
Reference:
1. https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/
2. https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/instagram-marketing/instagram-statistics/
