From Halloween and Thanksgiving, to Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, and New Year's, this time of year is ripe with potential for creative blog posts, homerun link bait ideas, and lucrative e-commerce opportunities.
Below are a few ways in which you can gear up your SEO efforts to maximize your holiday search traffic.
1. Find Holiday Keywords Without Having To Guess.
It can be easy to churn out a few holiday themed articles for your blog and pretend that you've covered all the bases when it comes to prepping your website for the inevitable influx of qualified searchers that are ready and willing to buy, but just taking a guess at what the right keywords will be is a bad idea. Instead, consult all of the data you have and make an informed decision about what keywords to target. There are a number of great places to find holiday keywords ideas.
- Analyze the keywords that were successful last year. Don't just look at your analytics to find which keywords saw increased traffic, but pay attention to which keywords converted into sales.
- Use Google Trends to spot patterns and figure out which keywords will be rising up in stock. You'll be amazed how many commercial keywords have consistent annual volume spikes in December.
- Try leveraging Amazon Bestsellers for your holiday keyword research. The idea is to find out which products are the most wished for and the most purchased so you can spot holiday trends early and figure out the hot button items of the year.
2. Create Creative, Interesting Holiday Content
All of these holidays create great opportunities to develop interesting holiday-themed content.
For any e-commerce companies, seasonal buying guides are a no brainer. Not only will they attract links if you truly put some time into making them a great resource they can convert incredibly well.
People are overwhelmed by holiday shopping, and if you can make their lives easier by simplifying their shopping decisions, you have a great shot at getting the sale.
There is also plenty of opportunity to create content that is built specifically to attract links. There were some impressive displays of seasonal link bait during Mother's Day this year, which are all great examples of how even if you create content that is slightly tangential to your website or product, it can still function as effective link bait if it is compelling enough to have success on social networks and on social bookmarking sites.
3. Combine Some Of Your Products To Create A Gift Set
Put together a few of your products that work well together and make a holiday gift set.
It allows you to target lucrative holiday keywords, especially those containing words like "gift set" or "gift ideas."
You can also put together a few different variations of the gift set to focus on different groups of gift receivers, such as moms, dads, and children.
Once you put together a good product offering and spruce up your on-page content to focus the product copy on the holiday season, ship a few gift sets out to niche bloggers for reviews. Easy links and, if you pick blogs with strong followings that are relevant to the product you're promoting, the kind of great inbound marketing that will easily pay for itself.
See also: The 5 Smartest Ways To Boost Your Holiday PPC Traffic