Christmas 2008 is behind us, and 2009 upon us. If you have an e-commerce site, one of your first tasks for the New Year should be to “fast forward” your SEO to Christmas 2009. Yes! It’s time to start counting down the days until the 2009 holiday shopping season as you plan your Christmas SEO efforts.
NOW is the time to make a list, and check it twice! Keep on your SEO Santa hat. If you wait until the Fall of 2009 to put your Christmas content online, you’re too late. It takes a few months to rank a page well for chosen keywords. Christmas keywords are very competitive, so it takes even longer.
E-commerce store owners have to think much farther ahead in the calendar than brick-and-mortar retailers. Walk-in retail stores are currently planning for Spring. Online stores MUST…
Begin planning for Christmas immediately after Christmas!
The online Christmas shopping season officially begins in November. Will your website be found by day-after-Thanksgiving shoppers? They will be typing their desires into search engines and receiving millions of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). A search for “christmas gifts” returns 29.3 million results!
Obviously, “christmas gifts” is a highly-competitive term, and you’ll want to plan for and optimize for a term that is not in such high demand. However, this illustrates the key importance of planning 2009 Christmas SEO NOW!
Below are a few suggestions to fast forward your 2009 Christmas SEO:
Research Christmas Keywords NOW!
Research keywords for which you want to rank next Christmas. Selecting the right keyword phrases is a top priority. You want phrases for which people are searching. Now is the ideal time to start researching Christmas-related keywords.
Current Keyword Research = How Christmas Shoppers Think
Do-it-yourselfers can use Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. The following shows results for “christmas gifts” on December 30, 2008:
Wordtracker displays 100 related keywords and the estimated daily search volume for each phrase. Shown above are the top 13.
Why Research NOW?
Wordtracker’s “sampling” represents searches for the last 160 days (just over 5 months). Data from right before Christmas represents how people are searching for holiday gift giving.
For example, people are NOT searching for “top 10 Christmas gifts” directly after Christmas. Wordtracker’s database of averages will drop each passing day for Christmas-related keyword phrases.
Assume you wait to do your keyword research in July 2009. You will NOT see accurate data and averages for how people were searching for “christmas gifts” during the 2008 shopping season. Do your research NOW to plan your SEO for Christmas 2009.
Redirect Christmas 2008 Product Pages
Do not simply delete your latest Christmas product pages. If you delete your old pages, users will get a 404 error – “Page Not Found.” You might as well tell shoppers not come to your store!
Use 301 Permanent Redirects.
Redirect your pages with a 301 permanent redirect to other pages in your site. This boosts rankings of the target page. Consider the following to determine where to send visitors who may have found or who have bookmarked your 2008 holiday product page(s):
- Redirect to pages with similar product offerings.
Transfer link juice by redirecting holiday product pages to other internal pages. Don’t just redirect to the home page, which usually has a lot of ranking anyway. Consider… if you have a Christmas Gift Bundle with a combination of products you don’t offer outside of Christmas, redirect to the most popular product in the bundle. Boost the rankings for that product page. - Redirect to your 2009 Christmas pages.
Put on your creative-thinking Santa hat while remembering that your 2008 page will have higher ranking than your 2009 page. Build link juice by redirecting to pages for next Christmas season.
Reference this guide to 301 redirects.
REMINDER: Update your sitemaps (for your website and XML sitemap).
Prepare 2009 Christmas Website Copy
Get your 2009 Christmas pages online to allow plenty of time for Google to index them. Select 2-3 keyword phrases per page, and write your website copy.
Put your chosen Christmas keywords in your:
- Titles, keeping title tags unique for each page.
- Meta Descriptions, knowing this is the copy that displays in the search engine snippet.
- Header Tags (H1, H2, H3)
- Body Content / Copy
- URLs (if you have search-friendly URLs which you can rewrite)
- Internal Anchor Text when linking to the Christmas copy from other pages.
- External Anchor Text when linking to the Christmas product pages from other websites.
Once again, remember your XML Sitemap!
Let your 2009 Christmas copy gain ranking!
SEO now to ensure product pages will be ranked for 2009 Christmas gift-giving lists!
Christmas SEO List
Of course, you’ll add to your Christmas SEO list as the year progresses:
- Get backlinks from related companies, suppliers and other quality websites.
- Participate in Social Media to be part of the Christmas gift-giving conversation.
- Comment on blogs where your target audience hangs out.
- Send specials to your email and RSS subscribers.
- Use matching keywords in PPC campaigns.
- Measure conversion, test, and experiment with all of the above!
You still have on your SEO Santa hat, right? Use a little bit of your jolly creativity (and current 2008 ranking) to consider one more holiday offer…
Offer Post-Christmas & New Year’s Specials
Turn your 2008 Christmas product pages into post-Christmas & New Year’s sales machines.
There’s no need to change the product body copy. Simply cut the price and add a graphic with a $ or % discount, a 2-for-1 offer, or free shipping to kick off 2009!
Jump into 2009 by turning your Holiday Gift Bundles into New Year’s Specials!
You’ll want to set a deadline for these specials. Then you can redirect the pages as suggested above.
Now that you’ve made your list and checked it twice, you’ve fast forwarded your SEO for Christmas 2009.
Oh boy! Jwhen i thought I was “safe” for another 11 months!
Great ideas Dana!
Alligator on a Leash:
Thanks, Julie!
Being online means we are never “safe” from Christmas. I really love this season and actually miss the decorations. However, we tend to want to forget about Christmas once the decorations are put away and the sales are over.
Ecommerce stores don’t have this option to “forget about Christmas” and must plan for next year now. It’s tough. We aren’t in that mindset anymore, but we need to be planning a year in advance for SEO. Unfortunately, waiting means it’s too late to even attempt to rank. If they wait, they’ll be saying “bah humbug” next year.
HmI’ve yet to think about the simple ways a search engine like Google thinks. The matter is that even though it indexes your page numerous times, it still takes a ton of due work on your part to get a website to become interesting to the big G. This lends to my understanding of search engines.