Last minute SEO tips for Christmas: With not many sleeps left before Christmas, most retailers will have had their Christmas SEO strategy in place weeks, even months ago. But even if your website is in lock-down there are still opportunities to help ensure you have a bumper haul this festive season.
- Gold: Improve all Rankings
Identify pages with crawl problems, such as 404s/broken links. Conduct a quick site crawl, or if that’s a problem because we’re in a peak period, use Web Master Tools. If you have the time then another great tool for checking links – and old friend of SEO specialists who’ve been kicking around since the early days of search – is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Internal links pointing to 404 pages should be cleaned up to avoid detrimental SEO impacts and a poor user experience. Any external links pointing to 404 pages should be the subject of a link reclamation project which 301 redirects any old pages that happen to have useful external links pointing to them.
- Frankincense: Review your Category and Product Pages
Make them more unique, engaging and relevant to the language, which consumers are searching for. Understand your customer’s language, intent and tone by compiling all search query data from your analytics, ad-words and internal site search. So frequently retailers use different naming conventions to the language used by their customers. For example, a retailer used a number of different ways to refer to a 12v lead acid rechargeable battery without using the term “Car battery”. A lead acid rechargeable battery has about 1200 searches a month, whereas car battery has over 18,000 searches per month.
- Myrrh: Reprioritise your Hierarchy
There is a general SEO rule that the higher up a page is in your website hierarchy the better chance it has to rank. Consider what categories and products are your best sellers at Christmas and create direct links from your home page to maximise ranking potential. A good example of a retailer doing this well is Boohoo.com. They’ve created a deep-link within their MegaNav for Christmas jumpers, taking an item that is usually 3-clicks away from the home page to just 1-click away and consequently they rank #1 in Google.
SEO plays a vital part of delivering the trading strategy for retailers during the Christmas peak, but yet many retailers find it a challenge to research trends and implement quick changes for unexpected seasonal peaks. By using automated SEO tools, you can ensure that your brand never fails to maximise on the festive season.
Warren Cowen
Connect with Warren CowenWarren Cowan is CEO and Founder OneHydra, the leader in automated search marketing and has been an expert in the search marketing industry for over 15 years. Cowan’s unrivalled search knowledge and unique perspective on the growth and movement of the industry is what has led his two separate businesses to leading roles in the digital marketing industry. Cowan has been recognized for his entrepreneurial capabilities on numerous occasions, including being shortlisted for ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ and being named in Growing Business ‘Young Guns’ list of 30 fastest-running and most exciting young entrepreneurs.
