I know, I know, it’s only September. But we really do need to start talking about Christmas SEO because SEO is not a 5-minute job! So we need to put the work in now to see those sales come rolling in for December and I want to make sure that happens for your business this year.
Just imagine how you’d feel waking up every day and finding shoppers are going nuts to get your products for their nearest and dearest this year. Sounds good, right? Effective Search Engine Optimisation in the run-up to the Christmas period can do exactly that for your product-based business and I’ve got all the info right here on how you can do it for your business!
How to Improve Your Christmas SEO
Improving your eCommerce SEO for Christmas is something you should do every year for the best results. Google likes to see fresh content coming from your site and they’re more likely to serve it to searchers if they think it’s up to date. So even if you’ve done some SEO work on your site already, you should follow these tips for ultimate optimisation for Christmas SEO.
1. New Keyword Research
It’s time to do some fresh keyword research and find out what everyone’s searching for this year. Even though Christmas is still a few months away, you’ll definitely start to see those Christmas searches creeping into your keyword research now and those are the ones you want to target.
You’ll start to see trends emerging and be ready to adapt your offerings to suit, rather than scrambling at the last minute to convince people to buy your products! This is also a good way to review your product offerings and see if you can get anything new to meet the demand this Christmas.
If you’ve already optimised your product pages for SEO then I don’t recommend replacing your old keywords with your new keywords. Instead, you could create long-tail keywords by combining your old keywords with the new ones, for example, “fluffy socks” could become “festive fluffy socks.
Alternatively, if you need to use an entirely different name in order to target Christmas shoppers then I recommend creating a brand new page to target your Christmas SEO keywords. Make sure your content is unique (aka don’t duplicate your old product page) and target everything on that page for your festive-focused keywords.
Psst! Not sure how to optimise your pages for SEO? My free SEO checklist will help you with that!
2. Create Gift Guides
Gift guides are great and there are a few different ways you can create them. If you’ve got the option to blog on your website platform then you could create your gift guides as blog posts, linking to your product pages and explaining the benefits of each, or you could use your product category pages to create gift guides and place your products into those categories.
However you want to do it, just make sure you do or you’ll be missing a trick!
These also work well when shared on social media platforms like Pinterest and Facebook and you can easily repurpose them for Instagram carousels, stories and reels. So they’re an easy win for content in the run-up to Christmas!
On your website, gift guides work as a treat for directing visitors around your different products and inspiring them with their Christmas shopping. This could take a potential £25 sale to a £250 sale if you package your products up in the right way with your gift guides. So give it some thought and consider your shopper’s needs.
When creating your gift guides, focus on researching keywords like “funny Christmas gifts for men” or “Secret Santa gifts for gin lovers” (sign me up for this one!) to find the most searched-for phrases and boost your Christmas SEO. Ensure you use this phrase for the title of your gift guide and that the products you share in it are 100% relevant to these searches.
The beauty of gift guides is you can create as many as you want and you’ll be able to repurpose them for other seasons, so they’re a great thing to add to your content marketing moving forward!
3. Optimise Your Category Pages
A lot of people seriously underestimate the power of their product category pages or don’t even use them at all (!!), but these are the perfect pages to optimise for SEO and attract Google searchers to your website.
Depending on the size of your site you might decide to create brand new category pages for the following method or you might choose to use your existing categories. I recommend using your existing ones unless they’re a key part of your website navigation, in which case I’d create specifically targeted ones for SEO.
Most websites will use their category pages for logical categories, like “pillows”, “throws”, “wall art”, etc. which are never going to rank on search engines because they’re far too broad and likely snapped up by the likes of Amazon. Instead, you should be using medium or long-tail keywords for your category pages.
A what-tail keyword?! Don’t worry, I’ve got your back on this one 😉
A medium-tail keyword would be something like “Unique Wall Art” whereas a long-tail keyword would be “Unique Wall Art for Bedroom”. Ideally, you’ll focus on long-tail for best results unless your SEO game is pretty strong and you’re ranking well in similar areas already.
Another example would be to take your basic category page for “soap” and turn it into “Handmade Organic Soap Gifts” which would optimise for search engines generally and likely target Christmas shoppers looking to gift handmade soap this Christmas.
4. Add Seasonal Keywords
Adding seasonal keywords to your website copy is a great way to generate Christmas traffic to your website. Once people start searching for Christmas gifts they’re far more likely to include “Christmas” in their searches, particularly as Christmas draws closer and they want to ensure their gifts are delivered in time!
You should properly research your relevant seasonal keywords but some popular ones include “festive”, “Christmas”, “holidays”, “Santa”, “Father Christmas”, “jolly” and so on. You can include these keywords on your main website pages, product pages, categories, gift guides, etc. to really ramp things up.
If you’ve already optimised your website for SEO then I recommend including these in front of your keywords to add some instant Christmas SEO to the mix. You’ll be able to easily remove them in January without affecting your overall SEO for the year ahead and it’s minimal work in terms of content and layout changes.
5. Optimise Your Meta Titles & Descriptions
Your meta title and description are the social media bios of the search engine world. They’re what people first see when your website comes up on their Google search results and they’ll determine whether or not someone clicks on your website to make their purchase. So they matter, a lot.
For product-based SEO you should aim to include phrases like “Click here to buy”, “Free delivery” and “Buy now” as calls to action in your meta title and description. This piece of advice isn’t just for Christmas SEO but it is especially important for Christmas SEO if you aren’t doing it already!
Ensure to include “Christmas” too, particularly your meta description, and mention delivery timelines if possible. Christmas shoppers want to know that they can buy the product on your page and how soon they can get it (especially if they’ve left things a little late!), so answer these questions in the meta title and description to encourage those clicks.
6. Review Product Pages
Now is the perfect time to review your product pages and make sure that you are ticking all the right boxes to make the sale by utilising these Christmas SEO tactics.
You should ensure your product descriptions are thorough and grammatically correct. People place trust in a well-written product page and it shows that you’ve taken the time to carefully review your products and content. Additionally, you should make sure your product pages meet minimum word counts for SEO. This currently sits at around 300 words however if you can go higher, you should!
For e-commerce, it’s particularly important that your images are next-level good because at this point the only thing keeping retail shops going is that people like to see and touch products before they buy. So your product images need to be the next best thing to that.
They should be high-resolution against a professional backdrop and you should have at least 3 per product. Ideally one of these will show the product in action, or better yet, you might even make a video to show this! Now is the time to go big or go home with your product images.
TLDR: Christmas SEO can make all the difference to your eCommerce sales this Christmas
I wish I could give you a nice little sum up here on everything you need to do for Christmas SEO but you really need to read through all the tips in this post! If I could offer one piece of advice for the skim readers among us, it would be to work on your product page SEO as soon as possible.
It usually takes a minimum of 3 months to see the results from search engine optimisation so you need to get started with it sooner rather than later if you want to see results at Christmas.
Want to work on your SEO but don’t want to do it yourself? My SEO services are just the thing for you!
