How to use SEO to boost sales at Christmas

With Christmas quickly approaching, if you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to start thinking about how you can use SEO to boost your sales. (Because it really does work!)

There are quite a few important and necessary tasks that you have to think about to make the most of the festive period, which includes:

Strategy and planning

Keyword research

Landing pages

Blogging

SEO-friendly URLs and indexation

Optimising product pages

Having a user-friendly website

Social media and email marketing

Below, we go into detail around each task, how they can be used/implemented and how they will help with your organic sales. Or explore our guide on how to dominate this coming Black Friday. Get ready.

Strategy & planning

When thinking about Christmas, planning and strategy will need to be at the top of your to-do list. Without a solid strategy in place, you may end up flicking from task to task without structure, which won’t benefit your sales.

When putting your strategy together, consider each of the following and think creatively about how you can stand out from your competitors.

The first task you’ll need to undertake is keyword research.

Keyword research

Keyword research will be one of the most important tasks you will undertake, as this will make the foundation for all of your on-page SEO.

Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush would be a good place to undertake keyword research. You will need to obtain your list of keywords from those tools and refine this list to those most relevant to your industry and that have the highest search volume and best intent over Christmas time.

You can then use those keywords to begin to plan your Christmas landing page as well as any blogs to support longer-tailed keywords to boost sales and increase organic traffic at Christmas.

Christmas landing pages

Once you have obtained the list of the key terms to target, the ones that can potentially drive more traffic and better meet user intent, you can begin to plan and write your Christmas landing page.

Ensure that you use your target keywords within the on-page copy of the Christmas landing page so that you can begin to rank for those terms and gain organic traffic to the page.

To guarantee that you capture all of the keywords within the landing page, you should start by creating a content skeleton. A content skeleton helps you to outline all of the content you want to include within the landing page, including headings and what content/keywords you want to capture under each heading. This way, you know you are including all of the keywords and topics you have researched.

Internal linking

You must make sure that you include internal links to the product/service pages that you want the user to visit to encourage users to explore those products/services in more depth and then make a transaction. Internal links also promote authority flow and help Google to crawl your website.

Seasonal blogging

If you’re unsure about what blog topics you can write about, tools such as Answer The Public will help you to get some ideas. Answer The Public gathers ideas and questions from real-life search data depending on which topic you enter.

You can also carry out some competitor research and see what they have done in the past to get some inspiration.

Some popular Christmas blog titles include ‘Christmas present ideas for Mum/Dad/etc.’ and ‘Christmas gifts for boyfriend/girlfriend/etc.’, but do some research and find titles relevant to your industry and that have some monthly search volume.

SEO-friendly URLs and indexation

Once you have your content, you then need to upload it to your website. Before putting the blog live, you need to ensure that the URL is SEO-friendly. Make sure that the URL isn’t too long, only contains lower case characters, and doesn’t contain any unusual characters such as ! or +.

An example of a friendly URL would be www.yourwebsite.com/christmas-2021 as it is short, sweet, and captures the topic of the page. You also need to make sure the page is both indexable and crawlable to Google, otherwise, the page won’t be found when users search for it.

Optimise product pages

Now that you have your seasonal landing pages and blogs live, you need to focus on your product/service pages. These pages will need to be optimised to capture those who are searching for a specific present for someone but may not know you exist.

Do your keyword research and competitor analysis to ensure you are capturing the highest searched keywords as well as those high-intent terms, and for an idea of how your competitors are marketing their products.

Write descriptive product descriptions and make sure you link to related products to encourage upselling.

User-friendly website

Having a user-friendly website is essential to ensure users don’t immediately bounce away.

You must ensure it is user-friendly on both desktop and, more importantly, mobile, as Google uses mobile-first indexing.

Use tools such as:

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test - to check whether Google considers your website mobile-friendly

Google Website Speed Test - to ensure your website has fast loading speeds to reduce the likelihood of a user bouncing

Social media & email marketing

Albeit social media and email marketing aren’t considered SEO, you should still use them to your advantage and they do have a cross-correlation with organic performance too.

If you have spent time creating new seasonal landing pages and blogs, let the world know about them! Post about them on your social media channels and email them to your newsletter signups. Use promotional codes to encourage repeat purchases and to bring your brand to the forefront of their mind.

Are you ready to pull it all together? With Christmas being a few weeks away yet (ask Alexa to remind you how long), getting started early is key. Especially as people will have started their Christmas shopping already.

Once you have completed all of these tasks, your holiday set-up will be complete and you will start to see a rise in your organic traffic and sales.

Final tip: Always remember to keep your website up to date and keep on looking at your competitors. This way, you will always be ahead of the game.

Any questions, our SEO team is always on hand to help.

Reach out.