Digital Marketing Blog

Too Late To SEO Your E-Commerce For The Holidays?

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The Holidays have once again crept up and surprised us all. As many marketers continue to push their holiday campaigns further forward into the calendar year, encroaching now upon Halloween (not just Thanksgiving); other marketers inevitably get caught off guard, wondering “Is it too late to get started?  Have I missed out on Santa’s annual gift to e-commerce merchants already!?” 

Holiday SEO Preparations

While 2011 may have rushed by, leaving little time to prepare for maximizing the holiday rush, it doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to quickly optimize your web presence to get your fair share of this holiday season’s sales action.

Digital marketers know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool for gaining exposure for your brand and funneling targeted online traffic directly to your website.  In fact, a well-designed SEO strategy can become an online marketer’s strongest tool. However, an impactful SEO campaign most often requires a healthy amount of lead time and effort before its benefits are fully realized. As a digital marketing agency we usually say that a 3-6 month timeline is aggressive for landing on the much sought after, page 1 of Google, never mind 3-6 weeks?!

So what can you do to ensure that the SEO Grinch doesn’t leave you with a stocking full of coal this season?  For starters, if you’re planning on leveraging SEO to drive holiday traffic you’ve got to get to work on a few crucial items immediately.   

Step 1: - Make your SEO decisions.

You've only got a couple weeks to make an impact so it is important that you pick only a few (2-3) keywords or phrases to focus all of your holiday SEO efforts on.  You aren’t going to get effective results with a huge and varied collection of keywords. At this point, time is of the essence and the more concentrated you can make your search engine optimization efforts, the better!  If you are having trouble finding decent words or phrases, try using modifiers such as a region, state or city. Also, keep in mind that going after many of the highly sought-after keywords can be fruitless. Instead, work to find a couple strong long-tail keywords to get higher search rankings and increase your likelihood of conversion.

Finally, choose terms you can impact. Pick a term or terms for which you already rank in the Top 30; or even Top 5-10 position. These are your best chances to improve rankings in the short term.

Step 2: - Get to work on the SEO.

Once you have your keywords nailed down, it is time to get to work. A large contributing factor to the search engine ranking of a website is the content of its pages. You will want to do some effective and frequent blogging, and prepare the best possible content and copy for your website. With blogs, make sure that you utilize specific keywords in the title and the content of the blog. Web page URLs, Titles, H1 and Image alt tags should contain your keywords as well. In writing copy for your webpage, keep your new keywords in mind without going overboard.  If you’re struggling to fit them in naturally, consider adding a holiday specific reference page that gives your holiday themed keywords a more contextually relevant environment.  

Step 3: - Connect the SEO dots.

Now, it’s time to bring it all together. Internal linking is a highly underused way of passing link juice between different pages of your website, hence boosting your search rankings within a spider web of relevant links and information. It allows a search engine to find all of your pages and builds the relevancy of your keywords. You should pick the page you deem most relevants, and that has the highest PageRank or MozRank, to funnel page-travel towards. And don't forget to link with link text that includes the keyword, not something like "read more" or "click here"; which carry no SEO value. Whenever you mention keywords in a blog post, link it back to the desired page.  Do your best to keep this strategy in mind as you write and soon you will notice just how many opportunities exist within your own site to assist in the SEO efforts.  

To be safe and to expedite indexing, submit your pages and page updates through both Bing and Google Webmaster tools. To learn more about the rising importance of Bing webmaster tools read our recent blog.

Step 4: - Explore other options.

While SEO is an incredibly powerful tool, it takes time to achieve the maximum results. Up until now, we have only touched upon what is referred to as “earned” search results.  However if you decide that there’s no opportunity to take advantage of organic SEO for this year’s holiday season, you still have other options. Explore investing in press releases, social media and paid search and/or paid social advertising.  

In this scenario many marketers will consider using Google for their paid search advertisements, which can quickly devour a budget at this time of year, or Facebook, which is notorious for its extremely low click through rates. However, and we’ve been touting this in past blogs, don't forget about Bing. What we have found for many of our retail clients is that often, Bing produces better sales conversion rates but is overlooked. Not a bad thing to ramp up and explore for the holiday season.  

To put a bow on it, for many of you the time for a full on holiday SEO campaign has come and gone with the speed and stealth of Santa’s sleigh. However do not despair, some quick and dirty SEO; along with social media, Facebook advertising, killer promotions and paid search engine advertisements; are all great opportunites to get frenzied holiday shoppers through the front door of your e-store!

(Photo credit: Saucy Salad)