For e-commerce and retail brands, the holiday season is often synonymous with the shopping season. Whether it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday or the end-of-year holidays, millions of consumers rush to websites and stores to get their hands on deals as well as gifts for friends and loved ones. If your brand relies on the holiday season for a large portion of yearly revenue, optimizing SEO for e-commerce has never been more important.

SEO is not a short-term game, and brands need a well-planned, winning SEO strategy so that good positions can be attained in the SERPs ahead of the holiday-related search volume spikes. The earlier brands start optimizing for BFCM, the better their chances at ranking well for high-opportunity keywords than can drive more traffic and sales both online and in-store.

Here are five SEO tips to boost holiday traffic and sales:

1.Evaluate last year’s trends to identify keyword opportunities
One of the best ways to identify opportunities for this year’s holiday season is to research search trends and behaviors from the previous year. Start in September by identifying the right keywords to target. Keywords should drive a high volume of searches while being relevant to the business. Once the perfect holiday keywords are identified, SEO teams should group keywords into themes based on user intent and match each keyword group to an existing landing page or a content gap. These themes act as the roadmap for on-page optimizations and content creation.

2.Create holiday landing pages
The keyword research exercise will shine light on top opportunities for content development. For the holidays, a few common ones are ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ deals. To capture this search demand, brands should deploy ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ pages in October, optimize SEO elements and copy with the appropriate keyword targets, and insert internal links to the new landing pages to increase their chances of better rankings.

This holiday landing page strategy pays off. iCrossing worked with a major retail brand to develop and optimize Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages, with tremendous success. The BFCM pages became visible for 245 keywords (previously not ranking at all) and saw a 32% YoY improvement in rankings. This led to a substantial growth in traffic that represented 35% of overall traffic to deal pages.

3.Optimize deal pages
While creating new landing pages is ideal to target holiday keywords, brands don’t always have the time and resources to develop and maintain various holiday landing pages.  When this is the case, brands should look at other relevant pages they can optimize for holiday keywords.

Some good landing page alternatives to update are deal pages. Deal pages tend to be evergreen in nature and have good page authority as they may have been live for a longer period of time. In November, brands should focus on optimizing deal pages with titles, descriptions, headings and body copy, ensuring targeted keywords are present throughout. Optimizations should be present during the holiday period and, if possible, a few days prior to allow engines to crawl and index the content.

Holiday optimizations to deal pages can be an effective tactic to improve performance. iCrossing applied this tactic on various deal pages such as OLED TVs, refrigerators, computer monitors and five other deal pages for a global consumer electronics brand. With optimizations to SEO elements and copy, the client improved deal page rankings by 451% YoY, growing from 43 ranking keywords to 237. The ranking improvements led to an increase in traffic to deal pages of 71% YoY.

4.Update pages with holiday messaging
An easy-to-implement tactic to improve holiday SEO performance is updating landing pages with holiday-related messaging. The SERPs can be very competitive but good messaging can help brands stand out and entice users to click on their listings instead of others. By communicating holiday discounts, offers and deals directly on titles, meta descriptions and open graph elements, brands can improve their CTRs on both SEO and Social channels and attract more users to their site. Ideally, messaging should be updated on the home, category and PDP pages and highlight key value propositions such as discounts, free shipping or returns, free gift wrapping, curbside pick-ups, etc. Once the holiday period is over, holiday messaging should be removed and pages should revert back to standard evergreen messaging.

iCrossing tested this tactic on a major children’s clothing retailer website and saw great results. The client was able to drastically improve CTRs with some easy changes to the metadata messaging with iCrossing’s recommendations to:

1. Test ‘Free Shipping’ messaging which saw CTRs improve by 20%
2. Then test ‘25% Off’ messaging which saw CTRs improve by 65%

5.Keep local listings current
Lastly, brands shouldn’t forget about shoppers at brick and mortar because consumers often check information online before heading to a store. To facilitate and promote in-person shopping, SEO teams should update their brand’s local listings on Google My Business, Bing Places, Yext and other services with holiday messaging and holiday hours. Stores often have different hours of operation during the holiday season and it’s critical to have those new hours reflected online to ensure customers keep coming into the stores.

As people increasingly turn to digital channels for holiday shopping, it is crucial for brands to have their online presence ‘SEO optimized’ as early as possible to drive incremental traffic and revenue. iCrossing’s SEO experts work with brands across industries to prep for Q4 holiday campaigns, with real business impact. Contact us for a free SEO consultation on your BFCM prep.