Christmas SEO Tips To Boost Traffic On Your E-Commerce Store

Holiday SEO Tips for Your E-Commerce Business

Christmas is the most beautiful time of the year, especially for e-commerce businesses. According to Forbes, retail e-commerce sales worldwide are expected to grow 10.4% in 2023, reaching $6.3 trillion. The holiday season is a golden opportunity for online retailers to boost their sales, attract new customers, and increase brand awareness.

In many ways, your search engine optimization strategy for the holiday season should be no different from your long-term SEO strategy. Your content should be fresh and well-optimized, your site should present a great user experience, and your technical SEO should be tip-top.

However, there are also some holiday-specific strategies to consider. Shoppers behave differently during the gift-giving season (which stretches longer and longer each year), and you should tailor your site to their needs and wants.

To succeed in the competitive e-commerce market, you need a solid Christmas SEO strategy to help you rank higher on search engines and drive more traffic to your website during the holiday season.

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday sales season less than three months away, now is the time to start prepping your site’s holiday SEO strategy — so you can give it time to work.

This guide will share some of the best Christmas SEO tips for e-commerce businesses that can help you optimize your website, create festive content, leverage social media, and avoid common pitfalls.

Christmas SEO Tips and Strategies for Your E-Commerce Site

Here are fifteen Christmas SEO tips we recommend from our years of experience working with online retailers just like you:

Confirm Staff and Contractor Availability

Before creating a holiday-specific SEO plan, you must know when your team will be available to help you.

Whether you’re working with in-house SEO staff or contracting your work through an e-commerce digital marketing agency, get on the same page about timelines and projects before the fall — or risk your optimizations never seeing the light of day.

We also recommend explicitly reaching out to your e-commerce web design team. You’ll need assistance implementing or testing site changes before the holiday season.

Your developer will have many holiday projects over the next few months; get on their “to-do” list early to ensure your site updates are complete long before the first frost.

Plan for Major Site Updates

On the same note, if you plan to migrate your site or perform other intensive site updates, now’s the time to make it happen — but only if you can launch it entirely before the holidays. If you launch your changes later in the fall, you’ll have less “fix it” time and fewer opportunities to test your site on shoppers.

The last thing you want is to implement changes that negatively affect conversion rates before the year’s busiest shopping period. If you can’t finish it in time, we recommend pushing it off until after Christmas to avoid unnecessary stress (and potential disaster).

Prepare Your Online Store for Increased Traffic

One of the first things you need to do before the holiday season is to ensure your website can handle the expected increase in traffic. You don’t want to lose potential customers because your website is slow, crashes, or has technical issues. To prepare your website for a raise in traffic, you should:

• Use a reliable web hosting service that can scale up or down according to your needs.
• Optimize your website speed by compressing images, minifying code, caching pages, and using a content delivery network (CDN).
• Test your website performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom.
• Fix any broken links, 404 errors, or redirects that can affect your user experience and SEO.
• Update your security measures and SSL certificates to protect your website and customers’ data.

Provide a Smooth User Experience

Another critical factor affecting your SEO and conversions is your website’s user experience (UX). A good UX can help you retain visitors, reduce bounce rates, increase engagement, and build trust. To make sure that you provide a smooth user experience, you should:

• Design your website with mobile-friendliness in mind, as more than half of online shoppers use their smartphones to browse and buy products.
• Use clear and intuitive navigation menus, filters, and search bars to help users find what they want.
• Provide detailed and accurate product descriptions, images, videos, reviews, and ratings to showcase your products’ features and benefits.
• Offer multiple payment options, shipping methods, and return policies to suit customer preferences and needs.
• Add live chat, chatbots, or customer service channels to answer questions and provide support.

Create a FAQ/Q&A Page

An increased number of customers to your website will also mean an improved response from your customer service. Head off some repetitive questions with a FAQ or Q&A page easily accessible from your homepage if you don’t already have one.

Use this webpage to address some of your customers’ significant (and most searched) concerns about your brand, including:

• Shipping and return policies
• Product how-tos/details
• Phone orders
• Order statuses
• Use of personal information

Benefit from Seasonal Keywords

Keywords are one of the critical aspects of Christmas SEO.

The holiday season brings a new set of SEO keywords. For example, Christmas brings keywords such as Christmas decorations, Christmas giveaways, Christmas desserts, top Christmas gifts, etc.

You won’t appear in search results if your online store does not include seasonal keywords in your product pages, offer announcements, landing pages, or blogs & articles.

Therefore, you must optimize your online store with trending holiday-specific keywords.

This optimization begins with keyword research, finding keywords consumers use most in searching for products/services during the holiday shopping season.

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Choosing the right keywords for your Christmas campaigns can help you target the right audience, rank higher on search results pages (SERPs), and drive more qualified traffic to your website.

The best Christmas campaigns utilize specific long-tail keywords with low competition and high conversion rates. Long-tail keywords are longer and more descriptive than short-tail keywords. For example:

• Short-tail keyword: Christmas gifts
• Long-tail keyword: Christmas gifts for men under $50

To find the best long-tail keywords for your Christmas campaigns, you should:

• Use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or SEMrush to generate keyword ideas and analyze their search volume, competition, and difficulty.
• Use Google Trends to identify seasonal trends and popular topics related to Christmas.
• Use Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to see what keywords drive traffic to your website and optimize them accordingly.
• Use competitor analysis tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or SpyFu to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and find gaps or opportunities.

Optimize Product Descriptions and Photos

Once you have chosen the best long-tail keywords for your Christmas campaigns, you must optimize your product descriptions and pictures accordingly. Product descriptions and pictures are essential elements of your e-commerce website that can influence your SEO and conversions. To optimize product descriptions and pictures, you should:

• Include your target keywords naturally in your product titles, headings, subheadings, body text, meta tags, URLs, and image alt text.
• Write unique, engaging, and persuasive product descriptions highlighting your products’ features, benefits, and selling points.
• Use high-quality, relevant, and appealing product images that show your products from different angles, sizes, colors, and contexts.
• Use structured data for your products to add rich snippets to your SERPs, such as price, availability, ratings, reviews, and offers. Structured data is a standardized format that helps search engines understand and display your website’s information. You can use tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or Schema.org to generate and implement structured data.

Offer Irresistible Deals and Discounts

One of the most effective ways to boost your sales during the holiday season is to offer irresistible deals and discounts to your customers.

Some examples of deals and discounts that you can offer are:

• Percentage-off that offers a fixed discount on your products or offers (e.g., 20% off, 50% off, etc.)
• Dollar-off that offers a fixed dollar amount discount on your products or offers (e.g., $10 off, $50 off, etc.)
• Free shipping offers free delivery on your products or offers (e.g., free shipping on orders over $100, free shipping on all orders, etc.)
• Gifts that offer a free product or service as a bonus when users buy your products or offers (e.g., gift with purchase, buy one get one free, etc.)
• Coupon codes offer a unique code that users can enter at checkout to redeem a deal or discount (e.g., XMAS10, HOLIDAY20, etc.)
• Flash sales that offer a limited-time deal or discount that lasts for a short period (e.g., 24 hours, 12 hours, etc.)
• Countdown timer that displays a timer that shows how much time is left until a deal or discount ends (e.g., only 2 hours left, hurry up, etc.)

Create Fresh and Festive Content

Besides optimizing your product descriptions and pictures and repurposing and updating your current content, you should also create festive content for your blog and social media. Festive content is related to Christmas or the holiday season in general. Festive content can help you:

• Increase your brand awareness by creating buzz and excitement around your products or services.
• Gain more traffic by attracting users searching for festive topics or keywords.
• Enhance engagement by encouraging users to share, comment, or interact with your content.
• Improve your loyalty by building a relationship with your audience and showing them your human side.

Some examples of festive content for your blog and social media are:

• Gift guides that showcase your products as ideal gifts for different categories of recipients (e.g., men, women, kids, pets, etc.) or occasions (e.g., stocking stuffers, secret Santa, white elephant, etc.)
• Holiday tips that offer helpful advice or information related to Christmas or the holiday season (e.g., how to decorate, wrap gifts, save money, etc.)
• Stories that share personal or customer accounts related to Christmas or the holiday season (e.g., how you celebrate, give back, overcome challenges, etc.)
• Contests that invite users to participate in fun activities or challenges related to Christmas or the holiday season (e.g., photo contests, caption contests, quiz contests, etc.)

Repurpose and Update Current Content

Content is king when it comes to SEO and e-commerce. However, creating new content can be time-consuming and costly. That’s why you should also repurpose and update your current content to make it more relevant and effective for your Christmas campaigns.

Does your site have holiday content you can spruce up for this season? While it may not have been applicable as it was pre-COVID, you can certainly take the time to update it for this year’s customers.

Update your old holiday gift guides with new and popular products, rewrite your seasonal messaging with your brand’s social media team, and look for refreshed images to add to your site.

Repurposing and updating content can help you:

• Reach new audiences by adapting your content to different formats, channels, and platforms.
• Boost your SEO by adding new keywords, links, images, videos, or data to your content.
• Increase engagement by refreshing your content with new information, insights, or perspectives.
• Extend your content’s lifespan by making it evergreen or seasonal.

Some examples of how you can repurpose and update your current content are:

• Turn your blog posts into infographics, podcasts, videos, or ebooks.
• Turn your product reviews into testimonials, case studies, or social media posts.
• Turn your FAQs into guides, tutorials, or webinars.
• Turn your newsletters into blog posts, press releases, or landing pages.

Similarly, you can create temporary content for any Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales your business plans to run. The priority with this strategy is generating holiday revenue; SEO may be secondary, especially if you plan on removing those holiday deals from the site later.

For a compromise between the two approaches, consider creating an evergreen “Discounts and Sales” page on your website. That way, you can update it year-round with your current promotions, incorporate it into your link-building strategy, and optimize it for those customers explicitly searching for site promo codes.

Reuse Last Year’s Landing Pages

Landing pages are crucial for your Christmas campaigns because they can help you capture leads, generate sales, and measure your results. However, instead of creating new landing pages every year, you should keep the same ones from last year and optimize them accordingly. Keeping the same landing pages from previous years can help you:

• Save time and money by reusing existing assets and avoiding duplication.
• Preserve your SEO by maintaining your page authority, backlinks, and rankings.
• Improve your conversions by testing and tweaking your page elements based on data and feedback.

To optimize your landing pages from last year, you should:

• Update your page content with new keywords, offers, headlines, calls to action (CTAs), or testimonials.
• Update your page design with new colors, fonts, images, videos, or layouts.
• Update your page functionality with new forms, buttons, pop-ups, or chatbots.

Create New Landing Pages

Don’t have any existing content from which to mine? Now is the time to create new Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages.

Gather your copywriting team and get to work now so that your new pages have time to rank in the organic search results before the holiday shopping season begins.

There are plenty of opportunities for generating holiday sales through SEO content like:

• Holiday gift guides and online catalogs
• “Best of” products or sales lists (ex: “Best Black Friday Deals 2023”)
• Holiday contests and sweepstakes (also terrific for email list growth)
• Product comparisons and reviews
• Holiday landing pages

While your long-term content marketing strategy should always help customers find and learn more about your products, it’s even more critical during the holiday season. Remember: Many shoppers buy based on others’ gift requests, not their interest in the product.

Leverage Social Media

Social media can help you promote your products and offers in various ways during Christmas, such as:

• User-generated content that encourages your customers to create and share their content featuring your products or offers, such as photos, videos, or stories
• Social proof displays social signals that show how popular or trustworthy your products or offers are, such as likes, shares, comments, ratings, or reviews.
• Social ads that create and run paid ads on social media platforms that target your ideal customers based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, or locations

Track and Measure Your Results

The last but not least tip for your Christmas SEO strategy is to track and measure your results. Monitoring and measuring your results can help you:

• Evaluate your performance by comparing your actual outcomes with your expected goals and objectives.
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses by analyzing what worked well and what didn’t work well in your campaigns.
• Optimize your strategy by making data-driven decisions and adjustments based on your findings and insights.
• Learn from your experience by documenting your best practices and lessons learned for future reference.

To track and measure your results, you should:

• Define your key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your specific goals and objectives (e.g., traffic, conversions, sales, revenue, etc.)
• Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Meta Pixel to collect and analyze data from your website and social media platforms.
• Use reporting tools like Klipfolio, Datapine, or Tableau to create and visualize dashboards and reports that show your KPIs and metrics.
• Use testing tools like Optimizely or SEMrush to conduct experiments and tests on your website and landing pages to optimize them for conversions.

Make the Most of the Holiday Shopping Season

Christmas is an excellent opportunity for e-commerce businesses to increase their sales and grow their online presence. The holiday shopping period is the most crucial time of year for most e-commerce businesses, and you should not take SEO lightly.

However, to succeed in the competitive e-commerce market, you need a solid Christmas SEO strategy to help you rank higher on search engines, drive more traffic to your website, and convert more visitors into buyers during and after the busy shopping season. 

If you only take away one conclusion from this post, let it be this: the time to start preparing your holiday SEO strategy is now.

The seasonal landscape is no longer limited to the November-December timeframe. Failing to prepare properly could see you losing significant amounts of traffic and revenue.

We hope you found this guide helpful and informative. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Is Your E-Commerce Website Ready for Christmas?

Are you interested in selling your products online but unsure how to attract eager holiday shoppers? Our professional e-commerce designers will be happy to help you with this. But first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your e-commerce web design and SEO needs, reach out to us! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.

And if you are unsure how to add e-commerce SEO ideas for Christmas, let’s talk! We will listen to you, answer your questions, and help you prepare your online store for the holidays!

Are You Selling Online?

Do you have anything to add to our e-commerce Christmas SEO tips and ideas list? Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our post with your audience!

For more content relevant to your business or product brand – check out the range of articles on our web design blog. (This one, explaining how to optimize your e-commerce website for Christmas, is an excellent place to start!)

Thank you! We appreciate your help ending bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita