8 SEO Hacks To Implement This Holiday Season To Boost Sales

8 SEO Tricks You Should Implement NOW To Increase Profits Over the Holidays

October is upon us, which means now is the perfect time for businesses to kick off their holiday marketing campaigns. Seeing as how the months around Christmas have been found to account for at least 19 percent of all annual sales between 2000 to 2014, anyone would be remiss not to put out all stops during this time of the year.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, digital marketing can work wonders for any traditional marketing campaign, augmenting its reach, effectiveness, and ability to build brand awareness. This is especially true when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), which can help retailers reach out to more shoppers and increase profits over the holidays.

The only catch is that it usually takes time for any effects made by implementing SEO to kick in, which means that NOW is the best time to begin any SEO campaign for the holidays.

Below are 8 ideas business owners can start integrating into their own SEO campaigns.

1. Churn Out Holiday Content Today

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Now is the perfect time to capitalize on incoming holiday searches by publishing holiday-themed content on your site. Sure, you’ve probably tried making cosmetic changes to your homepage before, maybe even offered some kind of holiday-exclusive product or service package, but what about the written content on your blog?

Naturally, people’s search habits change at different times of the year. During the holidays, most people are in “shopping mode”—between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, it’s no surprise why.

Writing content that’s optimized for the holidays allows you to get these searchers on your site. For example, a consumer electronics store can reach out to shoppers by writing blog posts about the following:

• The best smartphone to buy this Christmas
• The best video game console to gift someone
• Best 4K TV to buy on Black Friday

In other words, content geared towards attracting people with buying intent has a higher likelihood of generating more views and conversions. And although people don’t usually start shopping until mid-November all the way to the end of December, you want to start publishing content today to give search engines time to crawl your content assets.

2. Zero In On Holiday Gift Keywords

Of course, you can’t just create holiday content without taking the right holiday and gift keywords into consideration. If you’re a small to medium enterprise (SME), it will be difficult to rank for generic holiday-specific search terms like:

• “great Christmas gifts”
• “holiday gift ideas”
• “husband gift ideas”
• “gifts for mom”

What you can do is focus on long-tail keywords specific to your niche and category. Again, back to the earlier example: you’re a consumer electronics store.

You can target keywords such as “holiday iPhone 7 (insert your city)” or “holiday discount Playstation 4.”

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If you don’t know what search terms to play around with, this is where Google’s Keyword Planner tool comes in. You should also consider Google Trends to see trending search terms relevant to your industry.

Once you have your keywords, it’s simply a matter of integrating them across your landing pages and holiday-themed content assets. This shouldn’t be new to you by now, because you’re simply optimizing your site with the holidays in mind.

 3. Run a Holiday PPC Campaign

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PPC campaigns are perfect for seasonal promotions. If you want to fast track any gains in visitor traffic and conversions, you can run a PPC campaign on Google AdWords, with your adgroups and ads tailored towards holiday searches, of course.

Nothing will have changed about your target audience or demographic. To continue the previous example, you offer consumers electronics to a target audience made up mostly  of young professionals—nothing about this changes during this holidays.

However, your PPC ads also allow you to reach out to a new set of target buyers who appear only during the holidays. These people give away your products as gifts. Think of parents buying gifts for their kids, or wives looking to buy the latest gadgets for their husbands.

4. Emphasize Great Shipping Options

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Try as we might to avoid it, many of us still take part in the annual last minute holiday shopping rush. And you can bet that your customers do the same thing. Everyone knows the holiday season gets hectic, mainly because we’re all trying to beat the clock in some way. Not surprisingly, this mad rush often creates problems with product supply and shipping delays.

SEO best practices can turn this problem into a marketing opportunity. For starters, you can change your homepage company to emphasize that your company also offers in-store pickup, free shipping (perhaps for a minimum value order), and guaranteed shipping among others.

As the holidays get closer, shoppers will be more concerned about time. Your job is to be proactive and show them you’ve got their back. However, the key is to put information about shipping options on your site now to reap any SEO benefits in time for the holidays.

5. Optimize Your Top-performing Pages for the Holidays

If this isn’t your first time doing SEO on your website, you probably already know what your top-performing landing pages are. If not, visit your Google Analytics Landing Page Report to see which pages generate the most views and conversions.

When optimizing your site for the holidays, you want to return to these landing pages and give them a spin for the holidays. For example, if you have an ecommerce site, consider embedding holiday keywords on your bestselling products.

This can be done by including the product in a “holiday gift ideas” page, or better yet, by offering some kind of holiday promotion for the product to generate even more shopper interest.

6. Set Up a Landing Page for Holiday Gift Ideas

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One of the easiest ways to generate clicks and conversions on your most popular products is to set up a new section within your site completely dedicated to holiday gifts.

Whether you create a new landing page within an existing category or create a new category altogether, a holiday gift section can serve as the perfect platform for putting holiday-related keywords to work, putting your holiday-optimized content front and center. Having a section that’s highly visible and easy to access is just waiting to be crawled by search engine spiders, which can only be a good thing for your SEO efforts.

Besides making good SEO sense, creating a separate section for holiday gift ideas helps your potential customers find what they want in as little time as possible. In fact, most holiday shoppers don’t even know what they want to buy. Your job is to tell them what to consider, which is exactly what this landing page allows you to do.

7. Upload Your Products on the Big Ecommerce Sites

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This may seem like a common sense tactic, but you’d be surprised at just how many online retailers ignore the value of uploading their products on Amazon and eBay.

Leveraging these two ecommerce giants offers two main benefits.

• First, many marketers often forget that these two sites actually have their own search engines, which are just as influential as Google. As you may have figured out by now, these two channels are incredibly popular during the holidays, so it makes perfect sense to take advantage of the opportunity to siphon traffic and sales from these sites into your own.

• Second, increasing the visibility of your products on Amazon and eBay helps to boost your online authority, which in turn improves your ranking on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

• Conduct an SEO Audit to Check Your Site’s Health

The holidays can also serve as the perfect time to conduct an SEO audit or health check of your website.

In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, many sites that relied on now-outdated linkbuilding strategies were penalized and took a hit to their rankings on Google’s SERPs.

If this is your first time hearing of these updates, now’s as good a time as any to check your website health, which is as easy as visiting Google’s Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will tell you if you have issues with the following:

• 404 errors
• HTML glitches
• Duplicate pages
• Broken links
• Crawl and index problem
• Slow page speed issues

If you can identify these problems sooner than later, your site should have improved visibility in time for the holiday season.

Conclusion

Although there will always be people who deride the commercialization of the holidays, there’s no denying that the last few months of the year see a disproportionate amount of spending among consumers and businesses themselves. Implementing an SEO campaign early on gives you the advantage of being one of the first movers in your niche. This also gives you more time to prime your site and buyers as they begin mulling their purchase decisions for the holidays.

Remember, with SEO, timing and content are everything. Aim for relevance when creating your holiday-themed content, and always remember to solve your buyers’ problems.

To learn more visit Submit Press Release 123 to drive traffic and conversion to your website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

4 SEO Hacks Designed with Human Behavior in Mind Explained by Qamar Zaman a Dallas SEO

Dallas SEO Expert Qamar Zaman explains 4 SEO Tactics that Optimize Your Site for Real People

When it comes to SEO, one mistake that many marketers tend to make is missing the forest for the trees.

What am I talking about? I’m referring to the tendency of many SEOs to get bogged down by analytics data, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, conversions, and all this technical mumbo jumbo that should not be the be-all and end-all of search engine optimization.

Like any digital marketing strategy or school of thought, SEO is about marketing and promoting your brand to people—people.

Keeping track of hard data is one thing, but focusing only on numbers and stats won’t mean a thing if you don’t understand how your target audience thinks and behaves.

• Why do people visit your site?
• More importantly, why should they?
• What kind of information appeals to them the most?
• How can you help solve their problems?

These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself before you even optimize your site for search engines.

As you’re figuring out the answers to these questions, here are a few more hacks to help you create an SEO plan based on your customers’ behavior.

1. Figure Out Who You Should Reach Out To

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If you don’t know who your customers are or what factors will turn ordinary people into your customers, you won’t get anywhere with any kind of marketing campaign.

As a business owner, you should be able to figure this out quickly. Otherwise, you need to sit down and think hard about just who will benefit from your brand’s products and services. Very rarely will any business have just one kind of target customer.

This is where buyer personas come in.

This HubSpot write-up offers a succinct definition of what a buyer persona is: “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

The best way to start is to simply talk to your current customers. What do they like about your brand? Your products and services? What problems do your products and services solve?

But how is this relevant to SEO? By understanding who your customers are, it becomes easier to adjust your content and keywords to their specific needs and motivators, which in turn helps speed up the conversion process.

2. Check What Your Competitors Are Doing

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Another common practice among almost all consumers is the habit of comparing brands and products before making a purchase decision.

This in itself should give you enough reason to check out what your competition is doing, what tactics they’re employing, and what strategies seem to yield the best return on investment.

• How does their on-site SEO look like?
• What keywords are they using on their landing pages?
• Are they running any PPC ads? Check their copy for keywords and calls to action.
• Do your competitors have a blog? How often do they update it, if at all?

Moz.com’s Open Site Explorer is a powerful tool that helps you determine how well your site is doing compared to others and vice versa.

    3. What Do Your Customers Want?

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Once you’ve created your buyer personas, you then need to make sure your SEO campaign reaches out to customers across the different buying stages.

As search engine algorithms continue to evolve in sophistication, gone are the days of simply relying on keyword research to identify potential search terms and phrases your audience would probably use when making search engine queries, and ‘sprinkling’ these keywords across your landing pages and content assets.

For the most part, this helped users find search results they actually found useful. Still, it was far from perfect.

Thankfully, search engines have become smarter and more efficient at determining what search users want—in other words, what their buying intent is. Besides keywords, Google now takes into account the following:

• Device the search query comes from
• The time of day the query is made
• The location of the search user

The goal, of course, is to deliver the most relevant search results possible to users. And this is where your market research and buyer personas come in, helping you optimize your content for users in the different stages of the buying process, also known as a funnel.

For example, you may have someone who has committed to making a purchase, but is still weighing their options about where to best spend their money. Considering this information, you can optimize your content to reflect a bargain for customers that buy from you—it can be a discount, free shipping, or future deals on repeat purchases.

4. Know What Challenges Your Customers Face

Modern SEO has gone from simply cramming in keywords into landing pages and content assets, evolving into a process of solving people’s problems.

More than anything else, customers want information—your job is to give it to them. But you can’t just give them any kind of information. It has to be something that actually solves their problems and concerns, something that’s obviously related to your products and services, of course.

Notice how I keep going back to problems and concerns.

Part of developing buyer personas is knowing what your customers’ pain points are.

These are the issues, concerns, challenges, problems, and desires your customers face—or don’t even know that they’re facing. Once you’ve identified these pain points, you can then work your way towards presenting your products and services (through SEO and content) as having the power to overcome these pain points.

For example, let’s say your business sells used tires.

• One group of customers may be concerned about the quality of used tires—you can work on creating content that promises a warranty or some other strategy to allay their concerns about this issue.

• Yet another group may be concerned about shipping costs—you can perhaps weigh the cost-benefit ratio of offering free shipping, adjusting your content and PPC ad copy as needed.

To put it simply, the goal here is to optimize your content to address the different pain points of your buyer personas.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, these SEO tactics all revolve around a common factor: optimizing for people instead of search engines. If you optimize your site and your content with the goal of helping your potential customers, your rankings should improve in time.

Focus on helping your customers and providing them with the information they need. If you’re successful, you not only help solve their problems through your products and services, you also enjoy enhanced visibility on the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

Qamar Zaman Dallas SEO Consultant

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog