Are You SEO Ready for The Holidays?

The festive season is upon us. The important part of owning a business is capitalizing this season to increase your brand presence among customers and boost sales. You would want your customers to see your brand at the right time and at the right place to increase the online visibility of your brand. Whether you are a newbie or doing it for a while, you must have come across the term SEO (search engine optimization). If you have dabbled a bit, great! If you are looking for a place to start, keeping reading.

10 Strategies for Your Business

A good SEO strategy can bring in traffic to your website by appearing on the search term page, especially the top 10. It is recommended to implement SEO strategies throughout the year, but seasonal SEO (holiday SEO) will have a large impact. Here are a few SEO strategies to implement this holiday season.

1. Don't Wait till It's Too Late: You must bear in mind that the content takes a while before it reaches its ranking. Typically, around 45 days, so you must have started this yesterday. But, in some cases, it is never too late; there are so many opportunities you can look upon. 
2. Analyze Google Trends: It is one of the most underutilized tools in the SEO scene. The previous version of the dashboard was quite complicated, but the recent one is simple. You can check by filtering geographical wise and category wise. The time range is so vast that you can choose between 5 years and 4 hours. There are also advanced search options like web, YouTube, news, image, and shopping. You can also compare data and find the trends which are stagnated and rising. 
3. Get Holiday Specific Keywords: Search for correct keywords to include in your website. You can look at the keywords list last year and update them for this year. You can use platforms like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Google Suggest, and Spyfu to get holiday-specific keywords such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Some of the popular phrases include holiday shopping 2019, Cyber Monday 2019, or holiday gifts 2019, which are broad and relevant. There are also specific keywords that work wonderfully such as 'Christmas presents for my mom' or 'secret Santa holiday gifts.' You can mix both to get the shoppers to visit your website.
4. Create SEO-Friendly URL: URLs are very crucial to acquire organic traffic to your website. Spend some time in creating them and ensure that you do not use stop words such as you, with, and for. You can use holiday-specific keywords and make them readable. While you can use underscore symbol and hyphens, you should also remove unwanted punctuation.
5. Create Holiday Landing Pages: Like URLs, landing pages generate a lot of organic traffic as well. These landing pages can be used for social media promotions which will help with the ranking. The landing page should define the purpose, target the appropriate market, gives clear promotion instructions, and a call to action. Like landing pages, you can optimize the category pages as well. You can come with a different page title and meta description to make it look new. 
6. Review the Foundation: What makes the website more popular - the functionality. You can resolve redirects on broken links, lost landing pages, resolve any 404-error page, secure https, ensure the servers can handle the load, and optimize the page speed. You can also check for duplicate content, formatting issues, and lack of internal links. 
7. Use Social Media Campaigns: A survey says the company that does not use social media marketing fails at SEO by 50%. A planned social media calendar will help you generate leads, expose brands, and engage with the audience. To ensure that, plan your posts ahead of time and use automation tools to post. Use hashtags effectively and keep your content trendy. The social media profile should have good details and pictures. 
8. Do Competitor Analysis: Nothing in the online world is exclusive. People are selling almost everything. It is important to know your competitors and where they stand. You can also analyze their growth, their marketing campaigns of the past and present, and their strategies to get ahead. This can give you an idea of where to begin or proceed. 
9. Keep Your Content Mobile Friendly: 31% of online shoppers use their mobile phones to buy. And, did you know 87% of users use their search engine on the smartphone at least once a day? This had made Google index via mobile crawler. Ideally, the site should not take more than 3 seconds to load. This will help your website ranking immensely. 
10. Content is King, but Don’t Overdo It: Product bases content will bring in traffic and engagement, but you must know that the keywords should not be used as fluff. The average use of keywords should be around 3% to 5%. Make your content informative by adding videos, statistics, gifs, and slides. Avoid stuffing keyword and related content in one place and make it flow evenly.

Everyone will be focusing on doing everything to increase their sales. But choosing them to do smartly and wisely saves a lot of time and effort.

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