Plan Your Christmas SEO Campaign Now Or You Will Miss Out

Whether you are an affiliate marketer promoting other people’s products or own an online store, there is no doubt that Christmas is going to be your busiest time of the year. Indeed, some ecommerce retailers freely admit that one-third of their yearly turnover is generated during this period. So, you can see how absolutely critical it is to get the maximum traffic from Google and other search engines at this time.

The thing is, though, all your competitors are trying to do the same thing. Many of them may have bigger budgets than you, more resources to call upon and therefore they have an edge.

As someone who has run SEO campaigns for a number of online stores over the years, I can tell you that you can overcome these issues if – and only if – you plan your Christmas SEO campaign right now.

By plan, I mean, in fact, you should start optimizing for the holiday period right now. That way you will steal a march on your competitors and will be hard to budge from the SERPs when the critical buying period rolls around.

1:  They’re Buying That?

Firstly, it’s time to do some research. Find out which were your top 20 or 50 selling products from the last holiday season. These are critical to your success this year as well.

What you want to do is to get all these products ranking as highly as you can in time for the peak buying period this year. That means you need to start now and build links to these pages steadily over the next 2-4 months. One great way to do this is to hunt down ‘product review’ type sites that will allow you to link back to your own site and post impartial reviews of those products.

On a tangentially related note, you should speak to your suppliers and make sure you can get a sufficient supply of your top products for the holiday period. If your cashflow is good, it might be wise to order some extras now as the last thing you want is to run out or, more likely, find that your supply can’t fill your order as they’ve sent all their stock to the brand name megasite instead.

2: They’re Searching for What?

Yup, more research. Use the Google keyword tool to find out what holiday related shopping phrases people are actually using to find what they are looking for. Obviously, things like ‘christmas gifts’ and ‘christmas gift ideas’ will be huge at this time of year, but you should be looking for searches that are a little less competitive.

Let’s say you sell golf clubs and accessories. You might find that ‘christmas golf gifts’ is a highly searched for phrase. Now, take a look at your own site: do you have a page about ‘christmas golf gifts’? No? Then now is the time to set one up. Of course, you need to remember that the people searching for ‘christmas golf gifts’ are not necessarily going to golfers themselves, so the landing page should be clear and point them in the right direction.

Once again, if you are creating new pages to take advantage of future traffic, now is the time to get links to them via blog posts, press releases, infographics and whatever other methods you feel will work. The advantage to doing this now rather than in October with the holidays fast approaching is that you can build these new pages up slowly and surely.

3: Google Is Penalizing Who?

A lot has been made about recent Google updates such as Panda and Penguin. This article isn’t really the place to go into great details. However, the main aim of the Penguin update is to identify sites that are deliberately manipulating inbound link text in order to rank highly in the SERPs. Consequently, Google will demote or penalize sites that have large numbers of inbound links using the same or very similar anchor text. Similarly, they can see that a sudden large influx of links into a particular aged page in a short space of time is also an attempt to game their search engine.

If you start building links – with varied anchor text – to critical pages now, you can do it slowly but surely and avoid penalties of this kind.

4: Google Is Rewarding: How?

A less discussed part of the Google algo is how they choose to reward what they term ‘fresh content’.  Google wants to push time sensitive, recently created content to the top of their rankings, if only briefly.

Now is the time to brainstorm some ideas for content that is both Christmas related and fresh. If you are running a blog, you can schedule that content to go live some way into the future. That way you can take advantage of the freshness part of Google’s algorithm.

Some ideas of how to make the most of the freshness part of the algorithm include: surveys about this year’s worst gift ideas; promotional coupons that tie in with a sporting event; one-off competitions that last a week.

5: Your Competitors are Failing: Why?

If you follow the tips in this post and start your holiday search engine optimization campaign now, you will find that your rankings come Christmas are extremely defensible and that your competitors are failing to compete with you. You’ve already laid the groundwork and so any further push in the lead up is only going to strengthen your grip in your particular vertical.

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