SEO Prep for Holidays

The holidays are just around the corner! And preparing our website for this incredible opportunity is everything. So what does it mean to do SEO prep for the Holidays. Listen to this episode to find out!

More episodes you’ll enjoy:

• Planning a year of SEO: http://www.digitalbloomiq.com/seo/yearly-seo-plan

• Does having multiple keywords help with SEO? : http://www.digitalbloomiq.com/seo/does-multiple-keywords-improve-ranking

• When you don’t like your keywords: https://digitalbloomiq.com/seo/dont-like-my-keywords
  

And if you want to learn more about SEO Holiday Prep, check out this workshop: https://courses.digitalbloomiq.com/seo-holiday-prep-workshop

Listen to episode below:

Episode 274 Shownotes:

• [Listen at 2:07]: Holiday SEO's Impact on Attracting Clients and Sales - Cinthia dives into why it's crucial to focus on holiday SEO to maximize client engagement and sales during the festive season. Learn why preparing your website in advance and understanding the specific desires and search patterns of your audience during the holidays can set you up for success.

• [Listen at 6:23] Keyword Research for Holiday-themed Searches - Uncover the secrets of effective keyword research tailored for the holiday season. Cinthia suggests creating a comprehensive guide that showcases both your products and others to draw in more traffic. She also shares insights on how to optimize product descriptions, refresh images and content, and link to holiday guides to make your site more festive-friendly.
  

• [Listen at 10:34] Optimizing Your Website's Holiday Category Page - Cinthia highlights the significance of refining the holiday category page on your website. Find out how improving site speed, enhancing navigation with enticing holiday deals and coupons, and collaborating with other businesses can not only elevate your SEO but also create a more immersive and engaging experience for your visitors.

• [Listen at 14:41] SEO Documentation, Analysis, and Holiday Prep Workshop - Discover the importance of tracking and analyzing your SEO experiments. Cinthia discusses the value of tools like Google Analytics and how her SEO holiday prep workshop can guide you. Plus, she gives a shoutout to her training here: https://courses.digitalbloomiq.com/seo-holiday-prep-workshop , aimed to empower business owners in achieving their SEO objectives this holiday season.

• Full Episode Transcript

  2:07 - Cinthia Pacheco (Cinthia Pacheco)

  Hey, how's it going? Well, How's it going? It's been a while. Welcome to the Digitally Overwhelmed Podcast. I'm Cinthia, your host, and I run Digital Bloom IQ, where we help small businesses grow their impact with search marketing. And I'm so excited because today I'm going to be talking all about holiday prep, SEO holiday prep, right? So I've been a little bit on a hiatus from the podcast. Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't. But I am back. And I really want to talk about this because there's this huge opportunity during the holidays for us to attract Clients and sales and opportunities that are looking for us right in a holiday context. So this episode is going to cover some areas of your SEO strategy to look at, to think about, and this is a really hands-on episode, so I'm going to be giving specific examples. But if you want to go deeper, stay tuned, because at the end I have a little something that I think some of you are going to find interesting to do a little even more work on your holidays. Okay, so first of all, why should we focus on holiday SEO? like, how is this different from what we usually do with our SEO? So again, SEO takes time. And so when we start making these changes now, I'm recording this episode kind of the end of October, you can start to see the holiday. It results faster because we're already preparing our sites for that traffic and for those opportunities. So it's kind of like how you work the soil if you're into gardening or if you're not. I think a lot of you can imagine that working the soil, adding nutrients, moving, getting out the rocks, getting out the hard pieces of clay, whatever can help so that when you're ready to plant those seeds, everything's going to just bloom faster. So this is that idea. We're preparing our online home. We're preparing our site so that when we are, you know, at that point where there's people searching for us, our site is really prepped and ready to attract those sales. And it just takes time, right, for Google to see some of those changes. So that's why I recommend starting sooner rather than later. And holiday times and holiday searches are a little different because Our audience and, you know, in general, people are looking just to buy, right? So there's this huge moment, right? We want to be ready for that. So it's just a special time of year, literally. And so we want to tap into that desire, that desire to buy for loved ones, that desire to find the perfect gift, that desire to receive and give and, you know, research, maybe, a specific event, you know, maybe they want to do a special dinner, or they are searching for a product or a service. And so we want to really tap into that, right? And so we need to take a pause and think about what is our particular audience looking for during the holidays. So it's a little different, right? From that point of view, because it's not like another time of year, another holiday, right? There's a really specific thing going on here. And the last thing I want to note that... Why this is different is that compared to other SEO strategies, there's actually little SEO shifts you can make on your site that can make a big difference. So I'm going to cover some of these in this episode, but it's kind of exciting because you might already have a lot of the SEO elements on your site that then you can translate into holidays. And again, I want to give you some examples here, but that's also like an easy opportunity. So why not? Alright, so let's dive in. So the first area that I'm sure a lot of you are thinking about are keywords and keyword Benny research on the holidays. So like I already mentioned, you want to think about what is your audience needing, whether you're selling a specific product, you're an e-commerce store or you have a service and you can also sell that during the holidays or do a holiday themed kind of sale. We want to think about specific holiday searches that are both transactional and informational. So when I'm Transactional, I've talked about this before, but someone who's already ready to buy, so for example, maybe they're looking for best holiday gifts for dad. So this is a kind of a mix, but this is really someone who's already looking for a gift, right? So they're ready to buy. They're looking to buy, right? So that's transactional. could get even more specific, like best lawnmower for dad. I know that's probably not very holiday-y. But it could be best garden tools for dad. So it's more specific, the better. If you have a specific product here, you can get right into the product and that go-to-guide where you feature different your own product, but you also want to feature other products. So this, I know this kind of rubs up. And I've had some clients where we have to do some mindset research here, but having a go-to guide that's neutral, that features your product, as well as other products, can be really... An SEO-friendly, really SEO-great way to attract traffic. And then, yes, are you sending maybe some traffic to your competitors maybe? But you could also feature why your product is unique and maybe better than other products so you can kind of curate that. And then informational is more about, again, giving information of how to use something, how to write a holiday card, how to connect with your business partners during the holidays. So that could be great for a service or even if you have like an app or something where you do scheduling. There can be just like informational things there that tie in with your service as well. And so there could be a combo of both transactional and informational. It could be one or the other, but see how doing that keyword research. You can start doing that keyword research now and look at trends from the past. You can start to think about what you already have on your site. Could you translate some of your content and do holiday guides with what you already have? There's a lot you can put out there. so really marking those key dates of when you want to launch that, what you want things to look like, and opening up a calendar, working your way backwards really is important. You can actually publish your guides now. So they start to gain traction because I am sure that in October there are people who are already looking for this stuff. All right, the next area we want to think about especially for e-commerce stores are product descriptions, right? So how can we optimize them for the holidays? How can we maybe update the images or update some of the text and content? Could we link to our holiday guides? We want to link both ways from the holiday guide to the product as well as from the product of the holiday guide. So this is really good SEO best practice. How can we make it more holiday friendly? we want to add combos for the holidays? Do we want to suggest different combination of products if you have several products or just how to use it more effectively on the holidays? So thinking about our ideal client, where they're at, what are they looking for? What are they needing? So anticipating that need and thinking about our product descriptions. Another area you can really get So make a lot of progress with your categories and tags. do you have a holiday category page? Do you have a holiday tag page? Sometimes you can actually rank better for your category page than maybe a product page or even a blog post. So could you optimize that category page so that it is really helpful, informative, curated with just an experience where people can search, they can filter by products. They can just To have a customized experience to the holidays so that you're featuring all your holiday options, but you're also giving them information so there should be text on that page. So I know sometimes depending on what platform you're on, the category and tag page isn't as easy to edit, but do what you can. You can search other category pages and get inspired. But this is a great way to target keywords. This is a great way to just search So we're moving away from keywords and content. We want to think about your overall website experience because if we're looking to attract all our sales and traffic, we want to make sure our online home is working correctly. things like site speed is a great time now to check in with your host, to check in with, you know, can I do a little bit of a plug-in detox? If you're interested . You have WordPress or if you have another platform that has plugins, how can I speed up my site? And specifically, how can I speed up the pages that are going to get more holiday searches? So you can test specific pages, know, maybe go back and compressing images, maybe, you know, whatever's slowing down that page, you can work with a web developer there or an SEO expert. But you do want to make sure those specific pages are going fast because we can lose visits, we can lose sales if we have a slow site experience, and you could have the best product in the world, the best service in the world. But if your site is slow, people will be impatient, unfortunately, and they'll leave and they'll look at the competition. The other area of website experience you can think about is your navigation. Do you want to have like holiday deals added into your navigation starting now? Do you want to have key dates that, you know, unlock different navigation options? And again, I don't think it's too early now. Now to put that stuff now because it just starts to gain traction. And so just having that navigation is a great SEO best practice. And things like coupons. And like I said before, for Black Friday, for Thanksgiving, know, for the holidays themselves for New Year's. Do you want to have specific deals and coupons and things. And so how are you organizing your content, your coupon codes. What's what is coming up in that, you know, if you have like a marketing bar or a notice. The top of your website or even in the footer, like these kind of areas are all opportunities to put more holiday stuff in there because people will see that and they'll click through. So we want to take every single opportunity we have. And you also want to think about collaborations and partnerships. So this is a huge part of SEO that I love and I'm so passionate about is how are we working with other businesses and launching things together or doing. you. You know, a joint promo or maybe an Instagram giveaway or an email giveaway, right? So we want to work together because from an SEO perspective, when we have other sites linking to us, this boosts our SEO. And it's just so fun and important to collaborate and work together. And this is how things are meant to be. So who can you pitch right now in your in your circle in your network that would want to do a holiday sale together? would you want to launch together? How can you make it really fun? And I promise you, this is going to make all your goals so much easier to get to. going to make everything just so much more fun. don't, don't do it alone. Don't do it alone. All right. And then my last tip and just kind of like wrapping up here is to document and record all your experiments and definitely take some time to look at your Google Analytics, your search console. Take some screenshots. Let's make some notes. Why? Because at the end in January, you're going to look back, going to look at your results, and you're going to want to know what were the things that really worked, and what is Google Analytics telling us about what worked. And then next year, you're going to pull up that document, and you're going to be able to build on those learnings. So make sure to document dates, experiments, questions, whatever's coming up. If Google Analytics intimidates you, that's okay. Just looking at A tool like acquisition reporting that just tells you where your marketing is coming from. That's a great starting point. Don't overcomplicate it. I do have a Google Analytics course. You can check that out if you find that helpful. But your business owner documenting and thinking about if you had someone doing this for you, what would you want them to do? Right? So that can sometimes help you if you're kind of a solo perner. Because we don't do this for ourselves many times. And so just documenting this. And also setting it You to do reflections later, because this is this kind of thing, especially with SEO, as you'll learn year over year. And those learnings are going to be invaluable and help speed up your results. All right, my friends, I hope I gave you a lot of things to work on and to consider. And so if you're looking for a little bit more specific guidance and just me opening a site and showing you exactly what to work on, I highly recommend you check out my SEO holiday prep workshop. So this is a 90 minute workshop call. It's recorded, so you're going to have access to that to go back and, know, do the things you want to do. I'm going to be covering in more detail how to do holiday keyword research. I'm going to be covering how to update your product descriptions and basically opening up the page and showing you exactly what you need to be doing. And kind of a lot of the things I mentioned this call, but in more detail, right? So how can you pitch. Other collaborations and partnerships. And as a bonus, I have a 50 holiday keyword ideas PDF. So you get to access those pre researched SEO keywords and use them. And they're going to again both cover a service as well as product based businesses. So there's going to be all sorts of ideas in there that will hopefully point you in the right direction. And the other bonus, which I'm so excited about is a Q&A call, which will be happening early November. And so that is going to be delivered, you know, I'm going to define the dates for that. But basically the idea is you're going to have this workshop recording. going to watch it. You're going to start to make changes. And then there's going to be a Q&A call where we're going to go through specifically what's happening on your website and how to make the most right of the holiday season. And the last thing I want to mention is that it's currently on presale. So it's at a reduced rate. We'll be You can get access to this by going to courses.digitalblume.com and it's the first course there available. can also go to my site digitalblumeikue.com and under the courses tab you'll find the SEO holiday prep workshop 2023 there available. yes, grab that. I want to help you with your SEO. want you to get all your goals around the holidays. And this is my way of doing that. All right, my friends. I hope you have a great day and we'll talk.