“Holiday” planning is a never-ending story for me, so it’s no surprise that I picked this topic for my autumn SEO article too 😉
Inspiring marketing campaigns during holiday seasons – from Black Friday to Cyber Monday to Christmas – are some of the best opportunities for brands to boost sales and reach a bigger audience.
During these special sale seasons, they offer alluring discounts on their products and services, aimed at drawing more customers to their businesses.
To get the best results, there are some best practices and strategies to adopt to gain organic search engine visibility. With the right digital marketing tools, you can give your business or your client’s website the traffic boost that you have been aiming for. You can increase conversions by presenting the best campaign content to meet the needs of your potential customers.
From an SEO perspective, Google has previously said you:
“can help Google highlight your sales events by providing landing pages with relevant content and high-quality images”.
To discuss those tips from Google and more in detail, I have compiled a list of the most recommended SEO practices for holiday-related campaigns and summarised it in this free “Holiday SEO Checklist template”, to make it handy!
Creating the Landing Page Before the Season Starts
Creating the campaign page before your Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas sales gives Google bots some time to discover and index your campaign pages. This will eventually help you rank higher in organic results. While doing this, it’s also important to check page speed as well as the mobile-friendliness of the page.
If you’re planning to run SEO efforts for your holiday campaigns, for this year and the following seasons, make sure you create unique and dedicated campaign landing pages for each holiday season, which will be maintained live on your website throughout the year. If you already have one for any of them, use that page and optimise the content according to new products, offers, recommendations, and quick links to the most popular pages and gift collections. Include content that you would want to keep throughout the year and include a relevant, high-quality image with an up-to-date representation of your sale. Give visitors a reason to come back when your offer starts. Here are some examples:
- Check out the example from the Black Friday & Cyber Monday landing page of FatFace below. While they are getting their Black Friday page ready, they present their new collection:
Source: FatFace
- Brand Alley uses the Black Friday page as an opportunity to showcase the brand’s latest sales before the Black Friday sales start:
Source: Brand Alley
- John Lewis also includes links to its most popular category pages as well as the offerings from their Black Friday page:
Source: John Lewis
While you are creating a new page, it’s also important to come up with a solid URL structure considering the opportunity for creating sub-categories for your campaign pages too.
Check out your competitors’ relevant page structure and see what’s the common approach. For example, you may want to create one dedicated page for Black Friday and Cyber Monday together, whereas your competitors might have separate pages targeting niche keywords and user intent for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday weeks.
Pay attention to the queries such as “cyber monday 2021” or “when is black friday 2021” as those are the queries that would repeat within the new year search trends too. You can easily update your content by replacing the “year” data with the new one.
Also, you may want to consider creating sub-categories for Black Friday searches on product groups as part of your URL structure:
/black-friday/[category name]
/black-friday/mens-jumpers, and so on.
Keyword Research
Good keyword research is essential when optimising any of your campaign sales pages. Analyse your campaigns from previous years and figure out which of them got the highest traffic and conversions. Build your new campaign by combining the existing keywords from those years and new opportunities. Perhaps you can look for any new trends, considering the products/services in sales as well.
You can also analyse the keyword groups provided by keyword tools in order to come up with ideas for your content strategy either for your Christmas/Holiday page or editorial content you would create to support your sales page.
Make sure you use the relevant keywords you discovered from the keyword research tool, such as Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Keywordtool.io. Consider checking the Google Trends tool to explore trending topics as well.
For example, if I was searching for ideas for my clothing brand including products both for men and women, by simply searching “Christmas outfit” on Google Trends, I could get the inspiration to start expanding my keyword research. These topics could be a starting point in order to brainstorm ideas for my Christmas campaign page as well as for blog posts that I would create to support the sales page and increase exposure on social media as well.
Source: Very
As a side note, don’t forget to analyse the existing organic queries that you can find from your Google Search Console account. You can find the top-performing campaign pages in terms of years and analyse the organic queries coming to those pages. By using Search Console, you can access the best and most reliable data, to get ideas for your content.
With the updated keyword list which includes the relevant keywords, you can now decide on what to include in your SEO title, meta description, H1, the content on your landing page, anchor texts that you will be linking to your campaign pages from your relevant pages, image alt-texts and so on.
Linking Strategy for the Holiday Campaign Pages
If possible, link to your campaign page from your main menu or homepage banner using intriguing CTAs. Consider adding internal links from relevant pages to the main campaign page of your website.
For example, if you have created a Christmas campaign page and you are receiving traffic to one of your blog posts that has a holiday theme , try to link from that blog t to your campaign page. Even if your blog posts are not created directly for the campaign season, you can still use a holistic approach and find non-season-related blog articles that are performing well and link from those pages to your campaign page.
Let’s say, you’re planning to improve your internal linking structure for a Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign page. You may consider linking from articles written about autumn fashion such as “Top 10 Fashion Trends That Will Rule this Autumn 2022”.
You can also create a linking structure among your campaign pages as they are already relevant in terms of the deals, holiday vibes, festive seasons etc. For example, Boots added internal links to their Black Friday page from their Christmas page:
Source: Boots
Links coming to your campaign page from external domains are also an important part of increasing your campaign page’s performance. Getting links from websites with high domain authority to your campaign page improves your search engine visibility, traffic, and organic performance – as well as the URL rating of your landing page. So, the more your campaign page includes valuable content, the greater your chance of getting links from other domains.
Consider creating shareable content by adding unique creatives, visuals, additional details, infographics, tools and information which would differentiate you and your products/services from your competitors. This means giving your readers a reason to share your link with more people and eventually this may result in getting linked from different websites and so on.
You might also consider creating and sharing quizzes or tools such as a gift finder within your holiday campaign page, or including additional special offers/discounts for the campaign products/services that might attract your followers and visitors. These kinds of offers can increase the potential shareability of your content.
Source: Very
Source: The Body Shop
Publishing Blog Content to Support Campaign Pages
If you’re already running an active blog or resource section on your website, publishing relevant content to support your campaign page would be a good option to consider prior to the campaign period. This phase is something you can run together with your keyword research as you will probably find various content ideas to publish on your blog – or at least get inspiration from.
Depending on your services or products, you can create interesting and well-considered content, which you can also include in your social media strategy and the monthly newsletter you send to your subscribers. This way, you can give your readers a reason to visit your blog and from there, you can direct them to your campaign page without being salesy.
Source: BrandElfy
Reviews, Coupons, Vouchers, Delivery Options etc.
Customer reviews are important for most online businesses. People do a lot of online research before any specific sales weekend such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday etc. During their research, they may go through customer reviews on your page to ensure your products and customer service have good ratings.
Positive ratings positively influence your customers’ buying decisions. Therefore, you should showcase customer testimonials on your landing pages, where potential buyers can easily see them. However, while placing them on your web pages, ensure you do not obstruct important UX elements.
Place creative and unique proposition values that would make your business stand out – such as free deliveries, delivery discounts and installations, competitive pricing, coupons, vouchers etc. – at strategic places on your web page. Below are a few examples:
Source: M&S
Source: Hampers.com
Check site speed
A final tip is to make sure you’ve checked your site speed and solved any problems that would negatively affect the user experience and conversion rates. During festive holidays, an increasing number of visitors may cause slow loading speeds and other usability issues
A seasonal gift from Re:signal
To help you get ready for seasonal SEO, I’ve prepared a simple checklist that you and your team can use as a cheat sheet for almost every seasonal campaign:
Holiday Campaign SEO Checklist
Please accept this as my early Christmas gift 🙂
