Today is the first official day of fall, and if you’re a marketer, you're wrapping up Q3 and headed into Q4 with one thought on your mind: holiday strategy.

When it comes to holiday planning, you should think about advertising, email promotion, special deals, logistics, and so on. But have you also thought about organic search and SEO? 

Due to its long-term and subtle progress, SEO is frequently forgotten during this period, but here are 6 SEO tips to boost your revenue in the holiday season: 

1. Do Keyword Research

Do keyword research for items that are popular during the holiday. 

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Whether you use Ahrefs or SEMrush, find what keywords are trending during a particular season, and even piggyback on your competitor’s keyword rankings to get an idea of what strategies are the most successful. Of course, you don’t want to go after keywords with incredibly high competition or ones that are specific to a certain brand, but you can definitely target short and long-form keywords within your industry in hopes to generate more web traffic. 

You can also use Google Trends to see the trend of certain search queries over time. Depending on your products and campaigns, you might want to have a landing page for each popular product category.

2. Create a Landing Page and Reuse it Each Year

Whenever you delete a page, you might lose the SEO juice that the page has. 

To avoid this, you have to think ahead and strategize the URL of the landing page so you can keep using it in the long term. For instance, a Black Friday sale should have a URL that is https://yourdomain.com/black-friday-sale instead of https://yourdomain.com/black-friday-sale-2019. 

By using an evergreen URL, you can keep all backlinks & SEO value from previous years. You don’t have to start from the ground up. 

3. Publish Your Landing Page Early

Although the holiday is still a couple of months away, you should make this landing page live sooner rather than later. 

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A good rule of thumb is to create a landing page three months before the start of a seasonal holiday or event. This means that your landing page should be up early enough to rank on Google and serve as a pathway to support new posts. Search engines will take some time to notice your new page, so by getting it online early enough, you give enough time for Google and other search engines to crawl and index it. 

In return, when customers search online for the best holiday deals or discounts, your page can earn a compelling rank and bring you one step closer to landing a conversion. 

4. Constantly Update the Page

Chances are the content on your page is not fully ready yet and the campaign hasn’t started.

However, you should regularly update the page throughout the year or at least a couple of months before with whatever content you can. 

Whether it’s a banner image, a quick paragraph of copy, a countdown timer, or a sneak peek of a campaign launch, this will give the signal to search engines that your page is active. This also applies if you are using the same page (same URL) each year.

5. Build Supporting Content

Next, you need to engage your customers with informative/educational content. 

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Below are some ideas of articles you can create to support your holiday campaign:

• Create a gift guide or a shopping guide; you can also partner with other brands to come up with this list
• Update your highly visited articles with links to the holiday content (holiday articles and/or collections)
• Any seasonal topics from “Tips for Spending Thanksgiving with Your Boyfriend’s Family” to “How to Have a Stress Free Family Holiday”
  

6. Plan Your PR Efforts 

Finally, you need to plan your PR efforts and promote your campaign! 

This will be a busy season for everyone, so plan ahead. Reach out to publishers & bloggers about the promotion that you have. Make sure when the time comes, all partners can help spread out your campaign through their social media and content/articles. This will not only help boost awareness and sales, but it will also acquire backlinks and SEO value to your landing page. 

Start Using SEO Strategies for a Merrier Season

Remember, if you stay ahead of competitors and stay consistent with your SEO research and content creation, you’ll reap the rewards of each holiday and actually have time to enjoy them!

F.D. Roosevelt once said, “There are many ways of going forward, but there is only one way of standing still.” So what are you waiting for? Get holiday planning started and incorporate SEO strategies for a merrier season. If you need any additional help, our SEO experts at Hawke Media are here to take your holiday marketing campaign to the next level. Just fill out the free consultation form below. Happy Holidays! 

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