Is your site ready for the biggest sales rush of the year? If you haven’t started on your holiday SEO campaigns, you could be falling behind the curve. To help put you on the right path, watch today’s episode for five important actions to prepare.

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Like it or not, the holidays are rapidly approaching, which means it’s time to prep your business for the rush of customers looking to make online purchases this year.

To better position yourself in search engine results, one of the first things you should do is begin working on your holiday SEO campaigns. Get started by watching today’s episode, where you’ll learn five important tasks to ensure that you’re making your mark when it comes to holiday SEO.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Volusion

 

Here’s the transcript if you’d like to read along:

Hey, everybody! My name’s Matt, and I’m the Social Media Manager here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. The holidays are rapidly approaching, and so you need to make sure that your SEO strategy starts making the necessary preparations. Keep in mind this holiday season is going to be the biggest in history, so you’ll want to make sure you maximize your chances of being found in search engine rankings. With that in mind, today I present to you five must-do tasks for holiday SEO.

 

Before you do anything, you’ll want to identify your most important landing pages. Nine times out of ten, your most important landing page is going to be your homepage. But the question to ask is: Where does most traffic enter your site? Other important landing pages could be popular products that you plan to feature over the holidays. Once you figure out which pages are most important, you can start working from there.

Secondly, once you’ve identified your most important pages, you’ll want to pick out about three to five keywords to optimize for. Choose carefully, because if you’re looking at generic keywords, you probably won’t have much success especially if you’re still a small- to medium-sized business. Look more toward long tail keywords. Keywords that are longer in length means they’re more specific, so you’ll have a better shot at getting a quick return on your investment.

Third on our list, whenever you figure out what keywords you want to target, you’ll then want to incorporate them into the pages that you’re looking to enhance. You definitely want to include them into your site’s copy, but you’ll also want to pay really close attention to your title tags. Make sure that the three to five keywords that you’re looking to optimize for are somehow included in that tag, and you’ll also want to do a full check on your website to see if you have any title tags that are the same. If you have duplicates, change them so that all of them are completely unique.

Fourth on our list, you’ll want to make your meta descriptions seasonal. Keep in mind that Google doesn’t pay too much attention to your meta descriptions in terms of ranking your page. However, this is a great way to entice searchers to enter your site. If you’re offering free shipping or a coupon or a discount across your site, make sure to mention that within the meta description. It will help bait people to come on in.

Last, but definitely not least, and this is just a housekeeping tip: Make sure that you keep tabs on all of the different pages that you’re optimizing for the holidays. That way, whenever the New Year comes around, you can go back, and shift them back to normal. Let’s be honest, as cute as your holiday graphics are, they won’t be looking so hot come February.

Keep these five tasks in mind when you’re planning your holiday SEO strategy. It will help you be a lot more visible in Google, Bing and Yahoo, which is always a good thing. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment in the box below. I’ll get right back to you.

From me to you, happy selling!