Retail companies everywhere are buzzing with anticipation for the 2024 holiday season and with more than a third of consumers (37%) starting their holiday shopping as early as September or earlier, time is of the essence for marketers preparing for this high-impact season. Small and medium-sized businesses especially, must start thinking of their plan of attack for attracting seasonal shoppers if they are to stand apart from their fast-fashion, large-scale, corporate competitors.
Yet, what can you do as a local shop to outcompete the reach of businesses backed by a corporate budget and following? How can you drive foot traffic to your physical and/or digital store during a shopping season filled with so much competition? One way that you can ensure your business’s success this holiday season is to focus on improving your holiday Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, specifically for local SEO. Finding ways to boost your brand awareness and reputation with the local community will be essential in helping draw customers away from larger competitors. To help your business make the most of the coming holiday shopping season, keep reading as we take a look at five holiday SEO tips to set your business up for a successful season.
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
One of the first things that you should do to improve SEO as the holidays approach is to make sure that your Google Business Profiles listing is up-to-date. Establishing a profile is crucial for any local business, as it gives your business more visibility by ensuring that it shows up in search engine results. Make sure that you update your store hours on your profile well in advance of the holiday shopping season so that customers know when you’ll be open. While you’re not alone if your store hours fluctuate throughout the holiday season, you need to keep your profile updated as your hours change, as incorrect hours may attract negative reviews, hurting holiday SEO efforts.
Identify & Resolve Your Local Customers
Consumer demand and behavior are constantly changing, and if you want your marketing strategy and product offerings to speak to customers’ desires this holiday season, it is important to understand your audience. In anticipation of the coming holiday season, take the time to resolve your consumers for their demographic background, contact information, and further relevant data points. We’ve made identifying and resolving consumer data even easier for your business with our first-party data solution, Prospect Hub. With this innovative identity resolution technology, you’ll be able to pull relevant data points from site visitors who’ve already shown you their intent and interest during past visits. Fortunately, this tool is neither complicated nor time-consuming and can provide your business with critical insight into what your customer base is looking for this holiday season, as well as what your business can do to better position yourself as the ideal service or product.
How to Integrate Resolved Data into Your Holiday SEO Content Strategy
- By identifying and resolving the kind of audience frequenting your site, you can identify the gaps within your content and opportunities for new topics tailored to your audience.
- With your resolved audience data, you can perform more in-depth SEO audits, keyword research, and competitor analysis. The insights gathered from researching your actual audience can, in turn, help you create customized content that addresses their specific needs and interests this holiday season.
Integrate Off-Page Holiday SEO Efforts
Off-page SEO can be extremely effective in expanding the reach of your content this holiday season. Social media specifically can help your local businesses get more clicks to its latest content and even secure backlinks from platforms with high domain authority. An ideal strategy is partnering with local influencers, as consumers trust familiar faces over generic ads. For local businesses looking to promote their brand and engage with the community, a great way to set yourself apart from the competition this holiday season would be to partner with local influencers. Research who is influential on social media locally and reach out about doing a promotion, but make sure to connect with influencers well before the holiday season, otherwise, a competitor might get to them first.
Encourage (and Interact With) Reviews
To stand out to local shoppers this holiday season, it’s essential to focus on gathering plenty of reviews, as they are crucial for holiday SEO. Consumers rely heavily on reviews when making shopping decisions, and the more positive reviews your business has, the better your digital reputation. Reviews also serve as important brand signals for search engines, helping to verify the quality of your content and establish your authority and trustworthiness. During the holiday season, product reviews from bloggers and industry experts can further enhance your credibility and provide valuable backlinks. To encourage reviews, implement strategies such as requesting feedback on receipts, sending reminder emails to online customers, and offering incentives like discounts. Be sure to respond to reviews promptly, as this demonstrates an engaging customer experience and positively impacts your brand’s online presence. Visit our recent blog for more actionable tips on harnessing your reviews to reach your community this holiday season.
Update Your Website for Holiday Optimizations
Even though many customers still enjoy going out and doing their holiday shopping in person, most will still do research and price comparisons online as the holiday season approaches. For the sake of enticing readers and optimal crawl-ability by search engines, your title tags, meta-descriptions, and URLs should incorporate holiday and locally relevant keywords. However, you’ll want to establish a holistic plan across channels to ensure that you’re not cannibalizing the same keywords. The repeated use of identical holiday search terms may result in multiple of your business’ site pages competing against each other for search engine rankings. Further, if you haven’t posted your updated hours on your website, you could be hurting your business. Doing seasonal site maintenance to address these questions will keep you from answering dozens of phone calls about your expanded hours.
More Website Optimization Tips to Prepare for the Holiday Season
- Analyze any existing content like blogs or product highlights from years past to assess for relevant updates you can make ahead of the coming season.
- Post-holiday specials and update your e-commerce page slightly to reflect the season can help get your customers in the mood to celebrate by spending more.
- Update your header and footer with seasonal pages or link to them within your home page at least 30 days earlier to the season.
Let V Digital Services Show You How to Boost Local Traffic During the Shopping Season
Having the right holiday SEO strategies can help your small business succeed this holiday shopping season. If you aren’t sure where to start when creating your holiday SEO strategy, feel free to contact us for advice on steps that you can take to make your business stand out from the competition.