As December looms, it’s time to not only make sure your website content reflects the festive season, but also that your website is healthy and performing as it should be!
We asked Spindogs Digital Marketer Chelsea to share her top tips on getting your SEO ready for Christmas.
Make sure your website is technically healthy
Before you start any of the content changes, it’s really important to check that your website is technically healthy first.
When you consider your SEO, it’s normal to think about the content, blog posts, landing pages and search terms that people type in to get to your website. But, you won’t be ranking very well if your website isn’t technically healthy. Google and other search engines don’t really like ranking your website unless it has a good user experience! Missing images, broken links and missing information on the website isn’t going to help you rank for the terms you really want to be ranking for.
The best way to do this is to find an auditor tool that you can run through your website. There are loads online but a few of our favourites are SEOquake, SEMrush and Moz. You can run these through your website and it’ll flag any issues you should be paying attention to. For example, if your meta descriptions or browser titles are missing, these tools will let you know!
Once you have this stable foundation, your website can start ranking for the terms that matter to you, and especially the terms that are going to be important around Christmas time.
Create relevant landing pages
If you’re an eCommerce store, setting up pages such as ‘gifts for her’ or ‘gifts for him’ can really help your business. If you think about the types of terms that people are searching for around Christmas time, or even the terms you search for yourself, these are the types of phrases that you want your website to be ranking for.
Even if you’re not an eCommerce store and you’re not selling things that would be suitable gifts, you can think about how Christmas applies to your business. For example, if you provide a service for people, think about if it could be put into a blog post for Christmas ideas (e.g if you’re a financial advisor, you could give people your top tips on saving in the build-up to Christmas). Putting in the work early will pay off when people are ready to start searching these terms.
Reviews
I personally don’t buy anything on the internet unless I’ve read the reviews. The importance of reviews is skyrocketing as people are shifting more towards online shopping than ever before.
If you’re selling similar products to your competitors, good reviews might just be the thing that swings people your way rather than theirs.
Reviews are also incredibly helpful for SEO. You can use something called structured data, which is a bit of code that you put on your website which pulls out relevant parts of the reviews and puts it into the search engine results, rather than only relying on your website content.
It can be really hard to get people to review your products or services, especially all in one place so my suggestion would be to build a review option on your website, so when people are purchasing, straight away they can see what other people have said about the product.
A good way to start collecting reviews is to set up an automated email that goes out a few days after someone has purchased something to see what they think of it and if they’d be happy to leave you a review. If you don’t have the ability to direct these straight to your website, you can send them to Trust Pilot or Google my Business, whichever is more relevant for what you offer.
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So, those are my top three tips on how to get your SEO ready for Christmas.
Don’t forget:
- Technical Health
- Relevant Landing Pages
- Reviews
You can also watch my IGTV on Instagram covering this topic by clicking the link below.
Watch my IGTV video on getting your SEO Christmas ready.
If you’d like to speak to me or one of our experts about boosting your SEO or any of our other digital services then why not get in touch below? We’d love to hear from you!