12 Holiday SEO Tips To Boost Traffic On Your eCommerce Store [2024]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful technique to get your online store under the spotlight. Since the festive season marks the peak annual sale moment, holiday SEO becomes the most demanding optimization for your online store during the holiday. If you neglect SEO in this period, you may lose a major portion of your possible annual revenue in just a few festive days.

“If you choose to rank at one powerful keyword that matters to your business, you choose to partner with the most powerful company of the world, for your business”

During the holiday season time, the basic SEO gets majorly overruled by the holiday SEO. A  lot of things fluctuate with approaching festivals, and hence a planned optimization is required for ranking in the festive time. The search keywords turn more festive-specific, product choices get tuned with holiday needs, customer expectation on discounts and offers increases, etc. And, hence normal-day SEO practices fail to cope with them

This article brings you 12 powerful holiday SEO tips, particularly for the 2024 festival season.

12 Festive SEO Tips To Boost Traffic On Your eCommerce Store [2024]

The March 2024 core update is a more complex update than our usual core updates, involving changes to multiple core systems. It also marks an evolution in how we identify the helpfulness of content that helps enhance user experience and become more crucial for search ranking. It is important to stay on top of your user experience always!

Therefore, all your holiday SEO must ensure that ultimately it has a positive impact on the user experience. With this article, we bring you 12 powerful holiday SEO tips, particularly for the 2024 holiday season.

1. Analyze The Trends

Before starting with this year’s holiday SEO, it is advised to the SEO team to analyze last year’s trends and the highest-performing keywords that worked for you and your brand. After carefully analyzing, you can either stick with the old keywords that worked magic for your brand last year or research and find some new ones to enhance the quality of your holiday SEO. It is also crucial to understand the new trends that are prevailing the marketing to stay relevant to your audience.

The end line here is that the keywords you select should drive a high volume of searches while being relevant to your brand.

For Example, Here Are The 12 Important SEO Trends of 2024,

2. Win On Seasonal Keywords

Keywords are one of the key players in SEO and that matters in the seasonal ranking and holiday SEO as well.

As each festival brings a new set of holiday season SEO keywords into the front row, hence holiday SEO is based on these sets of keywords. For example, Christmas brings keywords such as Christmas decorations, Christmas giveaways, Christmas desserts, top Christmas gifts, etc.

The clear-cut point is that you won’t show up in search results if your WooCommerce store does not include seasonal keywords in your product pages, offer announcements, landing pages, or blogs & articles.

Therefore, the first action that you must take with each approaching festival is to optimize your online store with the trending set of festive-specific keywords.

This festive keyword optimization begins with keyword research — in which you find out the trending keywords for the specific festival. In other words, finding those keywords that are most used by consumers in searching for products/services during seasonal purchases.

Several eCommerce tools can assist you with keyword research. SEMrush is one of the popular SEO tools perfect for keyword research.

There are many other tools that you can try. Here is a list of tools:

• Google Suggest
• SEMrush
• AnswerThePublic
• Google’s Keyword Planner 
• Long Tail Pro 
• Serpstat
• SpyFu
• Ubersuggest

3. Festive-Friendly URL

Universal Resource Locators (URLs) are the gateways to your website or web pages. An unclear and random URL name makes it hard for users to trust and click.

Here is a definitive guide for SEO. It will help you with holiday SEO tips and help improve your website’s SEO. The first thing that the customer interacts with you is through the URL. Use the keywords carefully while building URLs. This will help in SEO as well as it’s more understandable to users as to what type of content a link might be redirected to.

Avoid the use of stopping keywords like in the URLs. It can decrease your SERP ranking. The URLs you build should be user and search-engine friendly.

Things you need to keep in mind while building URLs:

• Remove stopping keywords [e.g., you, with, for, etc.]
• Use relevant holiday-specific keywords.
• The URLs should be readable [e.g. use abc.com/festive/increase-holiday-season-sale-2019 instead of abc.com/?%1234]
• Check your organic search performance.
• Don’t forget to use hyphens [-] instead of underscores [ _ ]
• Match your URLs and titles with other sites.
• Always remove unnecessary punctuation.
• Use breadcrumbs

4. Optimize Content For The Festive Season

“Content is what the search engines use, to fulfill the user intent.”

Content that attracts, engages, and delights visitors also impacts the SEO ranking of the online store. In addition, the bottom-funnel content helps in boosting conversions.

So, leverage creative content during the festive season. You can write how your online store can help in making the festivals more special, or you can share customer celebration stories, provide gift ideas, or donate for the well-being of others and encourage your readers for it on festive days.

Generate content that emphasizes festivals, and which becomes memorable in your audience’s mind. Find out the trending content that best suits your industry this year by looking up the seasonal keywords on Google Trends and turning to Buzzsumo. Try to create product-based content that makes the buyer purchase instantly. The content marketing strategy will help in building a relationship with your target audience.

According to the 45-day rule, if you publish your content 45 days in advance you will likely get 50% engagement from the search engine traffic.

We Have Researched The Latest Social Media Holidays And Mentioned The Same For All The Readers:

Therefore, start early, and spend effort and money on promotions and content marketing ideas at the right time before it’s too late. So that you harness the best possibilities of content marketing to increase festive search ranking and boost sales.

Things you need to keep in mind for a good content marketing strategy:

• The keyword density of the focused keyphrase should be 3-5%.
• Create long-form engaging festive season content for your audience.
• Avoid keyword stuffing, try to use related phrases and keywords, and spread throughout the blog.
• Add videos, infographics, slides, and GIFs to your blog to make it memorable for your audience.

Hence, how can festive SEO be complete without festive content?

5. Transform Your Social Media Campaigns For Success

A well-planned social media marketing campaign can also help you generate leads, get you more brand exposure, engage your audience, and much more.

Let’s talk about how to optimize your social media campaigns to make the most of them.

How to do Off-page SEO with Social Media?

• Create engaging content.
• Perform keyword research.
• Plan your posts ahead of time, and use automation to post them without much effort.
• Track your marketing efforts and holiday SEO efforts
• Use suitable and trending Hashtags in all posts.
• Optimize your social media profiles(bio, username, pictures).
• Follow your posting schedule by uploading posts every week according to your convenience and user requirements.
• Use CTAs, images, and videos in your posts.

You’ll be more likely to get higher organic traffic with well-optimized social media content. You can use these perfect holiday social media plans to power up your social media marketing campaign.

6. Holiday Landing Pages

A holiday landing page can prove to be a golden key for your holiday SEO strategy and skyrocket your festive sales.

It allows you to make your festive goals more specific and targeted and provides a common home for all festive-specific keywords. Holiday landing pages help you add festive targeted Call To Action (CTA), lure in more customers, show up all offers and product announcements, etc., all in one place.

Further, visibility brings organic traffic, which leads to conversions and sales. Nowadays, eCommerce stores have started building enticing landing pages for various seasonal events. They optimize and promote these landing pages on various social media platforms, before the start of that event, to rank on the search engine.

Consider an example of a BFCM landing page as shown below:

The above landing page contains several Christmas-specific keywords and implements Christmas-specific media and products. And uses a targeted Call To Action (CTA) to motivate visitors to take desired actions, making the page a common place for all Christmas shoppers.

Such a page is easy to rank, making your festive SEO successful. Building an effective Call To Action (CTA) is a marketing skill. Color, size, anchor text placement, etc., all matter, and if all is done perfectly, the conversion rate is increased to many folds.

The success of a page should be measured by one criterion: Do the visitors do what you want them to do?

-Aaron Wall

7. Work On Product Listing

Holiday SEO is targeted mainly at making holiday sales. And, the core purpose of this type of SEO is to get our products/services to work in the best sync with the Google algorithm to help you rank better in SERPs.

The product listing can help in this quest. With the festive season, try to get your product or service listed in as many places as possible. This sends a signal to the Google algorithm about your authority on that product or service keyword giving you positive festive SEO benefits.

Did you know that merchants can list their products for free on “Google Shopping Lists”? It is a feature offered by Google that allows online retailers to display their products in Google’s Shopping tab without having to pay for advertising. This service gives e-commerce businesses an additional free way to showcase their products to potential customers, increasing their organic visibility.

8. Unveil The Festive Battle Plan Of Your Competitors

In the online retail business, it is necessary to know who your competitors are so that you can stand out and make your unique identity in the crowd.

Track and analyze what’s sprawling in your competitor’s head.

Once you have figured out their holiday SEO strategy, you can plan your marketing campaign for the present and future to stand with your competitors this festive season.

Having a competitor is not always bad; they keep you going. Learning from competitors is a great marketing strategy that demands not just a smart mind but the humility to accept something coming from the opposite side.

Social media, nowadays, is the best way to keep track of your competitors. There are several competitor analysis tools to spy on your competitors on social media platforms. The data or information they collect helps to strategically plan future goals.

9. Optimize Images With Alt Attributes

Google or other search engine crawlers don’t recognize images as we do with our eyes. They use ALT text or description to rank images in image ranking.

You must’ve noticed sometimes when an image doesn’t load, a text is shown in the place of that image. This text is the alternative to the image, referred to as the Alt text attribute.

Alt text attributes and other image optimization perks help search engines understand the images and increase the chances of your images ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

This also helps visually impaired people who use the text-to-speech feature, to conceive the image content.

By this, those who aren’t able to see the content can understand what an image is about by listening to the alternative description.

Alt attribute HTML code: <img src=”seotips.jpg” alt=“best SEO tips to grow sales in festive season”>

Therefore, the Alt attributes can play a major role in ranking your festive product images. These Alt attributes of images help in SEO ranking.

10. Festive Promotion Link-Building

A link to your web pages is a signal to Google crawlers that the following web page is a valuable piece of content. With such a signal, Google tends to improve the ranking of its web pages. (there are many other Google ranking factors too)

In short, it is called “Off-Page SEO”.

This can even be done for holiday season-based pages as well. To be more specific; extend the concept of off-page SEO to off-page holiday SEO.

Link building or backlinking is a strategic way of bringing traffic to your website or web pages from websites or pages. In addition, it helps in increasing the Page Authority (PA) as well as Domain Authority (DA) when links are “do-follow” in nature.

Special care should be taken when giving links to others from self websites. More and more internal linking can help you drive festive shoppers to various product pages.

The anchor text matters a lot. You must make efforts to get quality backlinks with anchor text that is more festive specific such as Black Friday deals, Christmas best gifts, Cyber Monday best offers, Halloween most scary getup, etc., that intrigue the readers for impulse shopping.

Remember the following during off-page link building:

• Guest Posting for better festive page authority
• Publish Press Releases (PR) for new product releases during the holiday season
• Don’t forget to use internal links [try to make a cluster of your blogs]
• Check page authority and domain authority before giving or taking links

11. Loading Speed And High Servers To Handle Festive Traffic

Page speed is a Google ranking factor.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Eve, etc., are the biggest festive season sale days of the year, which bring high traffic to online stores. The congestion may overload the server resulting in a slow loading speed. 

So, it becomes essential to ensure that your servers can handle this much site load. Don’t forget to double-check your servers before the start of the festive season sale to make sure that no problem arises during the sale. Resolve the error 404 pages and fix lost landing pages, broken links, and 301 redirects.

Did you know that, As of 2024, an estimated 4.88 billion people own a smartphone? That’s an increase of 635 million new smartphone users over the past year alone (between 2023 and 2024). This makes it even more important to optimize your website’s speed on mobile devices. 

How will you do it? Scroll down…

12. Update Seasonal SEO Content

Updating seasonal content for festive periods is essential for online businesses. By doing so, you can capture the attention of holiday shoppers and improve your website’s visibility in search engine results using holiday SEO.

Seasonal content performs the best in the festive season. The rest of the time, it barely gets any visitors.

Start by conducting thorough keyword research to identify trending festive and holiday-related search terms.

Incorporate these holiday SEO keywords into existing content or create new pieces tailored specifically for the holiday season.

Update product descriptions and landing pages to showcase seasonal offers, promotions, and discounts. Use festive imagery, colors, and themes to create an engaging experience. Leverage user-generated content and testimonials related to holiday purchases to build trust.

Updating seasonal content can get more visitors, better Holiday SEO rankings, and increase conversions during the festive period.

Things That Can Hinder Your Exposure And Sales During The Holidays

As the festive season is around the corner certain things or activities can hinder or stop your exposure and sales during the holiday season. It is no secret that during the holiday season, your company makes the peak profit, but the real question is:

Is your company prepared for the rush of this season? Because covid-19 has made a huge lifestyle shift and the overwhelming popularity of online shopping. Nearly three-quarters of the US population check the online stores first, before checking the physical store, we thought we would help recognize the mistakes that you might be making. This will help you refine your marketing strategies!

1. Not Updated Local Listings

You might ask why SEO is significant for local listings. Well, it is important because it helps with the visibility of the business and also helps with high-authority backlinks. But, you should also remember that not every listing will have a backlink, but it will at least direct new users to your website and make Google aware of your business.

Therefore, during the holiday season, it is important to update your local listings regularly because users might check them frequently!

2. Not Having Knowledge Of The Trends

Did you know? Only 25% of people go to page two on Google. In other words, 75% of people never scroll past the first page of the SERP. The marketer should always be aware of all the current marketing trends to stay on the first page of the SERP.

Marketers can also use tools like Google Trends to check what’s trending in the market. This enables them to stay relevant to the trends.

To stay relevant to their audiences, marketers should sometimes be well-versed with the change or shift in any of the trends. After researching thoroughly, we have mentioned the top marketing trends for 2024.

3. Unaware Of The Competitor’s Strategy

You must avoid this mistake if you want to ace your holiday SEO game.

The marketer should always be aware of their competitor’s strategy. But why is it important to keep track of this? It is important to recognize who your competitors are, and what they are offering. This can help you to make your products, and services, stand out in the market. It will enable you to set your prices competitively, and will also help you to respond to rival marketing campaigns with your unique initiatives.

This also helps you define your company’s position in the market. As you are now well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor, you’ll be in a better position to assess yourself and your brand.

4. Lack Of An Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing will always help you with holiday sales. This is because your brand is making the customers aware of the upcoming or ongoing holiday offers or the sale. You’ll be surprised to know that, by 2024, it’s (email marketing) expected to reach about 4.5 billion individuals.

Email marketing is so effective because it’s a direct line to engaged prospects.

Some of the latest strategies for 2024 are,

By incorporating these strategies into your email marketing efforts, you can enhance engagement, personalization, user experience, and compliance with privacy regulations.

5. Not Investing In Paid Advertising

Paid advertising helps you reach the right audience better and more efficiently. There are many types of advertisements, such as

• Display ads
• Pop-up ads
• Video ads

Today’s market can get extremely competitive with each passing day. Marketers must be on their toes at all times.

There are many types of Paid ads but our favorite one is Social Media Paid Ads. They are cheap and affordable. Take a look at this infographic that proves, its popularity:\

Now, you are familiar with the mistakes that can hinder your sales during the holiday season. We can now move on to the tips that help you grow your business tremendously.

The Bottom Line…

The optimization that is targeted to gain visibility during the holiday season is termed – Holiday SEO or Seasonal SEO.

Festive sales can scale up your revenue graph to a new height, particularly during the BFCM weekend. Ignoring BFCM can be a big mistake.

During festivals, shoppers are determined to purchase one or more things, on or before the festive day. But you need to ensure ways to bring those shoppers to your online store before they get on your competitors.

Holiday SEO is the best organic way to do that organically.

Therefore in this blog, I’ve discussed 12 simple tips that’ll help online retailers amplify sales and revenue. By using these festive season strategies online retailers can rank on SERPs and strengthen the bond with their customers. And, I’ve also discussed the mistakes that marketers can make that hinder their growth!

Happy Holidays and Happy Selling! :)