Is it too early to mention the C word?

We don’t think so. Many retailers are hoping for a decent festive season to make up for what has been a difficult year and have started their Christmas campaigns already. 

Here’s a few little SEO tips to help you make the most of the next fews months and drive traffic to your website.

Review you Analytics:

Use your google analytics to find out how people reached your site last year, what pages they viewed there and what products they were interested in. 

Did they find you thought social media, third party links or via a search engine? This information can give you a head start on this year.

Update your Meta

Take a look at your meta title, descriptions and headers to see if they are relevant and include your Christmas products and ranges. If your site is large the focus on the area of your website you think is most important this season.

You can help drive traffic to these product by writing a blog with the relevant links and sharing on your various channels. 

Create a Christmas categories

For many people time is precious and very little of us want to have to spend time searching a website for what we are looking for. If can take a little time but its work considering adding a Christmas category to your navigation bar so potential customers can find your Christmas range with ease – that way they are more likely to continue through to buying.

Make your self visible locally

Every Christmas, we’re encouraged to ‘shop local’ or ‘shop indie’ and this even more popular this year with COVID-19 lockdowns impinging on our ability to travel and people wanting to support local businesses. 

Buying local doesn’t have to mean buying in person – some shoppers will be looking for deliveries from local suppliers. Make sure you don’t miss out on this market, by ensuring you are using Google My Business and that the information there is up to date and contains all the correct contact information – in particular, your opening hours and Christmas items.

Link up your website

Once you’ve done the hard work and increased the number of visitors to your site, you don’t want these people to see these people bounce and leave the site without having a look around. To help your potential customer hang around for longer, make sure you’re directing people to the next most relevant piece of content or product on your site with internal links. This could be links from blogs to items mentioned, links from products to similar items you sell or to something that is popular that goes with another item.

Optimise your images

We know that page speed is a direct ranking factor, so first and foremost you need to ensure that your site’s images aren’t slowing things down and so this means making sure your images are compressed without reducing the quality.

But it also means making sure that your images are correctly tagged in order to be visible in Google image searches. Unless you’re giving vouchers this Christmas, present shopping is a very visual experience, so it’s important to make sure that your product images are optimised too. Google is getting better at recognising what’s in an image but you can help it along by adding alt text, title text and using a descriptive file name.

Get Social

Social media is a great way to promoted your seasonal campaigns and what your business is doing.

Make sure your header banners are updated, you are using Instagram and Facebook shopping tools, you are telling people about your fantastic Christmas products and offers and the story behind them.

Don’t be shy. Ask your friends and family to share your posts and if your make them fun and engaging others will too helping to increase your reach and hopefully your sales. It costs nothing so you have nothing to lose!

We hope you found something in these tips that you’re not doing yet that will help you and your business.

If you would like any further help or advice, we’re always here to help.