6 Holiday SEO Marketing Tips for E-Commerce Sites
Taking advantage of the holiday shopping season is essential for boosting growth in your e-commerce business. But to outdo last year’s results, you should further optimize your site for conversions to stay competitive.
Search has changed so significantly this year that optimizing for searches typed into laptops and on keyboards isn’t going to cut it anymore, especially for the holidays. Especially if you’ve resisted it until now, this is the time to optimize for generative engines.
From creating helpful content to improving product pages and increasing your brand’s search visibility, there’s a lot you can do to enhance your holiday marketing.
These tips are helpful throughout the year, but if the upcoming holiday shopping rush caught you off guard, it’s still not too late to implement them.
Use these last-minute holiday SEO tips to optimize your e-commerce site, attract more customers, and surpass last year’s sales.
Leverage Google AI Essentials and Other Tools for Holiday SEO
In early September 2025, Google’s Retail Team introduced a new suite of AI products ready just in time for the 2025 holiday shopping season.
The AI Power Pack comprises three campaign enhancements: AI Max for Search Campaigns, Demand Gen, and Performance Max. AI Max offers significant power and customization for retailers, especially for holiday shopping. Unlock next-level performance with AI Max for Search campaigns.
Turning on this enhancement in Google Ads with one little toggle uses Google AI to expand your campaigns with several features like search term matching, final URL expansion, and improved reporting for tracking incremental performance. AI Max itself can even be tracked.
Demand Gen leverages AI to build and serve ad campaigns on YouTube and other Google visual surfaces, like Gmail. It takes your best visual assets and creatives and serves them to the most relevant audiences on the channels where they are.
Performance Max combines all your Google Ads inventories into an omnichannel, multi-modal campaign that can be automated to optimize all its attributes.
Setting parameters like campaign goals and max bids is essential for most of these tools. These settings are also ideal for holiday optimization. Monitor conversions during Q4, specify product categories such as sales, and rapidly meet your KPIs.
Create Helpful Evergreen Content for Target Audiences
Evergreen content is a powerful tool for e-commerce sites. However, just because it’s meant to be timeless doesn’t mean you can hit “publish” and forget about it. You need to update your evergreen content regularly to keep it relevant.
Over time, the information in your content could become outdated or irrelevant, and your business goals may shift.
By revising your evergreen content, you can ensure it meets its intended purpose, especially when aligning with your seasonal SEO strategy and e-commerce objectives.
Segmenting common search queries and repositioning your evergreen content can help you handle the surge of holiday shoppers.
While your regular content may target the typical search intent of users who frequently buy within your industry, Q4 is an excellent time to publish holiday gift guides and attract traffic from holiday shoppers unfamiliar with your brand.
In addition to refreshing this content, marketers should update titles, tags, and meta descriptions.
For example, a holiday shopping article titled “A Parent’s Guide to the Top Games of 2025” will likely attract more clicks from users with transactional search intent than one titled “The Best Video Games of 2025” during the holiday shopping season.
Leveraging distinctive shopping habits during the holiday season can boost traffic, conversions, and revenue for e-commerce businesses. Check your blog to see if it needs updating or could benefit from a holiday-themed refresh to attract new customers.
Use Structured Data to Signal Seasonal Relevance and Inform Shoppers in SERPs
Ranking in AI search results like Google AI Overviews and product Knowledge Panels requires structured data, which is crucial for standing out in SERPs during the holiday season.
Because your organic site ranking might not be high enough to attract significant traffic, submitting structured data for your products via Merchant Center is especially important for your holiday SEO efforts. If you use a third-party CRM, ensure it’s connected to your Google Merchant account.
Structured data has always been crucial to SEO and rankings, but now that searchers use these three “Vs” of modern search: voice, visual, and video, it’s nonnegotiable. Without it, SERPs will lack the relevant data and context to offer your products and services to searchers.
Product schema markup helps potential buyers make informed purchasing decisions, leading to higher CTRs and conversions. If you have hundreds of holiday products to add to your product listings, leverage AI tools to automate your schema updates and gather assets for your visual content.
3 Vs for Holiday SEO: Visual, Voice, Video
Here’s where Google's new Demand Gen AI tool will be extremely useful. As long as you’ve already built a healthy library of visual assets and ensured your structured data is being regularly updated by AI or, perhaps, the intern, you can be successful across visual, voice, and video searches.
Demand Gen can create campaigns for you that will run on YouTube feeds, streams, and Shorts. You can also leverage these campaigns for voice searches run on mobile devices, which can serve visual results to searchers. It’s crucial you optimize your campaigns for the best SERP positioning since voice searches offer just the top results.
But even if you don’t use Demand Gen, there are several AI tools you can use to create optimal ad holiday SEO strategies. YouTube mastheads are now shoppable, and Google now indexes multiple channels.
People increasingly use video searches to find gifts for friends and family during the holidays. For many, this will be the first time they use video or visual searches for their shopping. Channels like Instagram and TikTok now offer shopping services, and Google is indexing Instagram and Facebook for SERPs. If you’re still treating all your channels as siloed strategies, this holiday season is the perfect time to start thinking about cross-channel indexing and optimization for multi-modal search.
Use the same tactics for your visual and video channels as you would for your content: create helpful, people-first content, ensure you’re adding intent-driven seasonal keywords to posts, and add alt text to the images and videos themselves. The alt text contributes to the structured data discussed previously, just one more layer of optimization for your campaigns.
Use Dynamic Retargeting to Boost Holiday Conversions
Standard retargeting is an essential tactic throughout the year, but as an e-commerce enterprise, the holiday season is the time to transform brand awareness into conversions and revenue.
This is why dynamic retargeting is crucial during Q4.
As opposed to standard retargeting, which serves generic ads to users who previously visited your site, dynamic retargeting uses the exact item a user viewed on your site, putting it front and center for their consideration.
As you know, during the holiday season, gift-givers tend to go the extra mile to find the ideal presents for their loved ones. Prospective purchasers are more discerning than ever, and reminding them of the specific products they viewed can help keep your brand top of mind.
Remember that many people buy more than one gift for each person. So, even if they decide to buy the “main” gift from one of your competitors, dynamic retargeting can remind them that one of your products would make the perfect supplement or stocking stuffer.
Audit Your E-Commerce Site for Holiday Shoppers
In addition to holiday SEO optimizations, it’s crucial to audit your site to ensure everything works correctly. Here are some of the more essential auditing tips to consider:
- Broken Links: Searchers who encounter broken links while navigating your site are likelier to leave. Additionally, broken links can inhibit search engine crawlers and reduce search visibility.
- Optimize Category and Page Organization: Speaking of site navigation, the holiday season is the perfect time to shorten your funnels wherever possible, including your site’s hierarchy. Make it easy for people to find the product or information they want.
- Mobile-First Design: Google uses mobile-first indexing, so optimizing your site for these users is key to maximizing your search visibility and funnel effectiveness.
- Sell Through Helpful Content: Google’s Helpful Content Update created a problem for e-commerce sites, as the content dominating revenue-driving product pages naturally didn’t align with Google’s new content creation guidelines. That’s why connecting your key pages to the informative content that Google wants to rank highly in search results is vital.
- Minimize Friction Sitewide: Use your analytics data to decide whether those coupon pop-ups do more harm than good while marketing for the holidays. If they’re driving people away, your brand may want to put them on pause or at least prioritize only the highest-converting pop-ups. The goal is to make your site an absolute joy to use, and if there’s noticeable friction anywhere, eliminate it.
- site. Additionally, broken links can inhibit search engine crawlers and reduce search visibility.
- Optimize Category and Page Organization: Speaking of site navigation, the holiday season is the perfect time to shorten your funnels wherever possible, including your site’s hierarchy. Make it easy for people to find the product or information they’re looking for.
- Mobile-First Design: Google uses mobile-first indexing, so optimizing your site for these users is key to maximizing your search visibility and funnel effectiveness.
- Sell Through Helpful Content: Google’s Helpful Content Update created a bit of a problem for e-commerce sites, as the content dominating revenue-driving product pages naturally didn’t align with Google’s new content creation guidelines. That’s why it’s vital to connect your key pages to the informative content that Google wants to rank highly in search results.
- Minimize Friction Sitewide: Use your analytics data to decide whether those coupon pop-ups are doing more harm than good while marketing for the holidays. If they’re driving people away, your brand may want to put them on pause or at least prioritize only the highest-converting pop-ups. The goal is to make your site an absolute joy to use, and if there’s noticeable friction anywhere, eliminate it.
Partner with VELOX to Optimize Your Holiday E-Commerce SEO Strategy
Optimizing your e-commerce site for the holiday season is key to maximizing your Q4 profitability. This is no time to cut corners, so partner with VELOX, the ROI-focused digital marketing agency that exceeds expectations and helps enterprise clients scale.
Our digital marketing experts will create and implement a custom strategy to surpass your holiday revenue goals, leveraging the power of SEO, PPC, and the latest digital marketing research. VELOX is recognized among the top 3% of agencies worldwide as a Google Premier Partner because of our forward-thinking approach to digital marketing and growth-oriented tactics.
Achieve sustained search engine dominance this holiday season with us. Contact VELOX today to learn more about our innovative approach.
