Image showing a large laptop with full shelves of products with gift wrapped boxes, coins, and a shipping truck surrounding.

November 13, 2023

5 Essential Holiday Marketing Tips for eCommerce Sites

Capitalizing on the holiday shopping season is key to driving growth for your eCommerce enterprise. But if you want to beat last year’s numbers, you need to further optimize your site for conversions so you can keep up with your competitors.

From selling through helpful content to enhancing product pages and boosting your brand’s search visibility, there’s a lot you can do to elevate your marketing for the holidays.

Frankly, these tips are worth implementing year-round, but if the holiday shopping season has taken you by surprise, it’s not too late to implement them.

Use these last-minute holiday SEO tips to optimize your eCommerce site so you can attract more customers and improve on last year’s sales numbers.

Make Your Evergreen Content Helpful and Relevant to Your Target Audiences

Evergreen content is a powerful tool for eCommerce sites. However, just because this content is meant to be timeless doesn’t mean you can hit “publish” and forget about it. You must regularly revise your evergreen content to prevent it from turning stale.

Over time, the information contained in your content could become inaccurate or irrelevant, and your business goals may change.

By pruning your evergreen content, you can ensure it fulfills its intended purpose, especially when it comes to meeting your holiday season SEO strategy eCommerce goals.

Segmenting common search queries and repositioning your evergreen content can help you accommodate the influx of holiday shoppers.

While your normal content might target the search intent typically exhibited by users who regularly make purchases within your vertical, Q4 is an excellent time to publish holiday gift guides and capture traffic from holiday shoppers unfamiliar with your brand.

In addition to this content refresh, marketers should revise titles, tags, and meta descriptions.

For example, a holiday shopping piece titled “A Parent’s Guide to the Top Games of 2023” is likely to attract more clicks from users with a transactional search intent than one titled “The Best Video Games of 2023” during the holiday shopping season.

Capitalizing on the the unique shopping patterns of the holidays marketing season will help eCommerce enterprises capture more traffic, conversions, and revenue. Take a look at your blog and see if anything needs to be updated or could be given a holiday season refresh to help attract and draw in these new customers.

Leverage Free Google and Bing Product Listings

Image of an online ad with gift wrapped boxes and a green buy now button.

Search results are more crowded than ever, and eCommerce businesses should take advantage of every opportunity to stand out. That’s why using the free merchant center on Google and Bing is a no-brainer.

In Google’s case, Merchant Center puts your products in front of people searching for them on Google Search, Maps, YouTube, and other Google properties. You can choose whether to direct clicks to your online store or a brick-and-mortar location.

All you need to do is upload your product feeds into Google and Bing Merchant Center. Once you’re up and running, you can use the personalized insights to help increase site traffic.

If you operate a physical store, keep in mind there’s a separate program in Google Merchant Center called Local Services Ads that gives searchers the option to call, send a message, or schedule a booking directly.

The Local Services Ads app will notify you of every lead, allowing you to take action and turn each one into a conversion.

Use Structured Data To Signal Relevance And Inform Shoppers in SERPs

Google Search features like the Popular Products carousel and product Knowledge Panels are driven by structured data and are essential to standing out in SERPs this holiday season.

Because your organic site ranking position may not be high enough to drive a meaningful amount of traffic, submitting your products for these features is especially important to your holiday eCommerce SEO efforts.

Say you have two listings for the newest video game title: one for physical copies and another listing for digital versions of the game.

Whereas the physical listing is standard, you use structured data for the digital listing, making the game’s ratings, reviews, and pricing information visible to consumers directly in search results.

This product schema markup provides prospective consumers with even more relevant information to help them make informed purchasing decisions, leading to improved CTRs and conversions.

The Popular Products carousel is a handy tool for eCommerce retailers, giving their apparel and fashion digital marketing efforts a welcome boost during the profitable holiday shopping season. But this Search feature applies to many industries, from health and wellness products to toys and baby products.

Users can filter through different product categories, view various colors, read reviews, and compare prices, all without having to click through to a retailer’s website. In fact, they only need to click on a store link when they decide to complete the purchase.

To get your products into this carousel, mark them up with product schema or submit a product feed to Google Merchant Center.

Use Dynamic Retargeting to Drive Conversions Throughout the Holiday Season

Standard retargeting is an important tactic throughout the year, but as an eCommerce enterprise, the holiday season is the time to transform brand awareness into conversions and revenue.

That’s 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 well know, the holiday season is when gift-givers tend to go the extra mile to find the ideal presents for their loved ones. There’s more comparing and consideration than ever among prospective purchasers—reminding them of the specific products they viewed can help keep your brand top of mind.

Keep in mind 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 eCommerce Site

Image of person looking closely at a set of folders with a large magnifying glass.

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 more likely to leave the site. In addition, 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 ensuring your site is optimized 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 eCommerce 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 Media And Optimize Your Holiday eCommerce SEO Strategy

Optimizing your eCommerce 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 and growth-oriented tactics.

Achieve sustained search engine dominance this holiday season with VELOX. Contact VELOX today to learn more about our innovative approach.