5 SEO & Holiday Marketing Tips to Give You an Edge This Shopping Season

Have you taken steps to equip your business for success this holiday shopping season?

Better late than never is not an option. The earlier you start prepping for holiday shoppers, the greater your success.

The entirety of Q4 is now prime holiday shopping season, with retailers displaying seasonal products as early as October, before the Halloween costumes and decor have even been put away.

This longer shopping period leads to record spending: Between November and December 2024, consumers spent a record $241.4 billion online, an 8.7% increase from 2023.

Want a piece of that pie? You’ll need to leverage every possible advantage, especially in a hypercompetitive industry.

When skillfully executed as part of an ROI-focused strategy, Organic Search marketing can boost online visibility, traffic, and conversions needed to reach your brand’s goals this holiday season.

It's time to get started on holiday SEO. Many of your competitors already have.

Read on to learn about the key aspects of Organic Search and what your team can do to set your brand up for success as the holiday season approaches.

Hopefully, this isn’t your first experience with keyword research. However, if it is, there's no better time than now to get started and focus on improving your brand’s online presence.

Specific paid keyword research tools make this process easy. However, set up Google Search Console (GSC) before paying for a tool.

If you’ve been up and running for over a year, you can use GSC to check your historical data and identify the keywords shoppers used to find your brand during the previous holiday season.

Start with a list of keywords based on traffic and visibility. Review the Queries report for each of your revenue-driving pages, and add the top two or three keywords for each page to your list.

Once you finish, review your list and eliminate outdated or duplicate keywords, such as those related to discontinued products. Afterwards, further refine the list to optimize the ROI of your holiday SEO efforts.

Not all keywords are created equal. Typically, those with the highest search volumes are impossible to rank for.

But that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. Choosing keywords based on relevance, search volume, and difficulty can significantly increase your brand’s visibility and achieve your goals.

The best keywords will be those with an optimal volume-to-difficulty ratio. Choose keywords with a high enough search volume to contribute meaningful traffic, and a low enough difficulty score that you can expect to start ranking by early or mid-Q4.

Looking to build awareness and gain impression share? Choose keywords aligned with your industry to help your brand surface on SERPs as users browse results, even if they aren’t ready to purchase. If your brand competes in fashion, choosing the right fashion keywords, especially during the holiday season.

Focus your SEO efforts on purchases and other conversion events during this season, particularly, and select long-tail keywords. The longer a keyword, the more specific it is. Long-tail keywords are typically used by people closer to the bottom of the funnel and ready to make a purchase.

By optimizing your pages to establish relevance for appropriate long-tail keywords, you can gain visibility on SERPs frequented by shoppers ready to make a purchase. Choosing keywords with transactional intent is key for brands looking for more conversions.

Emotional engagement and limited promotional offers are the two most significant drivers of spending during the holiday season.

As you tailor your keywords for the season, consider how you can use these two factors to your advantage.

When it comes to emotional drivers, think of the meaning different audiences would assign to the holidays, and how your brand fulfills a need by demonstrating those meanings.

Many consumers are drawn to products that evoke nostalgia or can help them make cherished memories with their loved ones. Do any of your offerings fit into these contexts? If so, consider how emotionally motivated people might search online for products or services like yours.

Deals are a key motivator for many. People generally avoid overpaying, often waiting for holiday sales to buy big-ticket items like tech, appliances, and cars.

This elevated purchase intent makes the period surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday an ideal time to offer discounts and drive holiday sales.

Businesses running holiday promotions will want to add key terms such as “deals,” “sales,” “discounts,” etc. to product/service keywords, as shoppers will be looking for not just your offerings, but the deals themselves.

There’s no time like the present to start working on your holiday content.

Consistently publishing holiday-focused digital content from now through the rest of the season is crucial for gaining the online visibility needed to achieve results, especially when competing against established rivals on competitive SERPs.

Working with an agency to create the ideal content marketing strategy gives you the best chance for success. Ideally, you’ll start with a content map designed to build topical authority for your brand around priority keywords based on the research we discussed previously.

Content creation is an investment of valuable bandwidth, so establish criteria for writing and editing your content.

Use each of these tips to create winning content ahead of the holiday season.

Q4 is a time of new product releases, seasonal trends, and exclusive offerings. Avoiding wasted money is crucial to maximizing your holiday digital marketing efforts.

This involves emphasizing products, services, USPs, and promotions that aim to increase revenue during the peak season, particularly if your business relies on these results.

Generating brand awareness ahead of Q4 is essential to maximize conversions during the holiday shopping season.

Earlier, we discussed the common practice of consumers waiting until the holiday season for large purchases.

This means these folks have plenty of time to research their purchases. This allows brands like yours to educate, inform, and build awareness through helpful content.

There is a wide variety of content marketing tactics to pursue here, from influencer marketing on social media to syndicating content on high-domain authority sites.

The longer funnel gives you more time to turn users into customers, but you should expect your competitors to take the same approach.

That’s why you can’t settle for anything less than best-of-web content as you demonstrate to users that your brand is best suited to meet their needs.

Google has come a long way since the days of the 10 blue links, but its systems still need time to evaluate your content and decide how to rank it.

The earlier you start publishing content and your entire holiday marketing campaign, whatever the channel mix, the better. BIOEFFECT, a science-based skincare brand, regularly works with VELOX on its marketing strategies. This partnership has resulted in significant revenue growth for BIOEFFECT: $645K in total paid social revenue.

For 2024’s BFCM, BIOEFFECT and VELOX did things a bit differently than usual: They launched the brand’s holiday campaign three days earlier than previous years. This amplified brand awareness and put BIOEFFECT ahead of its competitors, resulting in a 129% increase in revenue during the period.

As more users interact with your content and demonstrate to Google that your content is, in fact, valuable and worthy of ranking highly, you’ll see improved SERP visibility.

Additionally, your rankings will solidify over time, making you less likely to lose traffic due to volatility or ranking fluctuations.

Content is a powerful tool to improve funnels through internal linking, especially when it helps guide people to shop based on various use cases.

This personalized content speaks directly to your customer personas' pain points and goals, effectively building a deep connection with these users. Then, they can follow the links you added directly to your product or collection pages.

But don’t forget to include links to other relevant blog posts, individual location pages, and authoritative industry sources to support your claims about product performance or USPs.

As with keywords, you don’t want to include too many links. However, by including the most relevant internal links, you can build each piece of content as a resource that delivers the utmost value to your site visitors while driving conversions.

Creating and optimizing content for the peak holiday shopping season doesn’t have to be a slog. When done properly, it can help your marketing team operate more efficiently in each successive Q4.

Content that’s seasonal and evergreen is not a paradox. Think of it this way: As you write, speak to the season, not the year.

That’s not to say you can’t include specific mentions of noteworthy events from the current year, but you should do so in a way that makes those mentions easily revisable or removable. That’ll keep next year’s content clean-up to a minimum.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is to avoid putting the year in your URLs.

Use the year in your heading tags, copy, page title, and meta description. This is acceptable because they can all be easily revised.

However, changing a URL is a more involved process that must be executed properly to avoid significant SEO problems.

One final note: Be sure to align these tips with the latest best practices for digital content creation. Here’s a quick refresher on the essential dos and don’ts of writing helpful content.

RELATED: Informative E-Commerce: 5 Keys to Selling Through Helpful Content

There isn’t really a fun holiday spin to put on technical SEO, but Q4 is certainly when you’ll see the greatest payoff from your site performance and page speed optimization efforts.

First and foremost, delivering a premium experience to your site visitors is a best practice for pushing them through your funnels. If your site is challenging to navigate, takes forever to load, or is visually unappealing, the only thing you should expect in your stocking is a higher bounce rate.

As the song goes, Santa sees you when you’re sleeping, and he knows when you’re awake, right? Well, Google knows whether your UX is bad, great, or somewhere in between.

“He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake.” It’s the rule for kids hoping to unwrap great presents during the holidays, but it also applies to digital marketers and the company website.

And no, the week of Thanksgiving is not the right time to task your dev team with a site audit. Better late than never, sure, but the earlier you start, the more thoroughly your team can optimize your site before traffic picks up ahead of the holidays.

If you haven’t conducted a site audit in the past year, or don’t know when your team performed one, prioritize this task immediately.

RELATED: 8 Critical Elements of User Experience You Can’t Ignore

With these tips, you can prepare your website for an outstanding peak business season. But before you move on to the next step, it's essential to take stock of your work and the results.

Once your team has finished making their New Year’s resolutions, collect your data and conduct a thorough review to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what can be done to drive even better results next year.

Even if you don’t inspect your holiday efforts at a forensic level, you’ll at least want to come away with a spreadsheet of the blog posts that drove the most traffic and your top-performing product pages.

If you altered specific collection or product pages with holiday-themed content, don’t just delete it. Store it so you can pick up where you left off next Q4.

Once you’ve reviewed your data, sit down with your team to outline an action plan for the next holiday season so you can get an even earlier head start next year.

Leveraging Organic Search is an excellent way to increase revenue during the all-important Q4. Luxury travel apparel brand Anatomie worked with VELOX on their BFCM marketing campaign, which led to $451K in revenue sitewide. The strategy consisted of cross-channel efforts, including compelling content and Meta ads.

This outstanding quarter reflected a larger growth pattern based on a healthy ongoing partnership with VELOX. During their entire SEO and paid media campaign, Anatomie saw 146% revenue growth.

Experience the benefits of our New Revenue Model firsthand. Contact VELOX today, and we'll help you develop a strategy to grow your business.