August 28th, 2023
If you want to push the needle to attract new in-market customers, create an engaging onsite experience for holiday shoppers, and maximize your ROI, it’s critical to make sure that your onsite holiday content is up to speed with current best practices. The holiday season is fast approaching, and this year, the most successful marketing strategies will be the ones that are supported by a strong organic foundation.
Over the past year, there have been major shifts in search engine functionality and consumer shopping behaviors. So ensuring that your content is in line with the current best practices can offer numerous benefits for your website and business that will only compound over time. Check out our tips and insights below to make sure that you’re competitive within the organic space this holiday season.
1. Repurpose your page from prior years. If you have an established page that you leveraged last year for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday gifting content, you should refresh it with current content and make it visible on your site for Q4. Why? Because these pages already have a history with Google, and most likely have valuable links and social shares - all good things that help send more user-driven signals to Google that indicate that these are trusted and relevant to holiday shopping.
2. Optimize your page for how users are shopping in 2023. In Holiday 2023 Guide Part 1: H2 Economic Snapshot, we explored the economic factors that are driving consumers to be more price-conscious when making decisions around gifting. Google trend data over the last five years validates this by showing that more users are looking for gifts at lower price points.
Marketers should leverage this data by organizing holiday gift guides by price rather than by recipient alone. This strategy is easy to implement - simply build product categories for gifting around price buckets, and communicate this messaging across marketing channels, from email to social media.
3. Build a seamless, content-driven customer journey. Over the past year, we have noticed that more and more users are looking for reviews and feedback before they buy a product or invest in a service. To get these consumers to convert this holiday season, create informative content on your holiday gifting pages with the specific goal of answering frequently asked questions.
To find which questions are most pertinent to your audience:
4. Use data-driven insights to name your gifting categories. Are you planning to have a category called “Gifts for Her” or “Gifts for Him”? Well, it turns out that this might not be the best strategy for naming gifting categories. Instead, marketers should leverage search volume data to determine which phrases and themes are most relevant to their brand. This method for naming gifting categories ensures relevance for audiences while sending better signals to search engines around the content on a brand’s site.
5. Leverage this year’s holiday pages for long-term success. When the holidays are over, don’t delete your gifting pages. Rather, update the language to reflect that the sale or promotion has ended, and prompt users with an email subscription or to follow along on social. And by the time the holidays roll around next year, brands will be one step ahead with site pages that already have a strong foundation for organic search to leverage.
These best practices are simple and effective ways to help marketers improve their site visibility on Google (and other search engines) this holiday season. What’s more, they will facilitate an inherently better experience for online users, regardless of which channel they come through. So even if you’re just in the beginning stages of your Holiday 2023 planning, don’t wait to take advantage of these easy wins and set yourself up for success this holiday season.
Find more holiday marketing insights from New Engen at the links below, and stay in the know by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on LinkedIn.