Holidays SEO Tips for 2020
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Every year the holidays provide an incredible opportunity for online retailers to increase revenue and drive new traffic to their sites. Consumers are actively looking for products to buy for their friends and family and search online for the best offers and deals. That’s why it’s so crucial that you have a Holiday SEO strategy set in place so that consumers can find you and not your competitors.
To ensure this, we have put together four Holidays SEO tips for vape shops that are easy to implement and manage. With these tips, we hope you can take full advantage of the season and gain new clientele and traffic for your online vape shop.
Table of Contents
- Implement Basic SEO Strategies
- What Are Your Competitors Doing in Terms of SEO?
- Set Up Holiday Landing Pages
- Optimize for Speed and Mobile
- Conclusion
Implement basic SEO strategies
Holiday SEO is not really different from traditional SEO. They both require patience and that you start with the basics. While the basics of SEO could be subjective to some people, there is no doubt that every SEO campaign starts with keyword research.
Rethink your keyword research.
You’ll want to rethink your keyword research efforts during the holiday season. Holiday SEO keywords or Christmas SEO keywords, for example, will more than likely appear in November and December, rather than say in June. So creating a new keyword research strategy based on trends in the holidays is pivotal.
To see what keywords are ranking during the holidays, you can use SEMrush.com. SEMrush is a great tool that will help you see which keywords you are currently ranking for and which keywords you are not ranking for. You can also use Google Trends to search for seasonal keywords that gain popularity during the holidays.
Optimize and audit existing content
After keyword research, another SEO standard practice is to audit existing content. This practice is essential during the holiday season, mostly if your holiday content drove traffic; it is time to update it and make it new.
To update your content, you can do the following:
- Update outdated facts.
- Update the title and heading (if the title was 2019, you could switch to 2020).
- Add more media, for example, videos, pictures, or infographics.
- Make the content longer.
- Update the vape products or vape brands used in the article.
Implement Holiday-Themed URLs
Finally, it’s also essential that you update the URLs of the pieces of content you plan on updating. If the slug of a URL happens to be “vape-gift-guide-2019,” you can change it to “vape-gift-guide-2020” or add seasonal specific keywords that you found on your holiday keyword research.
What are your competitors doing in terms of SEO?
Another great strategy or tip is to take a look at what your competitors are doing. Not to copy their efforts but to create unique offerings that will set you apart from other online vape shops. You can follow your competitors on social media or even sign up for their email newsletter and look at the type of content or practices they are doing during the holidays.
Another great tactic that we have discussed in the blog before is using your competitor’s website to find keywords. This strategy works perfectly in the holiday season. You can input their website on the following three keyword analytic tools:
Set up holiday landing pages.
Another excellent SEO tactic is to create landing pages for each holiday. This tactic is a great way to win big during the holiday season since these pages will contain all your seasonal keywords and have a greater chance of appearing on search engines. Although since they will be new, you’ll need to get them to rank.
To do this, you’ll have to add them to your site’s navigation a couple of months in advance. To keep them hidden until the holidays, you can tell your web developer to create the pages using 302 redirects (which hide the page from users but not from search engine crawlers). This way, you can add them to the web and change their redirect when ready and optimized.
Optimize for speed and mobile.
Google not only looks at keywords, links, and content but also at how responsive a website is and how long it takes to load. Site speed and responsiveness have become two critical factors for SEO because most searches nowadays are done thru a smartphone, which requires responsive websites and optimal site speed.
Websites that consider this and optimize for speed and responsiveness rank higher on Google and provide a better browsing experience from a customer’s point of view. After all, no one has the patience to shop on a website that takes too long to load. So what can you do to improve site speed and performance?
Assessing Site Speed and Performance
Perhaps the only tool you need to measure your site performance and speed is Google's Web.dev, created for this purpose. In essence, you run your website thru the tool, and the tool gives you back areas that you need to fix and how the fix can improve the user experience. Keep in mind that you'll need a web developer's guide to help you address these issues.
Handling Spikes In Traffic
Another thing to keep in mind when looking at your website's speed and performance during the holiday season is that with the sales and discounts your vape shop will offer, there is no doubt you'll get more visitors than usual. To prepare for the spikes in traffic, you'll need to check with your hosting company.
Your hosting company will often be able to update your hosting plan if you receive more visitors than usual. You might also need to update to cloud hosting; it all depends on what your hosting company can offer you.
