Christmas is 6 months away, which means it is perfect timing for online gift stores to start an SEO campaign to boost sales for December 2015. SEO needing an organic long-term strategy, E-commerce managers need to start planning which product ranges need a sales boost, and start elaborating online deals. Planning ahead means introducing Christmas ranges around mid-October to ensure the specific products have enough time to be crawled and indexed by search engines.

Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to plan search queries. It is quite common for users to type the action term ‘buy’ before the name of a product, including the keywords ‘pre-order’. This just goes to show the real valuable importance of E-commerce SEO and why digital marketing managers of gift stores should consider this as part of an online marketing strategy. What is also highly beneficial is to put together and follow an E-commerce checklist to stay on the right track. This starts with the design of the Christmas E-commerce site.

Follow these steps to increase your rankings for search engines and reach your RoI.

On-Page Optimisation

Create unique, Christmas-related content for your online gift shop, with original and compelling stories around specific products. Use the keywords planned ahead to help each product page rank for a specific search term. Keep a good keyword density throughout the content including a few broad terms for particular product names.

 

✔ Semantic URLs for each gift and Category page ✔ Image optimisation
✔ Internal links throughout entire site ✔ Header tags (h1, h2)
✔ Product description with keyword(s) ✔ Navigation bar leading to each gift category page
✔ Visible search bar ✔ Customer reviews
✔ Duplicated content ✔ Page speed
✔ Social media links ✔ Christmas theme including any offers

To help search engines, make sure you use SEO friendly, semantic URLs such www.yourdomain.com/kids/games throughout each product and category page. Ensure the name of product images convert with the product name for both users and search engines. Avoid slow page speed as they can cause major drop offs, with potential consumers leaving your online store too soon.

Keywords

Keyword research is vital for online gift stores as search trends are seasonal and change every year. Use a variety of keywords with different competition rates which will help you be found in many searches. Try and find low hanging keyword terms as well as highly competitive ones. Users search long tail keywords to find specific products online so include terms such as “buy cheap Christmas gift online” in your SEO strategy.

Blogs and Updates

A Christmas blog is highly beneficial to spread awareness around your gift store and its specific ranges. Add extra keywords to your E-commerce through individual blog posts to attract links. Make sure the blog is a part of your E-commerce site rather and not an external blog.

Mobile Responsive Site

Now that the Google mobile update has rolled into place, SEO agencies have noticed a significant increase of mobile usage which has already passed desktop searches. Just like with the overall page speed, if your online gift store is not mobile friendly, chances are you will loose your potential consumers. Use the Google mobile responsive tool to test your site.

Once you have followed the Christmas SEO checklist, it is always fun and more appealing to have a Christmas theme on your online gift store. Speak to Polaris is you would like to alter your E-commerce SEO strategy for the Christmas period.

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