Quick links
With it being Black Friday, a lot of retail and ecommerce businesses during the past fortnight have been busy wrapping up the campaign and making sure during the peak trading event on 24th November that their website is performing not just at a content level but also that website is able to take the demand (product catalogue fully stocked and servers tested for on-site allowance).
During Black Friday – even if you have had the sales event live on-site for weeks, demand spikes considerably during the actual day.
To put this in perspective last year’s search data for the month of November around “deal queries” was 1.2m with 80% of this happening on the specific day.
However, as big as Black Friday is Christmas is more profitable for retailers as the event happens over a longer period, therefore higher demand.
A lot of brands throughout November focus on Black Friday and then run out of steam/focus for Christmas – it is not uncommon for online retailers to plan for Christmas early and then in December focus on Q1 campaigns.
The mindset at this time is that “Christmas has been wrapped early” and then to just let it run without paying too close attention to the opportunity apart from the ecommerce data/marketing channel metrics.
A lot of agencies feel the same way, working on 2024 campaigns and letting Christmas run.
As a highly experienced, multi-award winning consultant-led SEO ecommerce agency we don’t, we challenge clients and the sector to continue working on their Christmas campaigns as the gains can be significant.
One year, we continued to work on a high-street retail gifting brand to not only push them into position 1 but also kept them consistent within the top 3 during the event beating high authority gifting brands such as; M&S, F&M and John Lewis which ensured an extra £1.5m in sales over a 2 week period.
Setting and forgetting Christmas in our opinion is a little short sighted and unless you are consistently ranking position 1 during the transactional peak period for your primary keyword, which throughout December can increase 500% – then there is more work to be done.
Over the past 10 years when we have worked with ecommerce brands during this period, we have a “3 week peak plan” that is risk adverse, defined by impact and is able to be deployed in-house (which is key as most sites during peak are locked within a code-freeze).
We deploy an approach guided within a marginal gains framework to ensure a holistic campaign deploying impact-led tactics that in-house marketing teams can work on to ensure that during Christmas your website is not left out in the cold (which these days is Page 2 on Google).
Caveat: Page 2 in Google now is “the dark bleak mid-winter” with search populating the results with sponsored PPC ads (mid-page) and Google organic shopping on the bottom of Page 1. To get to Page 2 now takes 10X the scroll it used to on mobile which equates to over 70% of ecommerce website traffic.
By using marginal gains– we are atomising each part of the system that makes that task work and every day working on every element by tweaking, evolving to get a an increase. A small marginal improvement, throughout multiple elements aggregates to a large improvement.
Putting this into an SEO example, lets imagine its peak Christmas and your main keyword is 100,000 search volume if you ranked position 5 let’s estimate that you would likely achieve around 10,000 visitors over the month from that term at that position. Which is fine.
But with a mindset on marginal gains – let’s say you worked on that ranked page, developed some further supporting content, tweaked a couple of site areas and completed some further on-page work then that rank could increase to position 3.
That increase could potentially mean that traffic is now 15,000 – which doesn’t seem much but that extra 5,000 could equate to £50,000. For a small investment of focus and a marginal gains mindset that is a very strong ROI on hours vs revenue.
With this focus understood how ecommerce brands can adopt this process and start to work on “quick wins” in November around their Christmas campaigns in December.
The actions within this article can be deployed whether you are in position 5 or 15.
Remember even in November it’s still not late. Don’t take ranking Page 2 for granted.
Publish Fresh Christmas Product Themed Content Daily
You need to be publishing content daily in the run up to Christmas – this makes sure that Google is aware you are adding value to the users journey by creating content that assists the buyer. In recent studies, over 50% of customers expressed that they look to retailers for gifting inspiration during seasonal trading events such as Christmas. So as a brand you need to keep on developing short to long-form pieces (also not just content can be videos/imagery) along with “gift guides” to navigate the customers to products that intrinsically match their need for a gift recipient.
The publishing of content works in multiple ways to match search compliance, as an expert producing content based on having an experienced team this matches the E-EAT algorithm and updated guidelines on helpful content.
While at the same time offering new pages for Google to discover, matching freshness metrics where they tend to show recent published pieces over old articles.
Having worked with ecommerce brands and monitored the search results for the last 18 years – over the past few years this has happened a lot more frequently around seasonal events than other times.
Quick tip:
Make sure to create content that aligns with the primary buyer intent and has a product/category level alignment to ensure a natural clustering to internal link into the main high volume primary topic product listing page (PLP).
Action points
- Review all primary keywords and ensure you have a content calendar that aligns with these categories based around gifting and Christmas terms.
- Further develop keyword research around these topics that match the buyer-intent (review third-party keyword tools along with Google Search Console data).
- Once content has been created make sure you focus on getting visibility on these pieces and indexing (linking from core pages through menu and page content – see the Information Architecture point below).
Develop Social Media & PR Campaigns for search landscape coverage
Not SEO channel specific but still key for traffic and visibility.
Over the past few years, what tends to happen around key events such as Christmas the search fluctuates daily (sometimes hourly) so brands who are tracking keywords can see movement even though nothing has gone wrong/changed.
This can happen more around high-demand time periods as Google is constantly using user data to refactor the results to show the pages that best match their customers (the search engine users) needs. We will talk more about this later.
However, on some occasions what tends to happen is media publications and social media entrants position in the search index. This is usually caused by increased activity into these pieces and the freshness index pushing these pages as they are the most up-to date information within the category.
This can be frustrating. The only way to combat – invest in social media and PR.
A lot of the PR pieces will be already planned months in advance but make sure to reach out as until the piece goes live there is still an opportunity for listing.
Social media can be a little more difficult and could be anything. However, what has worked well in the past have been giveaways, in-store events or charitable donations as a way to get into these zero click social cards within the results.
Quick tip:
Develop your PR campaign around July/August to make sure you have visibility into these publications when they are launched (early-mid December).
Action points
- Plan a quick social campaign to launch on social media based around an engaging seasonal campaign idea (i.e. charitable event/giveaway)
- Take your main competitors, review their link profile (Ahrefs) and see what publications have linked to them the previous year during the event – build a media list using these sites and check that the publication date hasn’t elapsed
- Check Google news, filter date to the December period last year, type main keyword and review the publications come up against your comms plan to see if you have got these covered in your PR calendar
Build a proper customer-first gifting Information Architecture
Something that may not be easy to achieve in-house depending on the website CMS capability.
The further development of the websites architecture around gifting terms.
As we know from previous experience, customers “don’t like to think” and naturally gravitate towards specific named areas of a website that match their need – i.e. not thinking.
This is why ecommerce brands create “collection pages” based around gifting terms.
For example, on gifting sites many brands have a featured menu option for gifting – this could be collections for a recipient (gifts for mum), category (Christmas tree decorations) and filtered intent (gifts for less than £100) depending on the vertical.
As stated, it may be too late now to do this – but if it can be done it should be explored as there is significant demand and high conversion rates to be achieved from having such options within the navigation.
There is also a key area around inspiration as we know, customers are looking for retailers to guide them to gift ideas. There is a reason why the term X has Y search volume around key events such as Christmas. The term is in high demand.
Quick tip:
Go to your third-party keyword tool of choice and type in “Christmas + category” you will see the options that are available to you as a brand.
Action points
- Check that you have a Christmas category and themed pages (nested or not)
- Check that these pages are accessible through the main menu with a featured drop-down
- Assess feasibility for the development of new Christmas themed collection pages
- Undertake keyword research into these terms if above is able to happen
- At minimum place all new content and existing content into the navigation around “Christmas ideas” (if you can do so)
- If unable to do so – build strategy into next year to deploy the above
Christmas Taxonomy & URL Grouping
One of the most important and undervalued area of SEO. The clustering of pages within a topic level taxonomy – not necessarily URL or navigation based.
It is essential around events such as Christmas that you cluster themes so Google can understand the purpose, relevancy and intent of your pages clearly.
As an example, we know customers and even Google don’t come in only on the homepage – let’s say a hypothetical your PLP doesn’t have a navigation or footer, no breadcrumbs, no recommender assets or no way to navigate the site.
How would a customer or Google navigate the site? And even if it could how would it know what page it was visiting.
Now let’s say same page but there was a link within the page copy that said “prosecco gifts for mum” – the customer would understand clearly what was on the next page, so would Google. So, both would have a seamless customer journey and let’s say there were 100 pages like this Google would understand you have a lot of pages that match this topic intent. Higher preposition to rank.
Within your main category parent level PLP pages – Google should be under no doubt that these are the highest value to you as a business. This means contextual clustering.
At is most basic identity it is making sure the child/subpages along with the collection product detail pages (PDP) interlink within a content hierarchy back to the main page.
This is not navigation, footer, breadcrumbs, images or linkable assets sitewide. This is page level content asset linking.
The reason I state this is the most undervalued area within SEO is that it is very rarely done right (or at all) within ecommerce.
To do this takes a mix of technical awareness and content know-how – first you need to know the state of play then you need to invest in building once you know the gap/strategy.
Quick tip:
If you don’t have technical support or knowledge (plus access to third party SEO tools) you can get a list of all the pages linking into your main pages through Google Search Console. Another thing you can do spot check pages see if they are linking within the parent/child structure.
Action points
- Gather a list of your highest value ecommerce pages
- Complete an internal link review – recommended Screaming Frog inlinks export
- Filter the export to remove all links to the destination page that are navigation/footer
- Check these URLs to make sure they are linking on actual content links (sometimes breadcrumbs can show as content). A quick way to check is look at the anchor text for patterns.
- Filter/clean the data again and look for linkable gaps (homepage, other category PLP pages, PDPs and content assets
- Create a daily task to update pages with links, once changed and updated push the pages into inspect element to re-crawl/index in Google Search Console
- NB: Make sure to use different anchor text variations aligned to your keyword data – don’t just use the same one constantly as it has a negative effect
Fulfil customer intent through a seamless transactional journey
As detailed within the guide, the seasonal search index is very volatile. Daily fluctuation happens – the index is in a state of constant flux.
This happens because demand is so high – so each result gets clicked on thousands of times an hour, so Google has some much data to use to refactor the index to suit intent. Google said they don’t use click data – but we all know they do from recent admissions.
For example, a customer is looking for “novelty Christmas gifts for men” if Google show a site that a user “pogo sticks” off back to the search results then that intent is not matched. So, Google moves that page down the index in place of the site that matched the intent.
The above is very simplified but imagine that scenario happening ever millisecond – Google has that data to act upon that is why the index is so volatile.
This means that when you are ranking Page 1 position 5 many times SEO has done its job, it is now the job of the site to convert.
There are still some tweaks you can make to the on-page SEO – update page titles, meta description to contain USPs/brand benefits and keep an eye on keyword position CTRs/Impression/Click data within Google Search Console to “content upgrade” the page.
But the main work around this time needs to be more CRO & UX – it’s also an area that not many brands invest in during this time. However, you can learn so much as usually a lot of CRO work is completed on less than 1,000 sample set and doesn’t often take external factors into account.
Christmas time you can literally have 1,000 visitors an hour and customers keen to buy. This data is golden and can bring to the attention issues that need to be addressed that you may not have even been aware of on smaller isolated sample sets.
Having a basic CRO/UX programme live on your main PLP core traffic pages and PDPs is crucial as if you are able to act fast to address intent matching as if you are not matching intent at this time, you never will – this could be crucial for your SEO campaign as quantitative data would not report why this was happening.
Quick tip:
You don’t need to be CRO expert, setup a qualitative tracking tool such as; hotjar, VWO or use Microsoft Clarity (free) and monitor every 24 hours heatmaps and recordings on key transactional PLP/PDP pages and the checkout on multiple devices to see if any learnings can be gathered.
Action points
- Setup qual software as above (choose the one that best suits your brand/budget)
- Setup heatmaps and session recordings on core pages (identified above)
- Review data feed every 24 hours – feed in these learnings to the team
- Create a production schedule on “quick wins” and “technical issues” that are critical to fix
- Benchmark the before and compare with the after to check results
- NB: Keep an eye on high converting products/collection pages and increase their site visibility
- NB: Create CRO dashboards based on ecommerce data metrics and conversion performance data to triangulate with the qualitative insights to further feed into the business case why these areas need to be fixed now.
PS: With recent helpful content updates with the focus on experience-led content a good inclusion into any ecommerce site these days would be user generated visual content – showing the customers using the product along with reviews.
These are a list of potential actions that can be taken on your brands website in the run up to Christmas peak.
Some of these are easier to do than others and it really all depends on are these even feasible within your organisation to get done now, also do you have resource/knowledge to action as per the recommendations.
We must stress that it really is not too late and over the years we have affected a ranking increase from Page 2 to position 5 for high transactional terms (over 200,000 search volume) post a report issued mid-November. You can view our ecommerce SEO case studies for more information.
The key is action, awareness of the requests as although we have developed this guide to be easy to use the term “easy” is subjective – what is easy to some is not to others.
If after reading the guide, you have more questions than answers and are feeling a little overwhelmed but can see the signs that performance is not guaranteed then you should speak to one of our ecommerce consultants as timing it of the essence.
Our expert SEO team have advised on Christmas based tactical deployments within multiple ecommerce brands, numerous CMS platforms and can work with you to understand what is possible in the timeframe – plus get under the hood of the website to recommend customised quick wins outside of the guideline action points set within the guide.
