SEO Strategies for Holiday Landing Pages

SEO Strategies for Holiday Landing Pages

How to Plan Your SEO Strategy For Holiday Promotions

Holidays are always hectic, especially for the marketing department of any business. While many landing page strategies can be used to encourage web traffic and conversion during holiday seasons, SEO should be front and center. SEO is a task that never ends, no matter the size of the business and it should be part of your holiday marketing strategy. Read on to find out how to plan the perfect SEO strategy for your holiday-focused landing pages.

Evergreen Landing Pages

While creating different landing pages for every holiday every year seems like a good idea, it can create issues with your site’s optimization. Duplicate content is among biggest problems businesses run into when leaving multiple holiday pages live. If Google or another search engine sees the same information repeated on multiple web pages, search engine bots have a harder time prioritizing the most authoritative page (ideally your most recent and relevant holiday landing page.) We recommend planning an SEO strategy that includes evergreen landing pages for every relevant holiday in your marketing calendar.

A Single Page for All Holidays

Creating a single landing page that has updated content for each holiday is a great way to avoid problems with duplicate content. As each new holiday season approaches, change the keywords, banners, metadata, and copy to reflect what your company is marketing for every specific holiday. This type of single URL for all holidays is especially effective for businesses that do not tend to have much seasonality tied to holidays, but do want to acknowledge consumer demand for sales around those periods of the year.

Page authority is another aspect to consider. The longer a page is active, the more authority it gains with search engines, moving up in rankings and attracting new, relevant visitors. Remember, SEO is a long term effort that works well when you build on previous successes. The more time you have a properly optimized page live, the better.

A Unique Page for Each Holiday

To avoid the risk of duplicate content, you can also create unique pages for each holiday.

This sort of campaign is beneficial for consumer products or services that show dramatic opportunity changes tied to several major holidays throughout the year (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day, for example).

Businesses that want to pursue this SEO strategy should identify key, holiday-centric terms, and publish unique landing pages that are reused every year, and ideally are never taken offline. Small content updates or the addition of new goods or services can be used to refresh these URLs for each new year.

You should consider selecting keywords that are easy to keep relevant every holiday season. Build your yearly holiday ads around those keywords so that the traffic you are already gaining from them won’t be decreased. During off-seasons, these URLs can be moved to secondary or tertiary navigation (like the footer, sub-menus, or even just a sitemap).

Target Specific Interests or People

Another great holiday landing page strategy involves creating landing pages that target specific audiences who tend to frequent certain businesses during holiday sale periods. We often see ‘Christmas Gift lists for Techies’ or ‘10 gifts for the foodie in your life’ published around Christmas or other holidays. Like the prior strategy, these efforts work best if you can maintain a single URL year in and year out, with smaller content updates being required to modernize it for the new year.

If you’re a smaller business, you can also make these landing pages holiday agnostic and simply focus on the gift giving, the interest, or some other category (Gifts under $10, or Gifts for Techies, as examples). That can reduce maintenance effort for a smaller team, although it can diminish the term’s focus and thereby limit some of the keyword relevance to holiday specific opportunities.

Maximizing Traffic

When it comes to holiday landing pages, plan an SEO strategy based on how you already acquire relevant traffic. Our SEO technicians recommend using the web pages that are already established and bringing in potential customers to advertise for your holiday pages. You can easily add a banner on a home page or include a navigation link to your holiday pages within your site’s existing content. This strategy allows you to maximize the search engine traffic you are already receiving instead of trying to build new traffic in a short amount of time for every individual holiday.

Start Sooner Rather Than Later

Anyone who works in SEO knows it is part of the long game. Building holiday pages well in advance of the holidays themselves will help them to gain authority prior to them being relevant. While it may seem a little over eager to make a page available related to an upcoming holiday, it is never too soon in the world of SEO.

For example, we worked with an established home accessories and gifts store that specializes in handcrafted pewter and aluminum decor and Christmas ornaments. The Christmas season is vitally important to gaining sales from brand loyalists and new customers alike. That’s why we began publishing and optimizing holiday-related content at the beginning of June 2017 to preempt holiday demand. One of the Coalition team’s top priorities for this client was optimizing live web pages for the upcoming Christmas season and creating content for new products. Our team noted that the sooner those pages were available to Google, the better chance they had of being indexed properly before holiday related searches were trending.

Happier Holidays With Tailored SEO Strategies

Holiday landing pages can be a tricky part of search engine optimization for your company’s website. Deciding how to plan your SEO strategy is based on the way you want to keep content relevant throughout the years. The most important thing to remember is that targeted keywords and longevity are your best assets.

Do you want to know more about our tailored strategies for companies that want to maximize holiday traffic and revenue growth? Get in touch with our team today.

Related Posts That May Help