Season's Greetings: Holiday SEO Tips

The holiday season is one of the biggest revenue periods for many small businesses, and ramping up your search campaigns for holiday sales can help make your 4thquarter results even more impressive. There are multiple factors of consumer sentiment which change as you approach the end of the year: consumers become more oriented toward meeting their New Year financial and health goals, while also investing in gifts for their loved ones. As a result, nearly every industry can benefit by creating end of year specific Holiday campaigns designed to meet consumer needs.

To start, you'll want to evaluate the specific types of offers that you'll introduce at year end. If you're offering holiday gift packages or gift certificates, it's important to implement content pages targeting these specific offers. Building high quality content and design pages, however, is just a start: you'll want to make sure that you build links to these new pages. One way to generate inbound links for the holiday seasons is to co-create a promotion along with a local media site, magazine or blogger - this will ensure you get quality links and promotion at the same time. While targeting your local audience is important, it's also crucial that you offer is designed to retain consumers after the holiday season.

The nature of the content should be keyword-rich but also well balanced to appeal to consumers. Make sure that you have optimized meta titles, descriptions and URLs so that you can properly target your keywords. Getting your pages indexed quickly is important for time-sensitive campaigns, so make sure you submit an updated sitemap and generate links to the pages in a timely fashion.



Using Meta Tags to Optimize Your Site for Search

One of the most effective site updates you can make to your site is to optimize unique meta tags for each page. Just as you might spend time identifying the most effective headline and description for your Adwords text-ads, choosing the right meta-title and description can improve your organic search click-through and conversion rate. In the example below, computer company Dell has optimized their meta title to focus on the variety of products the company offers, while providing a meta-description that targets each particular customer segment:


Providing a summary of your core brand messaging

Your choice of meta-tags plays an important role not only in determining your positioning in the search results, but also in establishing a message for your brand. The example above is designed to target the breadth of the company's offerings, as well as the nature of their product and service solutions for all technology users. Pay close attention to the keywords and overall flow of your meta-tags so that you convey a clear message of what your company stands for.


As a startup company, Mint.com had to brand itself as a free personal finance organizer. Through effectively targeting keywords such as "personal finance software" and "budget planning", the company crafted an identity for their online brand for new and existing customers. Whether you have a well known brand that you're looking to expand or need to craft a unique online identity, meta-tags are one of the most important sources to target relevant searches.

 
Google is a registered trademark of Google, Inc. This website is not associated, affiliated or endorsed by Google, Inc.