5 Tips for Holiday SEO & Internet Marketing

Whether you use your website for e-commerce solutions or simply as a way to generate leads for your sales team, you can do several things to optimize your website for the holidays.

 

The search engines' relatively new markup language, Schema.org, is one of the best ways to communicate the nature of your products and content to the Big 3 (Google, Bing, Yahoo!). Schema is similar to Google's rich snippets -- HTML code embedded around content to tell you what it is about -- but is decipherable by the Big 3. Product microdata allows the search engines to better understand your products and how to index them. This will bring increased web visibility during the holiday season.

 

Visitors need a place to land when a promotion brings them in. If it's a big promotion that you want to take the front burner during the holiday season, optimize existing product pages for holiday keywords. If it's simply a part of your e-commerce and marketing operation, create a holiday-focused organic landing page and optimize it using valuable industry holiday keywords.

 

 

3. Use social media to push promotions
Social media networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, are great vehicles for getting the word out about your company's holiday promotions and linking to your website. Buffer your Tweets so you can spend some quality time writing them in advance. We use Buffer App for our Tweet queue.

 

4. Optimize your local listings and customer reviews
If you sell a product with holiday or gift relevance, you can be sure people will be looking up reviews on your local listing profiles to find out more about your products and services. Make sure all of your local listings -- especially on Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Yelp -- have accurate and consistent information (addresses, phone numbers, links, business hours, etc.). Additionally, encourage your customers to leave positive reviews (if they're happy with your products) so your business rating will improve across your local directory profiles.

 

5. Cross promote with likeminded companies
Cross promotion allows you to access the audience of companies that are similar to -- but not the same as -- yours. Trade blog posts with links to partners' products (don't forget the target="_blank" to open in a new window), and swap Tweets and Facebook statuses. You can even combine products to form a gift package. In the example below, Hickory Farms has teamed up a wine company to create a summer sausage, cheese and wine holiday gift basket. Everyone wins.