Early SEO Tips To Help Your Website Thrive This Holiday Season

Halloween is already here, and that means bigger holidays are just around the corner. Get your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) ready for the season of sales early this year! Here are five quick to add some desired cheer to your search rankings during these busy months.

Audit Your Website for the Holiday Season

Successful SEO changes don’t happen overnight! Prepare ahead of time if you want to keep up with the competition this holiday season. Going into your planning, take some time to audit your website. During your audit, have your SEO team take a look at how the site performed last holiday season and review the analytics to give yourself a clear idea of what worked and what improvements could be made to drive traffic to your landing pages.

Check Up on Your Site Speed

Site speed is a huge ranking factor for Google because it’s an element of a website that directly impacts bounce rates and the amount of time spent on a site in general. When these key performance indicators go in the wrong direction because your pages load slowly, it’s time to optimize for speed, because you’re already behind your faster competitors. If you find your site runs substantially slow, we suggest taking a look at free tools like GTmetrix or Google’s PageSpeed Insights to gain information about the speed of your pages, what exactly is slowing the site down, and how you can fix it. Some common reasons for a slow website include:

• Excessive redirects
• Poorly optimized images
• Use of the wrong image files
• Server performance
• Extraneous code

You want your website to be fast enough to provide a smooth user experience that keeps people engaged and willing to stick around to buy your product or service.

Focus on Content

Your site’s original content should also be a consideration during the holidays. Plan ahead and be prepared with social media and content scheduling. If you want to rank for specific gifts or holidays, you’ll need to have posts, blogs, and landing pages that are relevant to the topics and keywords you want to rank for. So, perform your keyword research and get your winter content ready for conversions.

Optimize Your Check-Out Process

Your usual checkout process could be too lengthy and tedious for the average holiday visitor. For your target audience, time is important at this time of the year. Don’t waste the consumers’ time with countless forms and confirmations.  Some ways that can speed up the checkout process can be:

• Not forcing registration for purchasing services
• The use of asterisks for mandatory fields in your forms
• Making the checkout page “clean”. Avoid the distraction of content overload. This area should keep consumers on the site and get them to reach the final step of the marketing funnel.
• Map out the checkout process for your customers. Showing where they are in the process gives them a visual “finish line” to their purchase.

Don’t Forget the Links!

Even if you have created fabulous holiday content, it’s best to create some internal linking that continues to spotlight your year-round landing pages. Internal links are hyperlinks that you create that lead to specific destinations on your site. Internal links are crucial to SEO because they establish a hierarchy on your website that lets Google know what the important pages are on your site. The cornerstone content you’ve highlighted with internal links plays a huge role in getting your site noticed by search engines and searching customers alike. During a crawl, search engines will review your site and rank its structure and established hierarchy. This shows how important maintaining internal linking optimization is to your site hold or increase its ranking spot on key search engines.

Let Dallas SEO Dogs Be Your Workshop Helper This Holiday Season!

Whatever your industry may be, the holiday season is most likely a busy one! With the attention that’ll have to go into your daily operations and customer service, SEO can easily become an afterthought. Don’t let overlooked optimization set your site back at the start of 2020! Let the SEO experts at Dallas SEO Dogs stay vigilant over your websites all year long! We are ready to meet you and get your site ranking! Contact us today to schedule your free consultation.