SEO – Santa & Elf Optimisation

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Now that the festive season is upon us, it’s time to take a look at what you can do to fully optimise your e-commerce site for the coming Christmas shopping period. Here are three great tips to get started:

Launch a Christmas shop

Most e-commerce sites will see a healthy increase during the festive period, as consumerism is often at its highest peak of the year. Some users may access your site directly with your brand or a particular product in mind. However it is important to remember the less organised shoppers, who don’t particularly know what they’re looking for, will type in Christmas related long tail searches.

For example, “mens christmas jumpers” has seen a huge increase in searches over the last 90 days:

The difficulty is, few sites would be targeting this term all year round. Starting a Christmas section of your site can really help your site to rank for such terms, as you wouldn’t naturally be targeting the word “Christmas” on a year round basis. The Christmas section can then be redirected to a relevant page once the period is over.  This new Christmas section of your site should also have relevant, Christmassy content in order to help you rank for these stray long tail terms.

Offer Christmas Traffic Bait

In order to attract users to your site in the first place, why not consider releasing something creative to launch your Christmas shop? Jean Paul Gaultier this year launched a “Naughty Advent Calendar” where users can win Jean Paul Gaultier gifts every day. Though it is largely flash based (not exactly search engine friendly), this has amassed a lot of interest with 2.3k Facebook likes so far. This is a great way to drive both links and potential revenue-driving traffic to your site.

Christmas up your meta data

Now is the time to review your meta data and make sure you are targeting key Christmas related terms. Find out the key Christmas terms for the products on your site and tailor your meta titles and descriptions around them. This is can have a huge impact, for example in a search for “mens christmas socks”, Sockshop.co.uk rank first with the meta title “Christmas socks for men”, despite this page having few links and the site as a whole having a lower domain authority than the competitors below it in this results page.

The Christmas period is a great time for any e-commerce site, but these three extra things should help put some extra sparkle into your site this year.