Should you change your Search Strategy for Christmas?

by Chloë Thomas

Around this time of year, you may well be thinking whether you should be changing your SEO focus for the Christmas period.

SEO activity can take anything from 4-6 months to several years to properly bed in, so it’s a little late to try refocusing entirely for Christmas 2014. Plus you need to be certain whether it’s even needed for your site or whether you can rely on the SEO structure that you have at the moment.

The question of whether to change SEO to be Christmas focused should be asked straight after Christmas this year in preparation for next year. You need to formulate an SEO plan as early as possible because, as you can imagine, Christmas keywords are highly competitive, so you will have your work cut out. So the earlier you start the better, get keyword research kicked off in January and take a look into Google analytics and PPC data from the Christmas period just gone to gain better insights into what keywords may work for next year and whether it’s worth changing them.

So can you do ANYTHING to help your Christmas SEO efforts?

You can still prepare for the Christmas traffic. You don’t necessarily need to change your SEO to grab the Christmas searchers, traffic ramps up on all keyphrases naturally. SEO is a long term project so it’s important to start off with the best keyphrases you can. It’s best practice to aim your SEO at keywords that describe what you offer all year round.

  • I would suggest that you have an audit of your webpages to make sure you aren’t making any simple mistakes, so checking your keywords are focused enough and that everything onpage reads well and that there are no coding errors etc.
  • Redirect any 2013 Christmas pages (if they are still live) to a page that is more relevant. It’ll boost your Pagerank and also not scare customers off!
  • Continue with your day to day SEO efforts. So continue to link build effectively, participate in social media and blogs, and try to get as much exposure as possible.

All of this will help you gain as much good traffic as you can this Christmas period.