Christmas SEO for your online shop

Kicking off with Black Friday sales in November, the festive shopping season is starting earlier than ever, so there will be plenty of people that are already online searching for the perfect Christmas presents. To catch shoppers attention during the frantic Christmas shopping period you need to make sure your website is search engine optimised (SEO), so that your shop appears in search results when potential customers are searching for something that you sell.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is a way of improving how high up your website appears in search engine results, therefore increasing the chance that potential customers will come across your online shop when they’re searching on Google or other search engines. Find out more about the basics of SEO for your online shop here.

It’s important that you start optimising your website as soon as possible, as it can take several weeks for search engines to to re-index and update the ranking of your website.

Improving your online shop's SEO for Christmas 

Find and use keywords

Keywords are one of the most important parts of SEO - they are words and phrases that potential customers type into a search engine to find products.

If you don’t already know which keywords are relevant to your online shop you can find out by using Google’s free Keyword tool - this will help you find out what people type into Google to search for the items that you sell. These can be general keywords related to your overall shop, and item specific keywords for when someone knows exactly what they are shopping for.

Once you’ve found some keywords try combining them with ‘Christmas’ or ‘presents’ to find out which keywords you can use to improve your SEO to attract Christmas shoppers - the more specific you can get, the better.

Christmas gift categories

If you have several pages that are using the same keywords then they’ll be competing against each other in search results.  To avoid different pages using the same Christmas related keywords, create a Christmas category landing page - you can use all your Christmas keywords on the category page and then for each product you can keep the product description unique and relevant to that item.

A lot of people will be online searching for gifts for a specific person, so if you have a wide range of potential Christmas presents that may be suitable for different kinds of people you should have several categories pages for gifts.

Create Christmas content

If you have a blog for your online shop then create Christmas related blog posts around your keywords and include links to pages and products on your website. When you’re writing content make sure it’s interesting and helpful as well, and don’t overuse your keywords. Google judges each web page on whether it contains valuable content, and will penalise you for keyword stuffing.

Bold & Noble’s blog post with gift suggestions is a great example of how you can create interesting and helpful content that will improve your search engine ranking and encourage customers to shop with you.

Come up with a plan for your blog content, and write posts in advance so that they can be relevant to different promotions or sales you’re planning on running, the different Christmas related categories you’ve created, and your best selling products. Find out more about planning your Christmas marketing here.

Review your product pages

You don’t want to change each individual product page to include something Christmas related, but you should make sure they all have relevant keywords in the page title, meta descriptions and ALT text for images.

For more information about improving your online shop’s SEO for Christmas take a look at these links:

• SEO for online sellers
• Christmas SEO: Strategies for ecommerce websites
• Christmas SEO: Don't forget your seasonal keywords
• 10 crucial SEO tips for ecommerce entrepreneurs