Christmas SEO Tips

From extending seasonal sales events to creating an attractive gift guide for your customers, here are 14 answers to the question, “Can you share some Christmas-friendly SEO strategies that have worked well for you in past years?”

• Extend Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales
• Partner Up With Influencers
• Create a Resource Page on Your Website
• Curate Holiday-Themed Landing Pages
• Avoid Using the Year (or Change Titles if You Do)
• Use Evergreen Holiday URLs
• Add Relevant Christmas Keywords
• Try a Christmas Cold Outreach Campaign
• Take Advantage of Affiliate Marketing
• Share Christmas PR Tips
• Upgrade Your Page’s Load Speed
• Ensure Your App/Website Is Mobile-friendly 
• Reuse Your Existing Content
• Offer a Gift Guide

Extend Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales

One SEO strategy that I have found to be particularly successful during the holiday season is to extend your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns and extend them into a larger holiday sale. This allows you to capture more traffic from those who are looking for deals and discounts during the holiday season.

Additionally, it is important to adjust your content strategies accordingly and only create content that encourages customers to purchase something during your sale and promote any special offers or promotions you have running.

Michael Fischer, Founder, Elite HRT

Partner Up With Influencers

Last year for Christmas, I included influencers in my SEO mix. I paid them to promote my website on their social pages and blogs. I was mainly looking for traffic from multiple sources, and influencers definitely helped. 

While my offers were super-convincing; huge discounts, no shipping fee, and limited-time offers; they helped me convert that traffic easily. The trick of the trade is to find budget-friendly influencers who can give you traffic from multiple social sites and websites, which can signal Google a positive response. Automatically, your Christmas pages get picked up faster.

Gerrid Smith, Chief Marketing Officer, Joy Organics

Create a Resource Page on Your Website

One Christmas-friendly SEO strategy that has worked well for me is creating a resource page on my website dedicated to gift ideas. I include links to my jewelry products and others that I think would make exceptional gifts.

I then reach out to bloggers and ask them to link to my resource page for a link back to their website. This has been a successful strategy for me in the past, and it helps boost traffic to my website during the holiday season.

Aviad Faruz, CEO, FARUZO

Curate Holiday-Themed Landing Pages

This strategy has done wonders for us over the last few years. It shines a light on top opportunities and makes sure that we have enough room for content development.

We optimize our SEO elements to go well with the festive season. We incorporate colors such as red and white on our landing pages so that our prospective consumers feel like they are wanted. 

Our marketing team also inserts internal links to the new landing pages. This measure helps improve our chances of engagement, especially during the festive season when people are looking for the best deals in the market.

Jay Bats, Co-Founder, ContentBASE

Avoid Using the Year (or Change Titles if You Do)

If you’re looking to create evergreen content, don’t put any dates in your URLs. If you want to include the year in your headings or title, make sure you remember to change it out every year. You can add calendar reminders to notify you so you can update them accordingly.

Sara Bodner, Digital Content Manager, Conklin Media

Use Evergreen Holiday URLs

Using evergreen URLs helps to boost your page ranking because you’re able to maintain the page’s SEO ranking every year. 

An example of an evergreen URL is /holiday-sales rather than using /2022-holiday-sales. When you keep the same URL, you don’t have to work hard to boost its SEO every year, you just have to make a few tweaks to optimize it for the current season. 

After you’ve made your seasonal updates, submit your site to be re-crawled by Google to ensure it has the most current site information.

Michael Nemeroff, CEO & Co-Founder, Rush Order Tees

Add Relevant Christmas Keywords

One Christmas and holiday-friendly SEO strategy that has worked well in the past for my company was adding relevant Christmas keywords throughout your website. 

One way to get started is by updating your web pages and product descriptions with some keywords. If your product listings, category pages, and landing pages don’t contain the Christmas-themed keywords people are searching for, then they will not be seen on search engines. 

You’ll need to start with some market and SEO research to see what specific keywords and phrases are popular this year. It’s very important to choose which specific keywords you want to rank for on the different pages on your website and think about how relevant they are on those pages, their search volume numbers, and how difficult it is to rank them!

David Ring, Senior Marketing Manager, MCT – Trading

Try a Christmas Cold Outreach Campaign

Every year, I have an outreach campaign for my Christmas-themed solitaire game, and every year, the response rate is significantly higher than with my usual outreach campaigns.

Last year it was 447% higher. My strategy is to contact sites that wrote a “Happy holidays” blog post the year before and offer them to implement a Christmas-themed solitaire game on their upcoming “Happy holidays” post. 

Cold outreach campaigns are notorious for low response rates, but this really hits the mark. The site owners get to give their readers a fun little game to play over the holidays, and they’re usually so grateful that they’ll mention my site, which is excellent for SEO. So it’s a win-win for everyone.

Holger Sindbaek, Founder & CEO, Online Solitaire

Take Advantage of Affiliate Marketing

I’ve worked at two leading SEO agencies and now coach SEO affiliates.

One of the best ways to get your site to rank for the Christmas season is by using affiliate marketing. This is where you recruit affiliates to promote your site for a commission.

My previous company was working great in 2021, but the “review update” is making it harder these days. So going forward, you can leverage affiliate partners to pay commissions on clean friendly links or coupon codes. Now you can find authority E.A.T. experts and partners to help you own multiple SERP placements to be ready for peak holiday sales. 

Brian Hawkins, Marketing Manager, GhostBed.com

Share Christmas PR Tips

One of the best Christmas-friendly SEO strategies a company can use is responding to Christmas-relevant pitches from journalists who are writing articles on Christmas content. 

For example, in our field, an SEO strategy for Christmas would be to provide our expert advice on the latest events and traditions happening in Las Vegas for Christmas or how to celebrate Christmas in Las Vegas and get backlinks to our company website.

Jenna Nye, CEO, On the Strip

Upgrade Your Page’s Load Speed

The Christmas period brings with it a vast increase in traffic to many websites and while this may be good news for the business, it presents some potential problems if the site has not been carefully optimized. 

The first thing you will need to do is to ensure that your servers can handle the increase in traffic. Once this is done, check your page load speed. A page that takes too long to load will cause visitors to leave the site, and this will seriously affect your SEO ranking. 

Remove any clutter from your landing page and check all the links for errors. Compress any files larger than 150 bytes and ensure they are in the correct format. By improving the page load speed for your visitors, you will improve your SEO rank and reduce the bounce rate leading to higher sales figures.

Colin Palfrey, Chief Marketing Officer, Crediful

Ensure Your App/Website Is Mobile-Friendly 

Christmas provides different benefits and challenges for the retail industry every year. As Google changes and consumers adopt new buying habits, merchants must adapt if they are to meet their goals. Making a mobile-friendly site is one of the best SEO strategies you can use.

To guarantee that customers who are shopping on mobile devices have a positive experience on your site, and have an easy time navigating and making a purchase, it is essential to have a mobile-responsive site. Besides having a website that is optimized for mobile devices and allows customers to make purchases, mobile devices are crucial for local Christmas shoppers who are out and about looking for stores.

We can all relate to the hectic holiday shopping experience; before making a purchase, customers may visit a store, use their mobile device, and then return to their PC. Therefore, ensure that your website or app has a lovely Christmas design.

Andre Oentoro, Founder & CEO, Breadnbeyond

Reuse Your Existing Content

Before bringing on new content, analyze how many visitors have actually seen your old content. To make full use of a content piece, use it at least three to four times. 

If you have a guide or checklist, update it with this year’s trends and planning. You can also send them in an email to your customers so that they can see the updated 2022 guides on your site. 

Making new content is great, but refining the old content you have is way better, as you’re not missing out on the old and new trends.

Anahit Manukyan, Digital Marketing Strategist, 55Brokers

Offer a Gift Guide

When working with a small business owner who sold holistic products, I created a gift guide showcasing sustainable, eco-friendly products in the range. 

We categorized the gifts by price, featuring attractive images and highlighting who they’d be suitable for. When we posted a link to the gift guide on social media, it generated a lot of shares and comments driving highly qualified traffic back to the website.Marie O’Sullivan, Web Designer & SEO Specialist, Marie O’Sullivan