Five Holiday Internet Marketing Tactics to Start Right Now
A new article on Search Engine Journal reports that if you're ready for the holidays, you can get some final, last-minute SEO and SEM strategies in place to make the most of the 2021 season.
The holidays always sneak up on us. Whether you end up scrambling to find the right gift for someone or rushing to ensure the perfect products you sell end up in front of shoppers, you need to make the most of the time you have available. If you haven't already deployed your holiday marketing strategies, it's time to prioritize and get to work.
SEO takes time. If you need to develop backlinks and create content to secure rankings, it's likely time to start SEO planning and strategizing for the 2022 season by now. That doesn't mean all hope is lost. There are strategies (including organic) that can still help you make the most of this year, even with mere weeks left until the holiday kick-off. Here are five top tactics to help you make the most of the 2021 holiday season:
The holidays always sneak up on us. Whether you end up scrambling to find the right gift for someone or rushing to ensure the perfect products you sell end up in front of shoppers, you need to make the most of the time you have available. If you haven't already deployed your holiday marketing strategies, it's time to prioritize and get to work.
SEO takes time. If you need to develop backlinks and create content to secure rankings, it's likely time to start SEO planning and strategizing for the 2022 season by now. That doesn't mean all hope is lost. There are strategies (including organic) that can still help you make the most of this year, even with mere weeks left until the holiday kick-off. Here are five top tactics to help you make the most of the 2021 holiday season:
- Offers: This is a gift from Google to business owners who are active with their Google My Business listings. Brodie Clark first spotted a change in local search results that includes offers in map results. There are a number of great reasons to add offer posts in Google My Business but until this change, a lot of the benefit revolved around branded queries. Now, the posts will trigger additional information in your map result, which is especially important for local SEO. It's likely to assist in ranking by boosting relevancy for terms in the offers, as well as improving clickthrough rates.
- Repurpose Your Pages: If you offer a Black Friday or other holiday sale, make the page evergreen. If you have regular holiday sales, you want to always host the current one at the same URL as previous. To get an idea of the simplest benefit let's look at Amazon's Black Friday page: They host it at the same URL each year and now benefit from that. When their next sale starts, they'll have a strong and relevant page. If you want to keep your past offers online for whatever reason, you can simply move them to a new sub-page. For example, if you were Amazon you could host last year's at: https://www.amazon.ca/blackfriday/2020
- Focus On SERP Features: There may be queries you want but can't have. Queries that are just too far outside your weight class (time to get started for 2022, right?). For some of these queries, you'll do well to focus on SERP features and think outside the box on how to target them. For example, ranking for "cod vanguard" is going to put you up against the game developers, and "buy cod vanguard" pits you against sites like Microsoft and Playstation. You might do okay with local results if you can beat out sites like Best Buy.
- Trends: As we noted with the addition of the offers functionality above, Google seems to be dishing up some handy tools for marketers this holiday season. Another new feature takes a tactic I've talked about previously - paying attention to terms that trend for the holidays - and makes it even easier. Until recently, you had to look at your keyword data to extrapolate this information. Google is now showing people how individual queries are trending over the past three months.
- Ads: Budgets might be tight, but it really does take money to make money. When people think of Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, they generally think in terms of search ads, which can get pricey. If you're on a budget, there's still a place for you in ads via the Display Network. Namely: remarketing. There are two angles you can take on this (and I recommend both, if you can manage it). The first is simple remarketing. You put your ads in front of people who have been to your site. Additionally, one of the unsung heroes of remarketing is Customer Lists. Upload your customer lists to Google and remarket to them. You can also expand on this list by remarketing to people similar to those in your lists/audiences. Use this in combination with your email campaigns to make sure your holiday messaging reaches your audience at multiple touchpoints.
