Paid media spend is through the roof in Q4, especially in the Black Friday-Cyber Monday timeframe. One way to mitigate huge spend increases and stay on target for your growth goals: SEO strategies that capture the buying intent of the season.
(Note: these work for any seasonal spikes, e.g. July Fourth for watersports products, so look for ways to apply them all year.)
We segment our holiday strategies into the following initiatives:
Let’s dig into each.
Around just about any holiday, we recommend you target long-tail keywords that capture user shopping intent, e.g.
So this could look like:
This has worked well in the past, particularly for clients who build these pages and refresh the content within them every year (and hide them when they’re not seasonally relevant). We recommend creating a dedicated landing page for each major holiday or promotional event – for instance, a Black Friday hub that contains all of your product promotions, with clear CTAs and details about the season’s discounts and promotions.
Don’t be afraid to get creative in enticing users to take actions with short- and long-term value attached. Options include creating a countdown timer for the landing page and offering access to additional discounts for new and existing email subscribers.
Go up the funnel just a bit and use your holiday as a segue into teaching users more about your products. Following our pickleball example, holiday-specific blog posts could include:
Your product and category pages aren’t set-and-forget; use the holidays to update messaging to add holiday urgency.
First, update your product descriptions: “The most popular paddle in pickleball is back in stock for the holidays – save 10% before they sell out.”
Next, consider bundle deals to add to your category pages: “New for Black Friday: save 20% on our pickleball start-up package including two paddles, four balls, and a pop-up net.”
Supplement your SEO and paid campaigns by fleshing out other owned media, specifically email and Instagram/TikTok.
At minimum, your holiday email campaigns should promote Black Friday sales, bundles, and new content. Emails should include:
Make sure to leverage your prime email real estate (subject lines and preheaders) to call out exclusive holiday discounts (e.g. “Exclusive Black Friday Pickleball Deals – Shop Now to Save 20%”).
Make sure you’ve got your holiday social media strategy ready to go with fresh creative and offers. We recommend:
Remember, anything that gains traction organically should be considered for paid campaigns – even just boosted posts – as well.
Most SEOs know all about structured data and schema, but a surprising number don’t update those initiatives to capitalize on holiday shopping seasons.
For product schema markup, we recommend that you:
For review and offer schema:
Perhaps most importantly, make sure you’ve got reporting set up to understand what’s working and how big an impact the initiatives have on your holiday growth. If you’d like to brainstorm more ideas or insights on using your organic properties to drive seasonal results in your vertical, drop us a line to chat!