and how you should prepare your holiday SEO campaigns.

Black Friday, Cyber-Monday, Christmas, Boxing Day and all other holiday shopping days will be here before you know it. Really. Black Friday will be here in just over 90 days.

There are several reasons to prepare your SEO campaign for the holiday season if you have clients or businesses that depend on seasonal holidays at the end of the year for revenue:

• can take up to eight weeks (or longer) to index a page, if at all.
• It can take a lot of time to create or update related content.
• The consumer is more deliberate and researches more before making a purchase.

The best time to start preparing for seasonal sales is in the first quarter. This is especially true if there are technical optimizations that you need or want to make to stay competitive.

It will be a bit more of a sprint in the third quarter, but it is possible.

Indexing

We know that it can take some time for new pages to appear in Google’s search index.

This also applies to pages which have bounced back and forth between 404 or 302 for long periods.

If there is no one to tell you otherwise, this happens a lot with seasonal pages.

It takes Google some time to adjust. Google has stated that they will regularly check the 404 page before delisting it.

We want to be conservative, and assume that the worst will happen – at least eight weeks.

Ranking is not indexing. Ranking in the top 10 takes time.

With the helpful update, and Google’s push to create truly unique and useful contents, indexing has become a new battlefield for many websites.

It is important to maintain your seasonal pages regularly and to allow them to grow in authority.

Please stop creating new pages for Black Friday and Christmas sales every year (I’m talking to you, /Christmas-2022).

Create evergreen pages and redirect historical pages with links to the new evergreen page.

In an ideal situation, you would keep these pages online all year round, but this is not always possible for various reasons, including legal and regulatory ones.

You can help Google index the pages faster by adding internal links to them before the season begins. This will let Google know which pages are important .

It is easier to do this if you are working with the sales or merchandising teams.

Here are some suggestions to help maintain indexing of seasonal pages, rather than being triggered by a soft404:

• Update the metadata as soon as the seasonal sales have ended. If applicable, include the next year in the metadata.
• Include a placeholder that lets customers find deals or sales through copy such as “Our holiday sales are over. Browse through our current offers,” with a hyperlink to the generic sales pages.
• Keep all internal links on the page.

You can also find out more about the content on this page.

The seasonal sales content you create is not just a list of all your products on sale for the year.

It may seem obvious, but sometimes the product team or the go-to market team will miss the integration needed with the content teams in order to create seasonal purchasing guides, price comparisons tools, integrate social media campaigns, and new seasonal visuals.

You should also audit your product pages, to ensure they are as consumer-focused and as efficient as possible. You could do this by:

• Make sure that images are compressed. Shopify’s auto-compression is limited. Even if the original image was 5 MB in size, it could end up being “compressed” to around 1 MB on your website.
• Check the topics and entities covered on each page using TFIDF or similar tools. Fill in any gaps.
• Include rich media at all stages of the customer journey: images, videos, and links to educational content.
• Schema markup is used to create product pages and reviews.

We can’t ignore the importance of cross-channel effects.

This is because content in this case does not refer to the content itself, but rather to the technical optimization that lies behind it. As an example:

• Integrate “Click and Collect”, or in-store availability, on your website.
• Your CRM or analytics platform can track and attribute online purchases to in-store ones.

It takes time to justify these items and they move up the queue in order of priority with developers and other stakeholders.

It’s better to start working on these technical optimizations next year, rather than during this holiday season.

Consumer trends

Research is becoming more important as the way we shop continues to evolve.

• In 2022, 80% of holiday shoppers said that they did research prior to purchasing.
• 74% of respondents to a survey said they planned ahead for their purchases.

Many people know what they’ll buy as holiday gifts for the end of the calendar year in May.

Black Friday in the U.S. begins before Thanksgiving, if not even earlier.

It’s not only consumers who are getting ahead – if we look at the news related to Black Friday 2023 in August, we see some interesting trends.

• Tom’s Guide, a third-party review/comparison site, has just posted their Black Friday predictions.
• GQ has also published its “Best of” Black Friday piece.
• Black Friday sales were held by several retailers (Best Buy Macy’s Samsung).

It’s more than just having a webpage published on your website when the merchandise starts to go live a few weeks before the sale.

Understanding how to handle stakeholders and how long you will need to allow for certain projects can be crucial to a successful Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale period.

You are interested in:

• Google will take time to review your money page, as well as any supporting research.
• Give your developers the time they need to implement any technical improvements that have been proven best practices over the past 12-18 months.
• Align your marketing campaign with the current and anticipated consumer behavior of your target market by working with the go-to-market team or another team.

All of these things require time, and they may have to be put off for more urgent work.

Give yourself some grace. Track all your work and the time it takes. Then report on what you did and how well you did.

You and your stakeholders can then do this again next year and have a better understanding of what it takes to build authority in an ecommerce company for seasonal peaks.

The post How to prepare for your holiday SEO campaign now and why first appeared on Search Engine Land.