For many businesses, events like Christmas and Black Friday mean winter is potentially the most lucrative time of the year. However, in a very crowded market and with rivals at their most competitive, visibility in search engine results is crucial for attracting potential customers. In this post, we explain how to create an SEO strategy that can help you be more successful over the winter season.
Contents
Keyword research
The groundwork for any SEO strategy begins with keyword research. This will enable you to find the keywords that searchers will be using to find the products and services you offer so you can use them on your website. The better your keywords match the terms that people use in their searches, the greater the chance your pages have of ranking well in search results, potentially increasing the number of visitors your site will get.
With it being the winter season, you need to identify seasonally related keywords that are relevant to your business. These should include both long-tail and short-tail keywords to give you the best chance of ranking. As well-known businesses and brands often get to monopolise the top ranking positions for short-tailed keywords, long-tailed alternatives can be crucial to increasing search visibility. Typical seasonal search terms can include ‘Gifts for… (e.g., kids, teens, mums, etc),’ ‘Christmas… (e.g., decorations, party outfits, food)’ and ‘Winter… (e.g., skincare, holidays, coats).
Trends analysis
While many aspects of the winter season are traditional, for instance, most people will buy a Christmas tree, decorate the house and have a family dinner, trends do change. These days people may want to buy trees that can be replanted, use non-plastic decorations and eat a vegetarian alternative to turkey. At the same time, the gifts people look for can change from year to year depending upon what’s new or what’s fashionable.
For this reason, when creating content for the winter season, it’s important to research the current trends so that what you publish online contains the keywords associated with those trends. For instance, with a cost of living crisis still going on, the trend this year could be for pre-loved fashion (both eBay and Oxfam held pre-loved fashion shows at this year’s London Fashion Week).
To get an understanding of where trends lie, you can use free tools like Google Trends that let you compare the popularity of different search terms over time. This can show you if certain keywords are becoming more or less popular and identify those that are trending right now.
Besides just using these terms in your content, you can also include them in your product category names and descriptions. For example, if ‘sustainable gifts’ is a trending search term, you can create a sustainable gifts product category that will be indexed by search engines and boost your SEO for that term.
Seasonal landing pages
Once you have completed your keyword research and trends analysis, the next step in your winter SEO strategy is to create your seasonal landing pages and update any old ones that can easily be repurposed for this year.
While the content you use on these is dependent upon your own particular business, make reference to the latest trends in your niche and embed your keywords in your title, headings, content and meta descriptions. Include them in your new URLs too but do not include the year in the URL as this will make it difficult to be repurposed in the following years. If you use 2024, for example, it won’t attract many visitors or rank particularly well in the years to come.
Finally, to ensure that new pages get indexed quickly by search engines, include them in your website’s menus and add them to your XML sitemap. Additionally, look for the most advantageous places on your website where you can create internal links to your new landing pages. This not only boosts their PageRank but also increases the chance that visitors to other pages will click through to them.
Make sure your product pages get seen too, read: The Ultimate Guide to Boosting Your Product Page SEO
Content creation
When important landing pages are completed, the next step is to create other winter-related content, such as blog posts and gift-buying guides. While some of these should be evergreen content that can remain on your site and be relevant year after year, others should focus on the latest trends in order to attract this year’s key customers. Again, when creating these, remember to include relevant keywords and add internal links to your seasonal landing pages.
Schema markup
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a form of coding that lets Google and other search engines better understand your content and how relevant it is to someone’s search query, potentially improving your chances of ranking better. While the code can be manually added to your website’s HTML, for non-coders, the simplest solution is to use one of the various plugins that can do the job for you.
With regard to winter SEO, adding schema markup is something you should do during the content creation process as it can help your landing pages and other content appear in the rich snippets in search results and potentially improve clickthrough rates. Marking up your prices and reviews can be very helpful too.
Social Media
After your content has been published on your website, you can massively increase its visibility by posting it on your social media accounts. The benefit from an SEO perspective is that by sharing it, you can encourage backlinks and other social signals that can help it rank better in search engine results too.
Update Google Business Profile
Having a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is an excellent way to get noticed in searches and is particularly useful for boosting local business visibility on Google. For winter SEO, make sure you update your profile to show your seasonal opening times and highlight any promotions, events or special offers, using keywords where appropriate.
Local business? Get more help with SEO, read: Local SEO Strategies to Boost Your Business in 2024
Use helpful tools
There are various tools you can use to help you improve your SEO. For instance, Google Trends and Google Search Console can assist with finding the right keywords and understanding their popularity, and marketgoo goes even further, offering an all-inclusive suite of SEO tools that audit your site and provide a checklist of required optimisations, together with the tools to carry them out.
Other considerations
Do remember that SEO isn’t just about keywords, content, linking and markups. Search engine algorithms also take technical factors like website speed, reliability, security and mobile friendliness into account when deciding upon ranking positions. So, besides the winter strategy above, it’s important that any issues with these factors are properly addressed.
For more information, read: 5 Key Areas of Technical SEO
Conclusion
Winter SEO is a crucial step to ensure that your seasonal products, services and offers get the maximum visibility on search engines. By researching keywords and trends and creating new landing pages and associated content you increase your chances of ranking better in search results, especially if you add schema markup, share on social media and update your Google Business Profile. Hopefully, from reading this article, you’ll now have a clearer understanding of how to put a winter SEO strategy in place.
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