Are you well-equipped for the holiday season? Perhaps you’ve been procrastinating and now you’re struggling to figure out how to boost your organic search traffic for the holidays.
Don’t worry. It’s not yet too late but, at this point, you need to evaluate your SEO campaign with the help of the following questions.
Do you have Google My Business page?
If you’re a business with a brick-and-mortar presence, it’s essential to create, verify and optimise your Google My Business page. This is absolutely critical for local SEO, but it has big benefits for any type of businesses. Here are the core two benefits:
- It tells Google that you’re a company and you’re verified at a location.
- A search for your brand is more likely to produce a Knowledge Graph result that includes information from your Google My Business listing.
Doing a proper Google My Business page usually takes a few hours only. In order to be verified, Google will send a postcard to your location, and you’ll need to enter a code from the postcard if you want to take advantage of all the features the tool offers. Once requested, the card often arrives in just a few days — but it can take longer, so get this done today.
Are your titles and descriptions optimised?
Titles impact search rankings directly; descriptions do not. But they both do impact “click-throughs”. So take the time to go through your titles and descriptions to make sure they’re optimised for SEO and click-through rates — that they contain your keywords but are written in a way that appeals to the searchers and draws them onto the page.
What keywords are you focusing on?
If you’ve indeed procrastinated and are now frantically trying to make the most of the holidays, it’s time to build from the ground up and start looking at the keywords toward the bottom of the list (not at the top-tier phrases).
Let’s look at “christmas gift” as an example.
Since it’s a high-volume keyword, there’s a greater competition for it. Here are the lower-volume keywords you can use in place of “christmas gift”:
Going for the biggest phrases will cause you to fail, but focusing on the lower-hanging fruit with less competition can get you the traffic you want. If there’s a specific niche, brand or value-add you offer, then figure out what keywords match with it and focus there. It may not be that fascinating, but it’ll pay the bills and perhaps help you fund your efforts to rank for the bigger terms in 2017.
Have you reviewed your content and current rankings?
If you find unoptimised content, you obviously need to remedy it. At this stage, you need to make a list of all your pages (or at least all your potential organic landing pages) and go over them to ensure that they’re properly optimised to target keywords you have a chance of attaining in such a short period of time.
You should also review your current rankings (Search Console is a great place to start) and, again, focus on phrases that rank low on the first page or high on the second, as those terms will likely be the easiest to get into the clickable positions.
Are you maximising advertising tools?
It’s possible to rank not just on Google, but also on sites like Top4 and Yelp. Fortunately, the algorithms of these sites aren’t as sophisticated as Google’s.
On Top4, for example, you can claim your listing (or add it if it’s not yet on the site) and optimise it.
If that doesn’t work, you can also consider paid advertising, which is generally far cheaper on sites mentioned above than the AdWords system.
Conclusion
In the next few weeks, you’ll be busy with your holiday SEO campaign, but it’s in January that your real work begins.
While you may be repairing this year, you should also be preparing for next year. Your major goal should be to ensure that by this time next year, you’ll just be maximising the conversions on your wonderfully ranking site (not wondering how to get it ranking at all).
If ever you need help for your SEO efforts, contact these digital marketing pros today.