Holiday SEO Checklist by MarketGoo

Run this checklist to prepare your site for the Holidays!

Local:

Update your Google My Business hours

Update Name, Address and Phone across ALL listings

Social:

Run a Contest

Run a Hashtag Campaign

Offer exclusive discounts

Tracking:

Add your site to Google Search Console

Consider heatmap testing

Keywords:

Identify high performing content on your page

Identify your Holiday specific keywords

Content:

Create a dedicated Landing Page

Create Google Posts

Start blogging

Scour for broken links

Perform cross-browser and mobile checks

Test your emails

Local:

Update your Google My Business hours

If you don't yet have a Google My Business page, read this and create one.

If you schedule special hours for an official holiday, users will be told that those hours are scheduled specifically for the holiday. If you don't provide special hours for these days on Google My Business, users on Maps and Search will be warned that the location's hours may differ on designated holidays.

Set special hours on your Google My Business page by signing into Google My Business and following these instructions:

1

For a single location: From card view, choose the listing you’d like to set special hours for and click Manage location. If you’re viewing your locations as a list instead of cards, switch to card view by clicking the cards icon on the right side above your locations. Click Info from the menu on the left side of the page.
2

For multiple locations: From list view, select the locations you’d like to set special hours for. If you’re viewing your locations as cards instead of a list, switch to list view by clicking the list icon on the right side above your locations.
3

Click the pencil icon in the top-right corner of the page.
4

Click the "Special hours" section.
5

Click "Confirm hours" next to an upcoming holiday. Or click "Add new date" to choose a different date.
6

Enter the opening and closing times for that day.
7

Slide the circle to “Closed” to indicate that the location is closed all day.
8

If you're open 24 hours, click Opens at and select 24 hours from the dropdown menu that appears.
9

If you enter closing hours past midnight, make sure to set them properly.
10

When you’ve finished entering all of your special hours, click Apply. Your special hours will appear to customers on Google only for the designated days.

Update Name, Address and Phone across ALL listings

It's extremely important that your Business Name, Address and Phone number is accurate and updated across all listings:

Google My Business
Yelp
YellowPages
Angie's List
Your local trade association or chamber of commerce website

Run a Contest

This is a surefire way to get people visiting your store.

Photo contests work well on Instagram and Facebook, and you can allow people to get creative by setting a theme (costume photos, awkward family photos/blunder year Christmas photos, etc)
Fill in the blanks get great engagement on Facebook and are probably the easiest to set up, because you can just pin it as a status update on your page. Ideas include: "All I want for Christmas is ______ ." ; "I realized the truth about Santa when ______ ." ; "My family's weird Christmas tradition is _____ ."
Multi-day giveaways, where you give out prizes every day for a certain period ("12 Days of Christmas") often get the best engagement on Facebook because fans come back again and again to enter.

1

Photo Contest
2

Fill in the Blank
3

Multi-day giveaways

Run a Hashtag Campaign

Branded Instagram hashtags are a great way to help spread the word about your business, find content created about you by your followers, and, of course, promote holiday campaigns!

A branded hashtag is a hashtag that’s unique to your business. It can be as simple as your company name, tagline, or the name of one of your products or campaigns. Or it can be a hashtag that has nothing to do with your brand name, but is linked to your brand identity.

Examples:

Calvin Klein: #MyCalvins
Sephora: #SephoraHaul
The Grommet: #AmericanMade #MadeInUSA #TheGrommet
Royal Oak Whiskey: #WithRoyalOak #whiskeylovers
Amazon: #PrimePet (for Amazon-related media featuring pets)

Offer exclusive discounts

If you offer exclusive discounts to those who follow you on social media, you'll get higher engagement and be able to attract those people who are looking for some discount holiday shopping.

See some examples below:

GrubHub requires followers to create some content of their own in order to receive a freebie.

Tracking:

Add your site to Google Search Console

If you add your site to Google Search Console, they will provide you with data such as what people are searching for in order to land on your website, you can see traffic numbers and what channels (social, e-mail, etc) are giving you the most visitors, among many other things!

See more about why it's important and how to get started here.

You can also install Bing Webmaster Tools.

Installing a web analytics tool (like Google Analytics) is also critical for recording and measuring website performance and conversion rates.

Google Analytics even has a handy feature for setting up goals to track how much each conversion is worth for your business.

Consider heatmap testing

Consider doing heatmap testing on your site; you can see where people click the most, and you can use that data to improve your pages for the next holiday season.

This is one for the more traffic heavy sites, but if you want to really see what users are doing on your website, you can use a heatmap tracking tool like CrazyEgg.

If you just want to try it out and aren't looking to spend on a feature like this, use Heatmap.

If you already have Google Analytics for your website (and use the Chrome browser), then you can go an even easier route and just get the Page Analytics add-on for Chrome.

Read this for more info on heatmapping.

Keywords:

Identify high performing content on your page

Identifying well performing content means knowing which pages and blog posts of yours attract the most visitors and even convert them.

To do this, it's best to have a Google Analytics account connected to your website. If you don't have it, there are also ways you can check where your efforts are paying off:

Weebly: you have a dashboard where you can see your overall traffic plus your top pages.
WordPress: add the JetPack (free) plugin and you can see statistics for your entire website and each individual page and blog post.
Wix: for Wix users, it is best if you connect your Google Analytics account to your site in order to see accurate stats.
Shopify: you have an Analytics tab on your left hand menu which will tell you everything about your most popular pages and products.
Squarespace: you have an analytics panel within the Home menu that includes Popular content, traffic overview and sources and search engine queries.

Once you have a good idea of your top performing pages and content, you can hijack them. Instead of creating a brand new page, you can update your best content to include relevant information on your holiday promos, products and gift guides.

Identify your Holiday specific keywords

The Big Picture

When thinking about keywords and key-phrases, think about the bigger picture - the theme of your words and content. In short, this means creating content for visitors a every step of your sales funnel.

There are 3 broad steps in this funnel:

Awareness – when someone first discovers your brand
Evaluation – when they decide to find out whether your product or service is the right fit or not
Purchase – when the person gathers the last bit of information they need before deciding to buy and becomes a customer.

What would content for each of these steps look like?

Awareness and Evaluation
- Ads (if you're using pay-per-click search or Facebook Ads)
- Landing Pages (like the dedicated landing page you can build in the next section!)
- Website your website can contain banners (like the ones from hellobar.com ) that alert visitors to Holiday specific promos and content
- Checklists (like this one!)
- E-Mails

Convert

- Social Media: your contests and engagement actions fit here
- Blog Posts (How Tos or Christmas Gift Guides)

So, now that you know within what kind of content you need to use you keywords in, how will you pick them?

Google Trends will tell you the popularity of a search term globally or by country. You can see how around Christmas time, gift related keywords surge.

For instance, if I had a US-based site that sold unique items that are Made in the USA, I can see that during November and December the searches for this term have increased, so I would create content around this keyword "Gifts Made in the USA".

LSI Graph will give you keyword ideas around a single theme, so you can cover all possible aspects of a topic in your content.

If I sold handmade items, I could make a gift guide called "Christmas Gift Ideas for my Girlfriend", and then LSI shows me that I could also include these keywords in my content:

top 10 christmas presents for girlfriend
things to get your girlfriend for her birthday
unique christmas gifts for her
cute xmas gifts for girlfriend
romantic gifts for girlfriend
creative gifts for girlfriend
christmas present ideas for girlfriend 2017

The possibilities are endless, and you can mix keywords that you already rank well for, keywords that are related to your products, and general christmas and holiday themed keywords to cover all your bases.

Don't know what keywords to pick? Get your FREE 10 day trial of MarketGoo and you can get suggested keywords from a real person as well as real-time and daily diagnostics of your site's SEO issues - and how to fix them step by step.

Content:

Create a dedicated Landing Page

A landing page is any web page that a visitor can arrive at or “land” on. To be more specific, it usually refers to a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective, in this case, getting shoppers to buy from your online business or ask you for more information.

1

If you're on WordPress and don't know much about how to create a new page on your site without it looking wonky, don't waste any time and go to Instapage.com (they have a WordPress plugin) or similar solution. That way you can easily built a page on your site that looks professional.
2

If you're on Weebly or Wix just add a page to your site and style it; on Squarespace just add a Cover Page and on Shopify you can use a free app called PageFly to build it: https://apps.shopify.com/pagefly.
3

Include a “gift guide” in your top Menu where you can feature your own products classified in attractive ways, such as "Gifts for Her", "Gifts for your Dad", etc. Make sure there are titles and descriptions that include the holiday keywords you've picked for yourself.
4

Don't expect visitors to click around to determine where the pricing page is. Include all pricing within this landing page.
5

Include a contact form and a livechat button. You can use chatra.io or Drift.com for a free solution. That way, any visitor with a question will reach out in real time and you have an opportunity to convert them into clients!
6

Include social proof: testimonials sent to you from satisfied clients or images of reviews from Yelp or Google My Business.
7

Include an FAQ section to answer any objections or doubts the potential customer might have. Payment methods, refund policy, shipping costs and times.
8

DO include images, but also make sure they are not too low quality (grainy), or si high quality that each image is extremely heavy and slows your page down.

Once the Holidays are over, don't delete your page - keep it relevant by updating links, telling visitors to wait until next holiday season to see big updates, and don't include the year in your landing page URL - so it doesn't seem dated if it appears in results.

Create Google Posts

You can use Google Posts to speak directly to current or potential customers in real time, for instance you can share:

Current promotions and specials
Events or happenings
Top products and new arrivals
New blog posts

By using this Google feature, you can increase your chances of being included in search results.

Keep in mind:

Google Posts that are not designated as an event will remain live for one week
You will get a notice on day 6 that a post will be expiring
Multiple posts will display in a "carousel" with the newest post first
Google Posts have unique URLs that can be shared on social channels including Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Insights are available in the Google My Business platform and include views (times your post was seen) and engagement (times a user clicked your button)

Media

An image is recommended but not required
The minimum requirement for an image is 250 x 250 pixels
The recommended dimensions for images are 750 x 750 pixels
Animated GIFs and videos are not supported at this time

Content

Copy can be 100-300 words (we recommend you stick to 100)
Events will also need an Event Title, which will appear just below the event dates and just above the post copy
Predefined buttons are available: Learn More, Reserve, Sign Up, Buy or Get Offer
If a button is selected, then a destination URL is required

Google Posts can be created directly in the Google My Business (GMB) platform, either on desktop or the Android and iOS apps.

If you have multiple business listings in GMB, you will need to create a post for a single location. Should you wish to have the post for all locations, you will need to create a separate Google Post for each local business listing.

1

Sign in to Google My Business. If you have two or more locations, click Manage location for the location you'd like to manage.
2

Click Create post. Or click Posts from the menu.
3

The “Create post” screen will appear. Here, you’ll see options to add photos, text, events, and a button to your post. Just click each field, and enter the relevant information.
4

Once you’ve created your post, click Preview to see a preview. If it looks good, click Publish in the top right corner of the screen.

Start blogging

Blogs are critical components of your content strategy, and each different blog post represents a different opportunity to use one of the Holiday keywords or keyphrases you have chosen.

If you haven't yet started blogging, there is a chance your posts won't achieve high levels of traffic by Christmas, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't start.

Scour for broken links

It’s one thing to proofread your content, but do yourself (and your users) a huge favour and check that the links in your website both work and go somewhere meaningful.

You can see if you have any broken links in your Free SEO Report, and if you want even more in depth backlink analysis you can use a tool like Monitor Backlinks.

Correct any broken or irrelevant links as soon as possible.

Perform cross-browser and mobile checks

Next, you should check that your website works in multiple browsers. Record the browsers tested in the form field below.

1

Chrome
2

Firefox
3

Internet Explorer / Edge
4

Safari

1

Mobile Safari
2

Mobile Chrome
3

Mobile Firefox

Test your emails

If you're planning to e-mail your subscribers, clients and any leads, test that your emails are coming through from your various contact and signup forms.

If you haven't thought about e-mailing these groups and you are sitting on e-mail addresses that have been provided to you, think about sending an inaugural e-mail blast during the holidays.

The cardinal rule is to always provide value when you send e-mails. Don't make it all about yourself and why you want readers to buy from you. Offer them discounts, tips on holiday shopping with you and promote your most useful blog posts.

If you don't have an email solution yet, below are 2 great solutions that have free plans:

Browse all templates Edit in Process Street