SEO Best Practices for Holiday Gift Guides

Consumers have fully turned to their favorite e-commerce brands — like Amazon and Wal-Mart — to ensure they can make a list and skip checking it twice. When it comes to a successful holiday season for e-commerce brands, a marketing strategy that’s proven useful year after year is the creation and publication of gift guides. These guides help direct consumers to related products and, ultimately, boost revenue during the busiest time of year. 

Given the quick-paced nature of the season, a well-executed gift guide expedites the customer journey by making products easier to find. Knowing how to optimize your e-commerce SEO approach to creating them will help you keep audience trends top of mind and meet your customers right where they are. By cutting down on how many clicks it takes a user to navigate through priority product pages and purchasing points, you’ll also need to leverage these three recommended advanced SEO strategies, plus a bonus tip at the end! 

Time-Sensitive Considerations

When it comes to creating an impactful holiday marketing strategy, setting early deadlines is crucial for success. Start executing early so that you can stay ahead of trends and challenges alike throughout the entirety of the season. At Rise, we recommend keeping the following timeframes and updates in mind:

1. Update holiday-specific content and metadata at least 30 days prior to the target holiday, across all digital touchpoints.  This includes gift guide landing pages, home pages, feature product pages, or category pages. 

2. Equip your strategy with creative and content that acknowledges upcoming “due dates”, like shipping deadlines for packages to arrive prior to major holidays. This allows you to target specific audiences, like last-minute shoppers, down to the final moments. 

3. Holiday-related shopping doesn’t simply cease to be on December 25. There tends to be a large influx of “Q5'' online shoppers (after the holidays and into January). A Q5 gift guide could address this continued momentum, especially by focusing on product pairings that encourage users to purchase complementary products to gifts they recently received.

Optimized Content for your Audience

Being authentically audience-centric during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, starts with acknowledging how consumers currently feel about online shopping. Between the sunset of cookies and a demand for more personalized experiences, it’s clear that brands need to earn the trust and loyalty of their audience by respecting their data privacy concerns. Gift guides are an ideal way for e-commerce brands to manage this intersection of personalization and data privacy.

In order to optimize the content of a gift guide and create the most relevant and authentic experience for your customers, returning and new alike, implement these tactics:

1. Target long-tail keywords, which are usually searched for by more qualified users than the more highly competitive, high-search volume keywords. For example, someone searching for the long-tail keyword "holiday gift ideas for a dad who golfs" is lower in the funnel than a search for “gifts for dad.” Targeting keywords like this open up more opportunities for high rankings. 

2. Identify appropriate audiences by asking questions to shape the content and metadata for your long-tail keyword targeting. Examine how your customers tick: What kinds of relationships do they have? What are their hobbies? What kinds of media do they consume every day? The answers will influence the kinds of keywords you implement in your gift guide’s SEO strategy. 

3. Guide web crawlers by going beyond image tiles and using copy that fully describes what the product is and why it would make a great gift. This helps web crawlers better understand the content of a gift guide page. 

4. Incorporate optimized holiday metadata across the site. This will boost rankings and drive qualified, holiday shopper traffic to the site. For example, update the metadata with optimized copy for both the gift guide landing pages and any other landing pages featured on, or associated with, your gift guides or larger holiday promotions. 

Linking & Syndication Management

Optimizing your internal and external links in any digital content effort helps make your messaging more visible during this pivotal shopping period. Here are our recommendations for how to weave a web of content that will capture the attention of your audiences: 

1. Support your gift guide with other holiday-themed content, such as blog posts, home page features, or holiday-specific products. 

2. Internal links should be incorporated across the site to help users easily navigate back to gift guides from category, subcategory, and product pages. This can be accomplished by temporarily adding the main gift guide into the site’s main navigation, incorporating it into breadcrumbs, or featuring it in a promotional banner. 

3. Leverage external links, especially from partner sites, to help put the gift guide in front of different audiences — and to build the guide’s page authority. 

4. Consider social media and email marketing techniques to accompany onsite gift guide strategies. 

Bonus Gift Guide SEO Tip

Wondering how to make your gift guide strategy the best SEO gift ever? Here is our bonus tip!

Identifying how and why your audiences want to shop the way they do, and what products they’re most likely to buy, creates an avenue for the most SEO optimized and personalized gift guides possible during the holiday season. Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll make the most wonderful time of the year the most successful, too! 

Ready to streamline success this holiday season with your own gift guide? Contact Rise today!