Starting Your Valentine’s Day SEO Strategy

As with any SEO strategy centered on a specific holiday, you want to start planning it about three to four weeks in advance to give the search engines time to crawl and index your landing pages. Create a landing page catered specifically to the holiday to make it easy for searches to find. Setting up this landing page early alerts loyal customers to forthcoming promotions, as well as captures potential customers who are looking for inspiration prior to committing to a purchase.

When running your promotions, be sure to include weekends in your campaigns. While the always-on consumer is searching throughout the workday, weekends are when people have the most time to search and shop for their loved ones.

On your website, notify consumers of the last purchase date for shipping and update them with any shipping delays. A countdown of your promotions on your homepage and Valentine’s Day specific landing pages is a great way to inspire urgency in consumers. As the actual day of the holiday nears, cater to last-minute shoppers by highlighting the ease of services and safety precautions at your brick-and-mortar store.

The Right Keywords to Say “I Love You”

Use Valentine’s Day specific keywords in your on-page content and in relevant blogs used to showcase your products. Optimize for keywords within the metadata text. Share your blog posts and landing pages across social media to generate awareness and engagement to help these pages rank higher in SERP. 

In February 2020, Google reported the following as the most-searched gifts in the United States:

1. Flowers
2. Ecards
3. Teddy bears
4. Rose bears
5. Chocolate covered strawberries

While these searches are, of course, subject to change in 2021, these are classically staples of Valentine’s Day. If your business sells these products, be sure to optimize all your content, including product descriptions and URL tags, to make it easier for people to find.

Use friendly and easy to read URLs. Simplify URLs to their most basic elements, such as http://www.yourbusiness.com/products/valentinesdayflowers. This improves your overall SEO performance, including better ranking, faster returned search results, and easier promotion. Most important, this drives a better user experience, as consumers are directly exactly where they want to go.

Target keywords people are more likely to search for, such as “gifts for my girlfriend,” “gifts for my husband,” “romantic gifts,” etc. While nearly half of the total estimated spending for Valentine’s Day will be on someone’s significant other or spouse, people shop for other family members, friends, classmates and teachers, pets, and co-workers. Including Valentine’s Day keywords related to a variety of loved ones will help diversify your content and reach. Create  blog posts or guides that showcase your range of products and target different audiences. Use titles such as “Valentine’s Day on a Budget Guide” or “Best Food for Valentine’s Day.” Soon, you’ll be everyone’s favorite Valentine.

How to Share Your Valentine’s Day Content

After you created all your great content and optimized your landing pages, how do you generate more awareness? 

Because Valentine’s Day is a special time for many people, a testimonial highlighting the attributes of a product or service can go a long way in ensuring other customers they are getting the right thing. Testimonials help improve conversion rates, as people are more likely to trust their peer’s reviews over ads and other promotional language. (Reviews also boost local searches, which can drive further business to your brick-and-mortar store.) Showcase positive reviews as much as you can without it being overbearing. Share on social in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day after your pages are optimized to help persuade undecided and last-minute shoppers. Add relevant testimonials to specific landing pages. Finally, include some of the best-written and glowing reviews on your homepage, linking the review to the specific product page to drive conversions.

Visuals are crucial to highlighting your products. High-quality images build trust and credibility with your customers. With the growth of video SEO, adding videos to applicable products can help add a competitive advantage to your. User-generated content can play a significant role here, as you can ask customers for videos of significant others opening their gift. 

As always, label images and videos with optimized keywords and add alt text that users will likely search for when looking for that particular product.

With a strong Valentine’s Day SEO strategy, you are bound to be inundated with hearts from loving clients.

Additional Resources

If your SEO strategy needs a loving boost, contact a NetElixir expert today.

• Google’s Match Type Update Explained
• 9 Search, Social, and Amazon Trends for 2021
• What Are Core Web Vitals and How Do They Impact Your Organic Rankings?

The post Sharing the Love: Valentine’s Day SEO appeared first on NetElixir.

Ensure your brand and products are there for them when they search by creating holiday-specific landing pages.

Packaging Holiday Landing Pages

To increase your chances for visibility on key shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, create targeted landing pages with researched keywords well in advance of the days themselves. Consider creating a separate page for each broader category of product for which you plan to offer a discount rather than a general, blanketed page stuffed with too many deals.

Broaden your holiday SEO content strategy beyond simply the products you have. Package your products into easy-to-navigate landing pages that are catered to specific demographics, key areas rising on Google Trends, and strategic messaging from trending terms and keywords you found success with last year. While this year is unpredictable and uncertain, you did have a winning strategy from last year – expand upon your victories, big and small. 

How can you package your products effectively? Start with your customer personas and target audience. Based on this data, consider segmenting your products by:

• Gender, like “Best Gifts for Him”
• Profession, like “Best Gifts for Teachers”
• Price, like “Best Gifts Below $25”
• Interest, like “Best Gifts for Outdoor Enthusiasts”

See what’s trending and what products you already have that could easily fit into trending categories. Keep your buyer personas in mind, as well, so as not to optimize for customers who aren’t converting to your website.

Once you have your packages neatly tied in a bow, use your product categories to create gift guides and blogs that list out your top selling products remarketed, for example, as Best Gifts for Mom. (If you have customer reviews of these products, even better! Customers love peer reviews. Consider working these packages and testimonials into your social media strategy as well.)

Your Holiday SEO Strategy

Ideally, these promotional holiday landing pages should be made ahead of time. Create pages before the holiday season crunch and use 302 (rather than 301) redirects wherever applicable. This is useful for holiday- and promotional-specific versions of a homepage. This pre-planning is twofold: one, you have time to optimize the pages fully based on your trends and keyword research, and two, search engine crawlers have time to scan and redirect points only during the appropriate time. 

When creating landing pages, consider placing them prominently in top navigation in order to drive traffic from the homepage. 

Drive Urgency for Your Holiday Promotions

Pre-planning your sales serves a third purpose: whetting the appetite of your loyal customers and alerting new customers on what to expect. Early announcements will drive users to your site as they start planning out their purchases and researching ahead of time. Using regular announcements (think once a week starting a month in advance to each day the week of) in tandem with a live countdown on your website will drive urgency in shoppers. 

Your holiday promotional schedule could look like:

• 45 days in advance: Leverage your website calendar, social media, and any emails or newsletters to start driving traffic and garnering interest
• 7 Days in advance: Begin leveraging the above for daily posts
• 1 Day in advance: Make your onsite countdown prominent to focus on your upcoming deals

Download a 2020 Holiday ECommerce Sales Calendar to coincide your marketing strategy with the anticipated high volume sales days.

Promoting your landing pages increases its ranking in SERPS. Beyond sharing the link to social, try writing blog announcements that highlight your product packages and new features of your holiday landing pages. These social and organic posts boost backlinks and generate greater exposure to your existing audience. Furthermore, such blog content, just as the landing page, can be used year after year through simple updates, making it evergreen.

For example, take Royal Caribbean, who has a blog they just add to every year so you can see how their Black Friday deals evolved over the years. Their blog ranks number 2 for high volume term “Black Friday Caribbean cruise deals.”

Your Technical Holiday SEO Checklist

• Start sooner rather than later
• Check your site for any issues that could affect performance
• Study last year’s trends and take note of ones that could be useful for your business this year
• Identify relevant keywords for your niche
• Create landing pages specifically for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals
• Coordinate SEO with your other marketing efforts
• Track and measure success frequently and adjust your strategy to focus on what’s working

Further Reading

• SEO Content Creation Process
• Amazon SEO
• Real-Time Data on Holiday ECommerce Trends

The post Effective Holiday Promotional SEO Strategy appeared first on NetElixir.

Check below to see what has changed in the Amazon A10 Algorithm update.

Having your products rank on Amazon requires a different approach than ranking on Google. While improving your organic search results on Google could take a matter of months after optimizing, you can see results in as little as one to two weeks on Amazon. The search intent for users is different. People go to Google to shop, yes, but also to research products, brands, and information before following through with a purchase. People who go to Amazon have a higher intent to buy and Amazon heavily caters to their user experience.

Further Readings

• Online Retailers Can No Longer Afford to Ignore Amazon
• Amazon Automatic Targeting
• Facebook Shops

The post Amazon A10 Algorithm Update: Weightage Shifts in Ranking Factors appeared first on NetElixir.

The goal of ranking is to try to achieve the maximum level of visibility in SERPs—right?

Yes, but this is only the surface, what gets people to click to a page.

Once someone is on your page, then what? Does the content, format, and goal of your page (now in essence a landing page) match the UI behind the ranking search term that just got a user to click? If not, that user will bounce, meaning that high ranking was a complete waste. Eventually, this high bounce will add up and you’ll lose that ranking you worked so hard to achieve.

Essentially, high-volume or not, we want terms to rank on pages where they make sense. Otherwise, high volume will not mean high converting.

Luckily, Google Search Console and other tools allow us to see what terms pages are ranking and getting traffic for. And one red flag that tells us if this traffic is converting or not is if a page has high impressions and clicks in GSC yet isn’t converting. Or, if a top landing page ranks for several high-volume terms but isn’t converting. Other tip-offs are if the page is also a high exit percentage page.

Sometimes it can be more subtle, though. For example:

You can rank well for a category of related terms on, say, your homepage. Is this bad? Maybe not that bad, but it may be an area for improvement. For instance, let’s say that the category of terms you’re ranking for on your homepage are directly related to specific products you carry. Wouldn’t it be better to rank for that category of terms on the relevant product page?

Ranking for the Right Keyword on the Right Page

Direct product terms are pretty specific, so we can assume they’re being searched by a user ready to buy or at least doing research. It benefits us to place that user as far along the buying funnel as fast as we can. This way we eliminate the number of clicks needed to get to the ideal UI-match page. This is especially the case for mobile where users have such a short attention span and are so fast to click back off-site if they don’t see the product they want. 

If the wrong page is appearing in SERPs for your target category of terms, look at how that incorrect page appears in SERPs compared to the desired page’s SERP result.

Stacking them one atop the other—which would more likely get you to click and eventually convert as a user if you saw it in SERPs after typing your target category of terms in search engines? If you’re more likely to click the SERP for the wrong page (the one that’s ranking and you don’t want to have rank) that’s a red flag.

How Do We Approach Content Strategy for Better Ranking? 

Adjust the Meta Content

There are several steps. An initial point is to adjust the meta content for each page to better reflect the terms you want that page to rank for, as well as match the user intent. Another is to evaluate the on-page content. 

In this case, we know the more ideal page isn’t ranking and needs content optimized for the related terms. But part of a strategy like this also often involves de-optimizing the page we don’t want to rank for the terms.

Evaluate All On-Page Content

Look at all “content” — anything front-end and user-facing. Are there several images on the wrong page grabbing the undesired term? Rewrite the alt tags or swap your images as needed.  

In addition to images, re-evaluate all ranking factors (content) on both pages (page you want to rank for the target terms and page that currently ranks which you don’t want to rank) — what is the keyword focus for:

• H1’s
• H2’s
• CTA’s
• Above-the-fold body copy
• Images
• Metas

In addition to adjusting content for the desired page to be more inclusive of the target term, you should consider adjusting content for the undesired page to exclude the target term. This may lose ranking on that term for a little while, but it’s better to rank a little lower for a high-volume term on the right page (where you get conversions) than it is to rank a little higher on the wrong page where you don’t see conversions for that term.

Evaluate Backlink Relevancy

More than just on-page content can make up the context of a page. The backlink profile (and the content within the pages making up those backlinks) also contribute to the context. So it’s important to ensure the pages making up the backlink profile also target the relevant and desired terms for that page and should be monitored accordingly.

Addressing all of the above should be part of optimizing the content for the page you want to rank for a term — and getting the terms off the page you don’t want to rank.

This is an example of some of the deeper analysis that should go into SEO content strategy and execution in order to best match your content and pages to UI and maximize conversions for rankings.

The post Matching Ranking to UI appeared first on NetElixir.

SEO Content Strategies: Part 3 of 3

Planning to write content for SEO starts with a question. Do you want to:

• Enhance your authority on a given topic (likely done by gaining a space in a universal listing)?
• Drive revenue for a certain product?
• Close the Competitive Gap?

If you are interested in boosting under-performing pages, improving ranking for a target term, or raising your brand awareness, please refer to the SEO content creation methods blog part 2. Some of the SEO content strategies may solve one or more of these questions, as there are multiple ways of realizing your chosen goal. Overall, good SEO content strategies work together to increase your site’s visibility so search engines can display your content to searchers and potential customers.

SEO Content Strategies and Methodologies 

Enhance Brand Authority

For this, much of your effort and approach will overlap with crafting content to heighten brand awareness. Authority – for a client or a brand – is really on an overall topic and not on a specific product. But at the same time, odds are those topics are product-driven, especially given a retail ecommerce business. Research high-volume terms, but keep in mind that those with the potential to be query-based should be addressed fully on their own; always answer the public questions.

In researching high-volume terms for increasing authority, take under consideration those topics that have the potential to encompass a wide range of products and services while also providing real value for users and not sounding salesy. Consider:

1. Where the new content can fit in the site;
2. What other pre-existing pages can the new content point or redirect to;
3. Where can the new content point to other pre-existing pages to increase sharing and page authority.

Think topic clusters. What existing content (preferably high-performing) does the website have that will be linkable and relevant to this new topic? This is another case of seeing and using what resources a client already has.

Authority on a topic comes not just from providing informative articles, but also articles with lasting power. E-A-T involves a page developing a history — so can this topic? So, consider those topics that will be relevant upon the date-of-post and remain relevant a year after the post. These are your evergreen topics: topics that can be built and layered upon with future content. When we come up with SEO content strategies for things to write, we should also consider what we will write in the future based on what we’re writing now. 

When optimizing content to increase your authority, remember to:

• Answer query-based topics
• Consider topics with potential to encompass several aspects of client products and services, while maintain a specific focus
• See how new content fits within the site and how it can be linkable from other preexisting high-performing content
• Explore evergreen content
• Layer future content

Drive Revenue

Driving revenue really isn’t a matter of focusing on term first, so much as it is understanding your client goals (as we should with all content assignments) and knowing which products they’re trying to push, what products are coming out, what the seasonality for products and the industry is, etc. Of course, you also want to be able to select those products that currently match client goals – while staying 3 months ahead for stronger SEO content impact – to high-volume terms and current market trends.

This requires a thorough conversation with the client.

Think Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) regarding SEO content strategy. You also need to think of pages as they progress toward a conversion within the buyer’s funnel, so don’t just optimize for terms on the target landing page — look to every page and click thereafter (and reasonable click before) until you get a conversion. Driving revenue means moving along the funnel; rank growth for this category should hit several touchpoints along the buyer’s journey. For this point, look to GA’s navigation to and from target landing pages for selected terms. Look at the spectrum of landing pages you need to optimize for a target term.

It’s also worth taking the time to categorize your target terms for driving revenue to your selected products by determining which terms within your broader category are informative and which are transactional. Informative terms should likely receive a focus for pages placed earlier in the funnel and to the left of this spectrum (possibly long-tail and more voice or query-based terms). Transactional terms should find a place directly on the page with conversion actions (likely shorter terms but also possibly query-based) and to the right of the spectrum. UX consideration comes into play here as well, but the content (besides attempting to rank) should also always be geared toward directing the next and appropriate action for the user to take. Incorporate this consideration in any content assignments as well. 

Driving revenue requires:

• Understanding the client product goals and seasonality
• Matching goals with target terms
• Looking at pages beyond target landing page where changes can be made to boost ranking
• Separating informative from transactional terms within your broader category

Competitive Gap

The primary focus to solve for a competitive gap involves two facets:

1. Benchmark against top-performers in a focus or target topic or group of terms and figure out what they did that worked.
2. Think of something extra to make the new content you’re creating better and more valuable.

Analyze what the competitor(s) talks about and how they talk about it, then identify things they don’t talk about that the client is in an authoritative position to talk about (again looking at existing client resources). What types of resource pages does the client have to add context to the landing page you’re optimizing via internal linking that the benchmarked competitor does not have? We know how to use SEMRush and BE to identify ranking competitor pages for target terms, but to push the envelope we have to spend the time thoroughly looking at the benchmarked competitor pages themselves.

In cases like this, create two checklists side by side showing what pages our client’s target page links to vs what pages the competitor’s page links to. What types of pages does our client have to add extra context that the competitor may not have? Can we mirror all their pages? Or add something better (while maintaining focus on quality and relevancy of quantity). Besides backlink use for context, there’s also the actual content on the page. You should check the content itself — what does the client discuss that we don’t? What can we discuss that the client can’t? (All while remembering the prior points of maintaining content focus and relevancy with backlinking).

Identify these areas and make it clear when assigning content to the team. We’re not just closing a gap; we’re surpassing the current benchmark. 

Close and overcome the competitive gap by:

• Benchmarking against top-performers 
• Thinking of something extra or additional to make the new content you’re creating better and more valuable to consumers
• Look at link and context building opportunities and resources that competitors may not have
• Look at services, products, and topics to speak to that a competitor cannot

Post-Content Delivery Procedure

Part of our internal process should be purposeful follow-ups for every piece of content we deliver. This means making it clear to the client that we want to know their thoughts and feedback upon delivery. That means pointed questions directly related to the content. Client satisfaction is the end goal of any strategy, so stay on top of this for specific deliverables for several touchpoints with the client post-send and be open to any and all feedback. Any deliverables have to start with a conversation with the client and should end the same way. 

The post SEO Content Creation Process: Content Strategies appeared first on NetElixir.