The holidays are a time when most people look forward to a rest, but in business, annual holiday periods represent a time of activity. While most businesses are involved in marketing campaigns at this time, what very few businesses think of in this busy time is to take holidays into account for their site’s SEO strategy.

A fresh marketing plan for the holidays is something most businesses will be familiar with. Search engine optimisation should play a part in this marketing plan, particularly with the world’s increasing reliance on the net. As more and more people turn to the internet for shopping, special SEO strategies for Christmas, New Year and other holidays are more and more important.

SEO can be a difficult area when you’re aiming for time-defined results. Playing the patience game doesn’t work when you know that Christmas is two weeks away. It is for this reason that using SEO for holiday traffic needs to follow a different path to regular search engine optimisation. Different techniques, as well as a different mix of strategies, need to be implemented for the holiday periods.

Part of your strategy needs to target holiday keywords. It is best if you can research the high-traffic keywords for your industry for the previous equivalent season, for example knowledge of keywords for Christmas 2008 will come in handy for Christmas 2009. This is more precise than using popular keywords for the last holiday season, but even these can give you some insight for the upcoming season. For example, keywords used for retail during Halloween 2009 may provide you with starting ground for Christmas 2009. If you are a retail site, at the very base you’ll have to include ’sale’ and ‘holiday sale’ in your normal keywords.

For precision results during holiday periods, it can be a good idea to support your SEO with paid advertising. You can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about how to work paid advertising into your long-term SEO plan.

Organic rankings during the holiday periods are tricky to achieve, but it can be done. The key is to implement long-term strategies that take holiday periods into account. For example, some of your pages can be focussed on holiday-based keywords. In a sense, these pages are optimised in anticipation of the increase of traffic on low-traffic keywords.

While it is wise to address the issue of holiday periods, you should never endanger your regular SEO in a rush to attract holiday traffic. Holiday traffic can represent a big slice of your business income. At the same time, you don’t want to lose your regular traffic through changing your site’s overall SEO plan.

You may find that your SEO strategies for holidays from year to year can be reused. At the very least, your SEO strategy from the previous year can provide a base for future holiday SEO plans. Being aware of the need for a holiday strategy is the first step to meeting the need.

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