How to Optimize Existing Content for Your Holiday Marketing Campaign
November 12th, 2019 by
All of a sudden you realize that the holidays are here and you’re not ready. You have your holiday merchandise in stock, but you haven’t promoted it or even thought about updating your site to include it. It kind of feels like it’s Christmas Eve and you still haven’t gotten that gift on your kid’s wishlist. Are you too late? Will any store still have it in stock? Well, if you have outdated holiday content on your site already, you just might be in luck.
Let’s take a look at a local t-shirt shop here in New Orleans, Dirty Coast, as an example. Dirty Coast offers a wide variety of beautiful t-shirts (and other swag) with clever, locally inspired designs. They’re one of my go-to places for that perfect gift for family members. While I may have a go-to place for New Orleans gifts, there are still about 1,000 people searching for “new orleans gifts” every month, according to a report pulled from SEMRush. Let’s take a look at how Dirty Coast can optimize their preexisting content for this year’s holiday marketing campaign.
Make Your H1 Relevant and Competitive
As you may or may not know, H1s are very important for SEO. You want to, ideally, have one relevant H1 on each page of your site. Dirty Coast’s 2018 Gift Guide page shows up as the 7th organic result for “New Orleans gifts”. Fleurty Girl, a local competitor of theirs, is showing up in the #1 spot, so let’s take a look at what they might be doing differently. For starters, the H1 on Fleurty Girl’s page is a little more relevant to the topic. While Dirty Coast has “THE 2018 GIFT GUIDE. GIFTS FROM NEW ORLEANS” for their H1, Fleurty Girl’s H1 is “The Best New Orleans Gifts: Your Ultimate Gift Guide From Fleurty Girl.” The topic “gift guide” actually doesn’t get much volume, so it would be a good idea to adjust the H1 to be more relevant to a topic with a higher search volume like “new orleans gifts.”
Structure Your Content
Google loves lists. And on top of that, people like them too! As Matthew Bains discusses in this blog about Writing Tips to Create Web Content That Converts, skimming content is the new normal and bulleted lists help. Taking a look at our example, Fleurty Girl’s page has a numbered list wrapped in H2s and H3s, as well as being organized by different price points. You can see that Google is pulling this list into the description for this page.
While the images for each section on Dirty Coast’s site are nice to look at, Google can’t read the headers within these images. So it would actually be better to have the section headers as text wrapped in H2s on the page instead.
Make Your Content Relevant
With so little content on the Dirty Coast page, there’s not much opportunity for Google to recognize the content’s relevance to the searched term. Product descriptions can help with that. In looking at the descriptions on the Fleurty Girl blog, there were a total of 11 natural opportunities for them to bring the topic of “new orleans gifts” back up within the content on the page, which ultimately helps Google further associate that page with the search terms. Additionally, it would be nice if users were able to read more about these products, including their prices, without having to click through to the individual product pages.
Add and Optimize Images
If you don’t already have images, you should. Luckily, Dirty Coast has some, although they may want to update them along with their product lists to only include products that they’re offering this year. In addition to updating them, they’ll want to optimize their images and make sure they have title tags and descriptive alt text. (Side note: you can read more about how to optimize your images in this blog by Shane Kretzmann). Google reads the alt text and title tags to better understand which images to display in image searches. And remember, image searches can also be a great source of traffic to your site!
Always Include a Call to Action
If you have an e-commerce site, you should be linking to your product pages so that users can easily make purchases. And if that’s still not enough to convert a potential customer, that additional call to action at the bottom of the page telling them to come on in and check out these holiday gifts in person is a nice, soft CTA to tie it all together.
Need Help?
As with most things, recommendations may vary on a case by case basis. And these are just some of the things to think about when optimizing your content. Search Influence specializes in optimizing content for a variety of marketing needs. Whether you’re preparing for the holiday season or if you’re just looking to achieve better organic results from the content that’s already on your site, we can help! Contact us today.
