SEO for Christmas 2021 – You Need to Plan Ahead

If you have a product of service that you need to market for the Christmas rush, then you really need to think about planning your SEO campaign and strategy well in advance.

By this I mean you need to realistically be giving it 6-12 months of planning. This sounds like a long time but when it comes to your search engine optimisation you really have to think long term and plan well ahead.

Rushing your SEO and expecting miracles within 30 days is just not going to happen. The reasons for this are many but following are just a few reasons why you need to plan your SEO in advance if you expect to reap the rewards that Christmas shoppers offer.

SEO rankings for Christmas takes time

1) Speedy Website Rankings will only get your website pinged by Google and you will end up loosing any rankings you’ve had in the past. This is a certainty as Google is on the look out for over optimised websites that are trying to fraudulently manipulate their page rank. Like gravity, what goes up must come down and in the case of your SEO, its going to drop like a rock. Of course, this will only happen if you take this approach or pressure your SEO company to push too hard for your Christmas rankings. If you rely on Christmas traffic passing through your website then creating content beforehand and optimising these pages is the best way to do things. If your primary Christmas product or service is on page 2 of Google and you need these keywords optimised further then a slow and steady approach is vital.

2) Many SEO companies absolutely love to offer quick 60 day guarantees when it comes to site rankings. For those Sydney businesses looking to make a killing for the 2018 Christmas period this may seem like an awesome plan of action. The logic is as follows. If they can rank me web pages in 60 days, they can certainly rank them in 30 days if I give them just a bit more money. Most of these SEO agencies will agree to this and will be more than happy to watch you part with your money. The only one who looses out here is you the business owner who is getting completely ripped off and scammed by these guys.  It is well documented by Google that any form of SEO guarantees are blatant lies and the following article proves my point: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en

Pay particular attention to the paragraph that begins with: ‘No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.’.

3) If you have a product that you want to sell, you should have it professionally photographed and you should be looking at getting some great copy written for this.

PLUS you may want to look at blogging about this and starting to promote this on your social media platforms. All this takes time and planning. A rushed approach to this is simply not going to work. Saying this if you are able to handle the photography yourself then Facebook and Instagram is a good option for getting the word out there about your product pre Christmas. SEO results unfortunately, will have to wait.

If you think that you can do the SEO yourself and hit your blog with 100’s of articles, forget about it. This is not going to work and Google is far too smart for this kind of spammy techniques.

So if you have an eCommerce website or have a retail outlet and are planning to sell to the Australian market for Christmas 2021 – Start planning now. This is a great tip and I strongly urge and advice all Aussie businesses to really get their head around this lengthy time frame. Planning ahead is the best way to survive any Google algorithm updates that can happen.

5 quick wins to promote your brand for Christmas

Social media: most of your customers are already using social media platforms every day. Cater to this market and promote your brand instantly by offering a discount or special offer.

Create a YouTube Video:  have you thought about creating your own YouTube Channel and marketing your business through this fantastic platform?  Creating videos about your product and posting them to your website is seriously engaging and your customers will love watching your videos about your business.

Refresh your home page banners: You main banner image is your primary selling message so update this to reflect your Christmas 2021 message.

Direct marketing: Make sure you have collected the emails of all your clients and send them a well designed flyer via email to tell them all about your Christmas specials. Quick and very easy to do, this is a great way to ensure that people who have engaged with you previously, will do so again.

Make sure your Christmas pages are unique: If you have a unique product for Christmas and are creating specific landing pages for these make sure all content on these pages is unique. Never copy from other sites and if you have a generic product that other businesses are selling you will have to write your own copy for this. Never plagiarise! See what Matt Cutts from Google has to say about duplicate content and the negative effects it can have on your Google rankings.