You optimized your website for the season, targeted keywords specific to this time of year, and customers searching for the “best holiday gift for women” flocked to your pages. Now that you have reaped the benefits of your holiday SEO, take a breather and assess your digital marketing so that you can improve optimization of your site for other key seasons throughout the year.
Mobile-Friendly Website Design
One of the key takeaways from the holiday season is the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. Whether you own a local shop or a service-based business, your customers search on their mobile devices as they research potential purchases, comparison shop, and check out your latest social media activity. Mobile search volume exceeds desktop, which means that if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, now is the time to explore responsive design.
A website that is designed responsively has the fluidity to adjust to various display sizes, allowing one website to serve all visitors as opposed to redirecting mobile users to a separate version. When weighed against a mobile site, responsive design has the advantage of being a forward-thinking solution that enables your website to adjust to new devices as they emerge without needing additional programming. There are benefits when it comes to SEO as well. With one website to optimize, only one SEO campaign needs managing, thereby eliminating the possibility that you will forget to make an update on one of the sites. A single URL also ensures that you retain the authority that has accumulated rather than having to build it from scratch for a new mobile site.
Conduct an SEO Audit on Your Website
While you are evaluating the extent to which your website is mobile-friendly, make sure that you have the SEO basics covered. If your holiday results were disappointing, there may be areas for improvement. Review your title tags, URL structure, and other on-page elements from the user experience and search engine perspectives. Keywords are critical to SEO since information retrieval is based on them, but make sure that your content is natural, prioritizing strategic and relevant use of keywords over density. This is an area where user experience and SEO intersect, as high-quality, readable content with natural usage of keywords will improve your ranking and benefit your potential customers.
Final Thoughts on Post-Holiday SEO
With your responsive site properly optimized, focus can shift to planning for the next season that is critical for your business. There are peak times for every industry, and these correspond to changes in search behavior. Since potential customers will search for your products and services well in advance of the actual holiday or peak season, and SEO is not instantaneous, your efforts should begin early. Once a season hits, it can be too late for your campaign to gain traction so allow enough time for pages to get indexed and ranked in advance of any seasonal spikes that you anticipate.
With the winter holidays coming to an end, take a step back to evaluate the responsiveness of your website, ensure that you are following SEO best practices, and then prepare for the next peak in traffic. Use Year-over-Year traffic comparisons in conjunction with keyword research to identify the trends that will inform your seasonal SEO in 2016. For more on post-holiday SEO, talk with one of our experts at Premiere Creative by calling (973) 346-8100.
