Whether you’re gearing up for Christmas or are preparing for any other seasonal boost for sales, your website must be ready to experience greater volumes of traffic and purchase intent. With this in mind, on-page optimization for your SEO has never been more important.
Although it’s crucial to note that SEO should never be regarded as a short-term focus for any online firm, creating a successful strategy that can be optimized and revised ahead of expected busy periods is a great approach for maximizing your potential for generating conversions at the right time.
Given the recent push towards digital transformation within many industries in the way of the Covid-19 pandemic, it pays for businesses to optimize well ahead of their anticipated busy periods. So whether you’re a clothing store specializing in specific seasonal wear, a retail store seeking to bolster sales during Black Friday, or a gift shop reading for Christmas, ramping up your on-site SEO is a must.
How to Optimize Your On-Page SEO for Periods of High Customer Activity
Let’s take a deeper look into how, specifically, you can build up your search engine optimization:
Audit the Speed of Your Site
Different times of the year will invariably lead to different levels of consumer interest. Most online stores will be familiar with this phenomenon as sales can fluctuate based on end-of-month paydays, changing seasons, and even the weather.
When you’re expecting consumer interest to rise, the prospect of having a slow page loading time, images that fail to appear on screen, forms that don’t work as they should, or bad on-site navigation can run the risk of turning away prospective customers for good.
Furthermore, Google’s crawlers will identify your website as too slow to rank highly compared to more functional competitors.
With this in mind, you must audit your website and your pages–checking for factors like:
- Slow loading speeds
- Mobile-friendliness
- Broken URLs and internal linking
- Issues with indexing
- Pages that are no longer relevant
- Duplicated content
- Issues that hinder your website architecture
- Orphaned pages
- Pages with missing SSL certificates
- Canonicals that no longer work
By keeping these issues in mind and regularly checking to ensure that they’re not hindering the usability of your website, you can ensure that your on-page SEO will enable visitors to have a pleasant experience while navigating through your pages.
Never Ignore Mobile
As discussed in the last point, you must optimize your website for mobile browsers. Today, huge volumes of your leads will be accessing your pages via smartphones–and by ignoring their needs, you’re effectively shutting the door on several online sales.
(Image: MobiLoud)
As the data above shows, the number of users accessing pages via mobile is growing, and the time they spend on websites is growing.
Always ensure that they’re mobile-friendly when creating or adapting season-specific websites or landing pages.
Use the Past to Inspire the Future
Suppose your research suggests that your busy periods recur regularly. In that case, it’s worth looking at past events to understand what your audience searches for when making a purchase specific to your industry.
For this, it’s worth setting up Google Search Console if you haven’t already. This empowers you to get search query data from your target audience, while other platforms like Ahrefs can perform well in keyword research.
It’s certainly worth utilizing Google Trends to study the peaks of specific search terms and identify patterns.
Let’s say, for example, you run an online skiing equipment business. Following on from a rudimentary Google Trends search for the term ‘skiing,’ we can see a consistent peak for search intent forming in January and sometimes February of each year, which has rarely deviated over time.
By refining your searches to see what your audience is looking for and when they’re most interested in your products, you can better plan and prepare your pages to accommodate greater traffic levels.
Get Your Keywords Right
Getting keywords right is arguably the most important aspect of your on-page SEO, and research is always key in this particular area of website optimization.
Lawrence Hitches’ on-page SEO checklist highlights several key points that ensure you can utilize the best practice for your keyword research while accurately measuring your results to deliver the best seasonal customer experience.
The first consideration is that there needs to be sufficient search volume for your targeted keywords. It’s good to have keywords in mind that are relevant to your industry, but they’re not worth much if nobody’s searching for them.
Again, tools like Ahrefs can be effective for this part of your on-page SEO, but Google Search Console can also help to provide actionable insights into your most effective keywords.
Let’s say that the average monthly search volume for your chosen keyword is 10k per month; your website will, on average, obtain around 1% of those searches should your page rank 1st on Google’s SERPs–with this in mind, it’s important to look for the higher volume keywords with fewer rivals battling it out for that coveted 1st place on Google’s results pages.
Although it can be a difficult balancing act to optimize your website for increased traffic volumes during certain times of the year, getting your on-page SEO right can bring unprecedented peaks in conversion rates and purchase intent from your target audience. You can maximize your revenue potential and secure future growth by getting your SEO right at the right time.
