SEO during Christmas for websites

Is your website Christmas-ready? Key SEO tips this festive season

Whether you’re a Christmas Grinch or truly believe it’s the most magical time of the year, if you sell goods that make great gifts, Christmas is a vital trading period. In fact, never mind magical, apart from anything else it’s likely to be your busiest time of year.

As always, preparation is absolutely key. So how can you get your website SEO and generally ready to cope with demand and looking its best so that it helps your business make the most of the festive rush? Here are a few tips to get you started.

Add some Digital Seasonal Sparkle

Of course, it’s possible to overdo the seasonal look for your website. But by featuring at least some seasonal content, tastefully, you can show visitors that your site is always up to date and professional looking.

You could use a template from your web builder. Alternatively, think about the following:

  • Change your colour scheme

Consider red, green and white, which always look good at this time of year, while gold and silver can look classier. Then, of course you can add snow, holly and themes to your fonts – there are versions you can download for free.

  • Adding some media

Have a think about the videos, photos or illustrations you could incorporate. How about banners, backgrounds or an appropriate greeting on your home page? You could even embed some Christmas sounds – as long, of course, as they are royalty-free.

Embed social media

You’ll want to launch Christmas promos on social media to reach new and current customers (embedding social media shouldn’t just be for December, but all year round). Run discounts, offers, competitions, an advent calendar with various vouchers codes, support a charity or have an exclusive discount code for retweeting on X or reposting on Instagram. Additionally, embed links to your social media platforms when you send out newsletters.

Work on your website’s performance

At this time of year, your site should see above-average traffic (depending on the industry you operate in). Of course, that’s great – but it could also mean your pages take longer to load, potentially affecting performance. Consider addressing the problem via a shared or managed hosting solution. These can optimise loading times, while being highly secure and protecting against server failure.

For e-commerce merchants, webshop software can keep life manageable and straightforward. Buy through a hosting provider and you’ll get technical support and be all ready for the extra visitors this Christmas time.

  • Involve your customers

There are plenty of opportunities for audience participation, from raffles and quizzes, to adding plug-ins for advent calendars or other content features which you can embed on your WordPress website. Think about creating mini-games or scavenger hunts, or encouraging visitors to upload Christmas-related posts or photos which could include your designated hashtag.

  • Don’t forget your SEO

It’s always vital, but at Christmas more than any other time of year, your site needs to perform well in the rankings with major search engines such as Google, so that as many potential customers as possible find your business. Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves various elements, from content to media and text structure, among others.

And the things you can do include writing meta information, inserting keywords and incorporating internal links. But, clearly, before you do anything else, meticulous keyword research is essential to understanding which phrases will do best in terms of search volumes.

Finally, ensure that data across all your pages, but in particular your landing page, is consistently up to date. No one wants to see anything about Halloween in mid-December!

SEO Experts can help!

At Front Page Advantage, we have many years’ experience of pushing the websites of our customers (who come from a broad range of sectors) up the search engine results pages. Talk to us about what we could do for your website, whatever the size of your business and whatever industry you operate in. We can maximise its performance, at Christmas and all year round.