30-second summary:
- The best time to prepare for the holidays was 6 months ago. The second best time is now.
- Stay ahead: pinpoint a launch date for next year’s holiday season by backing into link acquisition needs for target SERPs.
- Holiday-related URLs on your site are not temporary. They should be evergreen components of your year-round organic strategy.
- Tap into the previous year’s Google Search Console data. Identify holiday-related terms you’ve surfaced for and make sure you have intent-aligned pages for them.
The end-of-year holiday season is stressful. And whether you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Winter Solstice, Las Posadas or Festivus, as a digital marketing professional, your day-to-day job doesn’t do much to reduce that stress.
Between the Q4 rush, the abbreviated weeks due to bank holidays, and having to juggle a litany of “real world” holiday prep, the holidays for people like you and me often leave us feeling like we have more work than there are hours in the day.
I get it. It’s a lot. Despite being in the middle of a pandemic, we must make good on the promises we’ve made to our teams and our customers. We’ve got quotas to hit and metrics to make. As a result of that fact, every year around this time, Victorious receives a lot of requests for guidance on how best to prepare organic search channels to capitalize on the holiday season, specifically Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The problem is that these requests tend to come three to six months too late. But as the old saying goes, “The best time to start is yesterday. The next best time is now.” So, if you’ve found yourself reading this article and feeling a little behind the eight ball, read on.