Tis the Season to Start Optimizing for the Holidays

Do your keyword research. Are there any holiday-related keywords you should optimize for? Paid users of Keyword Discovery can see historical trends going back one year, which may help identify changes in searcher behavior during the holidays. Google Trends, which is free, can provide similar data, but without exact numbers.

Take care of your on-site SEO. If you're looking for a quick checklist or two, try this list of 21 things to do and this list of 20 things to avoid. Do this step quickly, since any on-page efforts you make now may not reap benefits for a couple months.

Update your content with holiday shoppers in mind. As the holidays approach, your generic home page text can be replaced with more specific material for shoppers. But be sure to still use keyword-rich copy that search engine spiders like.

What makes Keyword Discovery such an interesting tool is the ability to create charts that examine keyword trending and market share by search engine.

In the chart to the right, you'll find the trending data for the search term "wedding flower arrangements." As expected, you can see a sharp increase in interest in the late spring and early summer as brides planning May/June weddings finalize their plans. It's not hard to see how this type of data could help companies make decisions about when to launch new product lines, when to ramp up paid search spending and when to launch new organic content in order to get into organic search results prior to the uptick in search interest.