Are you looking for ideas to ramp up your WordPress website and SEO for the Holiday Season? Kori Ashton highlights this article from Yoast.com https://yoast.com/holiday-season-seo/ that will share with you the 45 Day plan and more. Be certain to optimize your site for speed too by following this other video on Site Optimization https://youtu.be/K18AXLecsu4
You can learn more about SEO with Kori’s playlist https://askkori.com/category/seo-tips/
Full Transcript
Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton and welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. Today’s tutorial’s all about search engine optimization, specifically inside the holiday season.
If you’re like me, it seems like the holidays come earlier and earlier every year. But this year, I really want us to be strategic in all of our content strategy, including, how to kind of recycle some of our older content, making it a lot easier for you to rank higher inside those search results.
And for those of you who are running on WordPress, please, please be sure to have a great WordPress support team, just like Liquid Web here, they’re the sponsor of my channel. I want you to reach out to them, be sure to get answers for all your WordPress questions, for any type of support that you might need, don’t let your hosting company say, “That’s just a WordPress issue, I can’t help you.” Liquid Web will help you every time.
All right, let’s get to the tutorial, y’all.
Those of you interested in my health journey, as I combat cervical cancer, please stick around at the end of the video, I’ll give you a quick update.
Yoast Plugin
All right, for the topic of SEO inside of the WordPress world, you know, one of the absolute leaders is the Yoast plugin. If you’re not using this plugin inside your WordPress website, I highly recommend that you learn it front and back, you figure out to use this great tool because it allows you to easily overwrite the Google snippets, and how your page search results appear for every user. It’s really important that you’re able to overwrite those things, and really capture their attention.
AB test certain lines, and be certain that you’re getting the most traffic possible. Especially during the holiday season, you know this could be one of your biggest seasons, if you’re selling products online, or if you’re trying to blog, specifically for the topic of a holiday tradition or maybe holiday products, or holiday seasonal items, anything coming into season right now, we wanna talk about it.
And, Yoast has a really great article here that I’m gonna reference, I’m gonna give you the link in the description box below. If you wanna come read this article, it’s really fantastic. It talks about preparing early, and it’s just about this time of year that they start talking about needing to do this.
45 Days In Advance For Promotions
What’s crazy is, they reference another article by bigcommerce.com called, “The 45-Day Rule.” Here’s what this article says, 45 days in Advance: Post your promotion to your website calendar, right? And post a save-the-date post on social media including your email newsletter. So, they’re not saying this is just preparing, they’re saying, actually start advertising.
Create published posts, put it out there, adjust it couple of times, 45 days in advance, and start to share with the audience, that this is coming. Then if you have an event, or you have a release or a product or a new sale that’s about to happen, they say be sure to advertise it seven days in advance.
Give it a little ‘nother push, another little notification that in seven days, this is about to start happening.
Then of course, within 24 hours this has one day in advance, be sure to notify again your audience.
Hey, heads up! Tomorrow morning, or at a certain time, this is gonna happen, here’s the link to be sure not to miss it. You wanna be certain to put that content out there, and notify people. So, please don’t leave this to your memory, please be sure to go in there strategically and put in scheduled posts. Be sure on a calendar you have it all mapped out, so that the day before a big event happens, you have a post that’s going out and notifying everybody. Seven days before, you have a post going out, notifying everybody, hey, hey, please remember to come to our website, here’s the link. And now, even now, 45 days in advance, you can go ahead and start talking about your great event, or your great products, or whatever holiday promotion you have coming up.
Holiday Season Gift Page
One of the cool tips they put on this page is setting up a holiday season gift page. So, if you have specific products, you wanna kinda group them together on a page inside of a category, and allow people to easily navigate through those, especially these are seasonal, they’re only gonna be on your website for these 45 or 60 days, whatever it might be, you wanna be certain to put it in one area so that everybody can find them easily and quickly.
Again, I’ll put the link to this article and in the description box below, because you’re gonna wanna come read this and click through all their different links and resources and really understand this topic.
Social Media
Social media as well, you wanna be certain that you have things scheduled out across all social media platforms. And please don’t forget about using a really great tool like Pinterest, or even Twitter this season. Challenge yourself to not just stay on Facebook, challenge yourself to get out there and try Pinterest where a lot of people do a lot of holiday shopping. They’re over there looking for creative decorating ideas for their home, or their office or their creative space. They’re looking for gift ideas.
Be certain that you’re inside that feed, whether it’s organic, or you’re paying for ads, you’ve gotta be in some social media feeds. They also talk about adding new products, so be certain you something brand new. Don’t just recreate the list from last year.
You always wanna have something fresh, something clean, something that’s trending now out in the forefront of all your advertising.
Structured Data
They also talk about structured data. I’m gonna do a follow-up video on this, next week so you understand specifically how to do structured data. This is so important when it comes to rich snippets for your product pages, or your articles, there are ways to get a boost up inside of the search engines, and it’s with structured data.
Reuse Content
Now, even though I’m saying don’t reuse only the content from last year, you can reuse content from last year, you just don’t only wanna do that. You wanna be certain to recycle old content, if you’ve gone in and looked at your analytics and you had a really great article, go back in and kinda give it a freshening up for 2019 or 2020.
Be certain that it’s fresh, its new, it’s still relative to today and you can use it again. You certainly wanna be sure that your website is optimized for speed. I’ve already done several videos on that, I’ll put the links to those in the description box below. Here’s why, if you’re starting to advertise over on social media, if you’re starting to put content out there and you’re really trying to get found inside the search results, and people click on your link and come to your website and it takes too long to load, or it frustrates the user, they’re just gonna click their back button and move away from your website.
So you wanna be certain as you’re trying to drive traffic to your website, that its not gonna get bogged down, you’re gonna be able to have a great user experience.
Find A Great Hosting Company
And with this, I wanna be certain that you understand a lot of that is on your hosting company. So be sure to have a great hosting company like Liquid Web, they’re one of my favorites, you’ve gotta have them so that they optimize your website and make certain that has all that traffic hits, your website’s not gonna go down.
Measurement Plan
And lastly, you wanna be certain that you have a measurement plan in place. Or you wanna be certainly have Google Analytics minimally, which is a free resource plugged in and analyzing your traffic, analyzing your landing pages, understanding what content’s working, what content isn’t working.
What social media platforms are actually driving traffic, and which ones are you either posting the wrong type of content, or just not gaining an audience from. These things or how you measure every bit of effort that you’re going to right now, whether it’s you or your staff, or the company that you’re paying, you need to be aware of how the measurement lines up, make certain that you are exceeding expectations.
And I’m not gonna spoil it for you, I’m actually gonna put the link to this, I want you to come watch this video because Yoast even talks about how to handle your products whenever the season is over. So I’m not gonna be a spoiler, this is a great video, it’s a minute long, super short, super easy to watch. I’ll put the link to that in the description box below so that you’re starting to come over here and watch it.
Optimize Your Site
Y’all those are the tips for SEO for a holiday season and is super important that you optimize your website and get ready for this rush of traffic. You really could have a great season this season, have a lot of new customers come in, learn about you, brag about you, be sure that there’re social share buttons on your website so that everybody can brag on your great articles, or your great products.
Also, be sure to subscribe because next week I’m following up with a structured data video, you’re gonna wanna get an alert for that.
I hope this helps you, if it does, be sure to comment below, lemme know how it’s helped you, it’s always an encouragement to hear from you. I hope you’re having a great one, I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday, bye everyone.
Health Update
All right y’all so this is it. This is my week, to be in one of my major surgeries and procedures. So if you are thinking about me this week, I am probably flat on my back right now in the hospital. I’ve recorded this early, so that I wouldn’t miss you on this week. But I am going through one of the toughest moments in my life right now. So if you think about me, if you’re watching this video, please say a prayer, or it say a thought for me, or light a candle, or whatever your faith might be, would you please think about me and put some good energy out there that I am able to recover, that there’s no collateral damage inside of this surgery as it’s going to be internal radiation, as they try to combat my cervical cancer.
So, it’s a four-day long procedure where I’m flat on my back, with needles going in me, where they’re gonna be pumping me full of radiation. So, I am very hopeful that this is gonna get it, this is gonna be the fix and I’m gonna be able to come back to you with some really great news. Next week, I’m gonna record another video today, so that I have another video next week.
So you won’t hear yet, you’ll hear it couple of weeks after I’m done with the procedure as I’m back in the studio and able to record. But I hope that’s not too long, I hope I’m back on my feet pretty quickly and able to catch up with you. I always miss you all if I’m not able to be here, I love reading all of your comments and all of your sweet DMs and tweets to me, always such an encouragement, thank you so much y’all. We’re gonna get this thing, I’m hoping to come back to you with some great news. All right y’all, keep being positive, keep looking up. I’ll see you next time, bye everyone.
