Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. It’s a perfect day for sharing the love – and it’s a day we need a little bit more now after the year we just had. During the holiday season, consumers wanted to celebrate the small holidays as well as the big ones to get together with friends and family as they could. According to a NRF survey, nearly 3 in 4 people feel that celebrating Valentine’s Day this year is important because of the pandemic. While searches for “love” are peaking, as they traditionally do around this time of year, it’s a perfect opportunity to extend the holiday as a love of community, friends, and family to continue to bring people together. Prepare your Valentine’s Day SEO strategy so your customers can celebrate one of the things they love the most – your brand!
Starting Your Valentine’s Day SEO Strategy
As with any SEO strategy centered on a specific holiday, you want to start planning it about three to four weeks in advance to give the search engines time to crawl and index your landing pages. Create a landing page catered specifically to the holiday to make it easy for searches to find. Setting up this landing page early alerts loyal customers to forthcoming promotions, as well as captures potential customers who are looking for inspiration prior to committing to a purchase.
When running your promotions, be sure to include weekends in your campaigns. While the always-on consumer is searching throughout the workday, weekends are when people have the most time to search and shop for their loved ones.
On your website, notify consumers of the last purchase date for shipping and update them with any shipping delays. A countdown of your promotions on your homepage and Valentine’s Day specific landing pages is a great way to inspire urgency in consumers. As the actual day of the holiday nears, cater to last-minute shoppers by highlighting the ease of services and safety precautions at your brick-and-mortar store.
The Right Keywords to Say “I Love You”
Use Valentine’s Day specific keywords in your on-page content and in relevant blogs used to showcase your products. Optimize for keywords within the metadata text. Share your blog posts and landing pages across social media to generate awareness and engagement to help these pages rank higher in SERP.
In February 2020, Google reported the following as the most-searched gifts in the United States:
- Flowers
- Ecards
- Teddy bears
- Rose bears
- Chocolate covered strawberries
While these searches are, of course, subject to change in 2021, these are classically staples of Valentine’s Day. If your business sells these products, be sure to optimize all your content, including product descriptions and URL tags, to make it easier for people to find.
Use friendly and easy to read URLs. Simplify URLs to their most basic elements, such as http://www.yourbusiness.com/products/valentinesdayflowers. This improves your overall SEO performance, including better ranking, faster returned search results, and easier promotion. Most important, this drives a better user experience, as consumers are directly exactly where they want to go.
Target keywords people are more likely to search for, such as “gifts for my girlfriend,” “gifts for my husband,” “romantic gifts,” etc. While nearly half of the total estimated spending for Valentine’s Day will be on someone’s significant other or spouse, people shop for other family members, friends, classmates and teachers, pets, and co-workers. Including Valentine’s Day keywords related to a variety of loved ones will help diversify your content and reach. Create blog posts or guides that showcase your range of products and target different audiences. Use titles such as “Valentine’s Day on a Budget Guide” or “Best Food for Valentine’s Day.” Soon, you’ll be everyone’s favorite Valentine.
How to Share Your Valentine’s Day Content
After you created all your great content and optimized your landing pages, how do you generate more awareness?
Because Valentine’s Day is a special time for many people, a testimonial highlighting the attributes of a product or service can go a long way in ensuring other customers they are getting the right thing. Testimonials help improve conversion rates, as people are more likely to trust their peer’s reviews over ads and other promotional language. (Reviews also boost local searches, which can drive further business to your brick-and-mortar store.) Showcase positive reviews as much as you can without it being overbearing. Share on social in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day after your pages are optimized to help persuade undecided and last-minute shoppers. Add relevant testimonials to specific landing pages. Finally, include some of the best-written and glowing reviews on your homepage, linking the review to the specific product page to drive conversions.
Visuals are crucial to highlighting your products. High-quality images build trust and credibility with your customers. With the growth of video SEO, adding videos to applicable products can help add a competitive advantage to your. User-generated content can play a significant role here, as you can ask customers for videos of significant others opening their gift.
As always, label images and videos with optimized keywords and add alt text that users will likely search for when looking for that particular product.
With a strong Valentine’s Day SEO strategy, you are bound to be inundated with hearts from loving clients.
Additional Resources
If your SEO strategy needs a loving boost, contact a NetElixir expert today.
