No doubt you’ve already seen your local stores jumping on board with their own festive offerings. If you actually want more local customers finding your business during the festive season, your website needs to be optimised for how people search in December, and those searches are very different from the rest of the year. That’s where a smart mix of Christmas SEO and Local SEO can make a real difference.
Why Christmas Changes the Way People Search
During the holiday season, people search faster and more locally. Consumer behaviour changes dramatically, search demand increases for terms related to gifts, holiday promotions, local events, extended trading hours, and seasonal services.
Instead of researching for weeks, they’re looking for immediate solutions:
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- “last-minute Christmas gifts Brisbane”
- “best Christmas lunch near me”
- “same-day florist Sydney”
- “local toy shop open late”
- “Christmas catering Melbourne”
The closer it gets to Christmas, the more urgent these searches become. That urgency is exactly why local businesses can do so well during December, for businesses that have invested in both website optimisation and local visibility. A well-prepared website can attract customers who are actively searching for products or services in your area.
Update Your Website Before the Christmas Rush Hits
One of the biggest SEO mistakes businesses make is waiting until mid-December to update their website. By then, competitors have already indexed their Christmas pages, updated promotions, and started ranking for seasonal searches. You don’t need a full website redesign. Usually, a few strategic updates are enough to improve visibility and conversions.
Some simple seasonal updates include:
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- Christmas landing pages
- Holiday service pages
- Festive product collections
- Gift guides
- Shipping and delivery updates
- Extended trading hour
- Announcements
For example, if you run a beauty clinic, you could create a page around “Christmas gift vouchers” or “holiday-ready skin treatments”. If you own a café, you might promote Christmas catering or end-of-year functions.
The goal is to make your website feel current, active, and relevant to what customers are searching for right now.
Tips on ways to increase your site traffic
There are a few ways to make your website more attractive to local customers for Christmas. For example, you can add a new shopping cart page for free shipping during the holiday season. If you’re unable to offer free shipping on your site during this time of year, you can encourage people to come in and check out what’s available. This can be particularly beneficial if your store offers high-end services or products that are difficult to find online. You can also put together a Christmas gift guide with all kinds of gifts that will be perfect for gifting this holiday season. You don’t need to go overboard with the number of items you create; it just needs to be enough content so that as soon as someone browses through the categories, they see what your store has in store for them. These types of pages tend to work well when paired with a product page where customers can browse through items and purchase them directly from the site.
Local SEO best practices on Google Maps and Facebook
One of the best practices is to use Google Maps. You want your website to show up on Google Maps and more importantly, you want your building to show up on Google Maps. If you’re a brick-and-mortar business, you should also make sure that it’s showing up on Facebook as well. You can also work with real estate agents in your area to get listings for your location. You might also consider using a local search engine optimisation agency, such as fun/serious (yeah yeah yeah, I know, but it’s my blog and I can plug my SEO business if I want to!), who will help ensure that you are optimising your site for the most important keywords and phrases related to your business.
How to do keyword research for your website content
One of the easiest ways to find out what phrases people are using to search for your product or service is by conducting a keyword research. The first step in this process is to think of two or three words that represent the topic you want to focus on. Then, use Google’s Keyword Planner tool—or any other keyword research platform—to get an idea of how relevant these terms are for your business. This will give you an idea of what terms you can target with your content, which will help when deciding on the most important keywords for your site. It’s also a good idea to try and include these keywords in both branded and non-branded versions of your content. You can then see which versions perform better than others. This helps prevent any potential audience confusion caused by having duplicate content, and it also lets you know which phrases are more important for SEO purposes.
If this is gobeldygook to you, I know who can help you with your local SEO strategy!
To sum up!
That creates a huge opportunity for businesses that are prepared. In order to effectively use SEO during the holiday season, you need to prepare your website for increased traffic and do keyword research for your content.
If you want Ben to help, you better get in touch ASAP!! Otherwise we can focus on Valentines Day, Easter or any other number of holidays! Boom, I got ya!
