The Ultimate Christmas SEO Checklist for a Christmas Ready Website

Timelines: Start Your Christmas SEO Early and Plan Ahead

The most common mistake businesses make is waiting until December to start their Christmas campaigns. Due to the time it takes search engines like Google and LLMs to crawl and index a new page, SEO takes time to produce results, so you need to get a head start.

September - October: 

If your business has information on consumer purchasing habits or user behaviour, this can also be an instrumental part of your strategy. If not, ensure you’re recording as much information as possible this year for use in future.

We then need to consider keyword research and how your users are searching to find your products. This information can then be used to determine the way Christmas-related content appears on your site. 

Examples might include:

• A Christmas Category and subcategories showcasing all your Christmas products. 
• Inspirational content about why an item or items make the perfect gift
• Gift guides for seasonal items like “Stocking fillers for men”, “holiday party dresses”, or “Christmas gift ideas for her”

Ideally, this work would focus on keywords with lower competition so that we can have an impact on site performance and conversions.

November:

With your new content ideas in place, focus on on-page SEO and internal linking. Optimise your new and existing pages with your target keywords. Create a dedicated Christmas hub page and link to it from your homepage and other relevant pages.
This is also the time to start building high-quality backlinks to your holiday pages to improve their authority.

December: 

The focus shifts to promotion and technical SEO. Ensure your site's speed is optimised to handle the increased traffic. Check for any broken links or redirects. Promote your content through social media, email marketing, and paid ads. 
Monitor your keyword rankings and Google Search Console query data to determine if further optimisation is needed, and adjust your strategy as needed.

January:

Post-Christmas is a great time to analyse your performance. Look at which pages performed well and which didn't. Any insights you can gather will be really useful in improving your strategy for the following year.

Update your content for the new year. While you may want to remove banners and homepage links to the Christmas category hub, don’t delete the hub itself. With the main signposts removed the page is effectively in hibernation until next year, however, maintaining the URL structure ensures it remains indexed, making it easier to rank next year.

Structure: Building for Now and the Future

Instead of creating new pages that you'll delete after the holidays, you should build a sustainable content structure that you can reuse and update year after year.

• Evergreen Christmas Hub Page: Create a main "Christmas" or "Holiday Gifts" landing page. The URL should be simple and evergreen, like yourwebsite.com/christmas-gifts or yourwebsite.com/christmas. This page will be the central point for all your holiday related content. In future years, you can simply update the content on this page instead of creating a new URL. This preserves the page's authority and link equity, saving you time and effort.
• Gift Guide Categories: Instead of a single, massive gift guide, create separate, specific guides that cater to different audiences. For example, "Christmas Gifts for Dads," "Secret Santa Ideas under £20," or "Eco-Friendly Christmas Gifts." Each guide should have its own optimised page. This also means you’ll have specific pages for specific keywords - great for ranking on more niche terms.
• Blog Content: Use your blog to support your main Christmas hub page and gift guides. Write articles that answer common holiday-related questions, like "How to host the perfect Christmas party" or "Creative ways to wrap presents." These articles can be a great source of organic traffic from people in the research phase of their holiday shopping.

Events Leading Up to and Including Christmas

Your SEO efforts should align with key shopping dates and events.

• Black Friday and Cyber Monday: While not strictly Christmas, these are the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season. Optimise your product and category pages for these sales events. Announce deals early to get noticed by search engines.
• Christmas Gift Guides: Promote your gift guides heavily. Use internal links to connect different guides and relevant product pages. This not only helps users find what they're looking for but also signals to Google the relationships between your pages.
• Last-Minute Shopping: Create content and optimise pages for last-minute shoppers (e.g., "last-minute Christmas gifts," "same-day delivery"). This captures a very specific, high-intent audience. When creating this type of content it's important to be clear on when a user can expect to receive the item. Last minute implies the user is shopping late in the season so be sure to outline delivery options for these items, and consider adding a gentle behavioural nudge like “Order within the next 2 hours to get it by Christmas!” to create urgency and drive conversions. These cues help prompt quicker decision-making and can significantly boost conversions during peak last-minute shopping periods.

Key Takeaways For This and Future Christmas’

The work you do this year should serve as the foundation for your next holiday season.

• Don't Delete Pages: The most important rule is do not delete your Christmas-related pages. Deleting them means you lose all the SEO value, backlinks, and authority you've built. Instead, update the content on the same page every year. While out of the Christmas season, consider changing the page content to direct users to latest offers, or to sign up to your newsletter, to ensure the page still has value if a would-be customer lands on your page outside of Christmas time.
• Redirect Outdated URLs: If you have pages from a previous year that are no longer relevant, use a 301 redirect to point them to your main, evergreen Christmas hub page. This passes the link equity and authority to your current pages.
• Analyse and Learn: Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to review your performance. Identify which keywords and pages drove the most traffic and sales. Take note of what worked and what didn't so you can refine your strategy for the next year. This data-driven approach will make each holiday season more successful than the last.

If you’re looking to level up your Christmas SEO strategy contact Reflect Digital today and find out how we can help.