All aboard the holiday express! With November officially here, that means that the 2019 holiday shopping season is upon us and the time to ensure your business thrives is now. Well, in reality, you should've been prepping throughout Q3 for this illustrious time of year, but today, I'm here to help out you procrastinators. When it comes to holiday shopping, one thing that many retailers seem to let slip between the cracks is their SEO for this time of year. But what makes this time of year different than the other ten months you may ask? Now you need to appeal to users who are not in the market for your product for themselves but instead are looking to give the perfect gift this holiday season. With that being said, allow me to let you in on three, effective and last minute things you can do to increase your brand's visibility to holiday shoppers.

Restructure Those Titles & Metas

So when it comes to scrounging away and trying to get the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time, restructuring your titles and metas is a quick way to ensure you are getting your message across to the shoppers online. So currently, your titles & metas are more than likely optimized to reach your key consumer for your industry, meaning that your titles and descriptions are probably specific and anyone with any interest in what you offer would know what is going on. But let's think about technology for instance. You sell a variety of laptop brands and a parent is looking to purchase one for their college student this holiday season. To ensure that your content engages the right shoppers you will want to use titles such as "Student-Rated Top 10 Laptops for Christmas 2018" instead of "Mac, Lenovo, HP Laptops Available Today." Restructuring the titles to engage the users is a sure fire way to ensure that you get the click instead of your competition.

Featured Snippets Can Help

Featured snippets give you the ability to appear before anyone else in the SERPS and really gives you a large chunk of real estate to work with. Keep in mind when marking up your site for featured snippets, you will want to continue appealing to the holiday shoppers and not your key demographic this season. Articles such as "The Best Gifts to Give For Christmas 2018" will often get the coveted spot as they provide a lot of information, have excellent markup and gain quite a bit of traction during the holiday season.

Utilize Google Posts

With my first two points being the easiest to help you rank better this holiday seasons, I did want to mention one last method that may help you succeed this holiday season. The first being utilizing Google Posts. Crafting Google Posts to share articles on your site about hot holiday gift ideas is a great method to reach even more users! Your Google Post will come up in the knowledge box on the side of the search results, and pairing an intriguing article with an eye-catching photo can sometimes pull the user away from even the most detailed featured snippet.Now that you have all three of these methods at your fingertips, get out there and dominate this holiday shopping season! Keep in mind that making these changes before Black Friday and Cyber Monday would be ideal as those are two of the biggest holiday shopping days of the year. If you need any help getting your site holiday ready, contact the experts at Red Shark Digital!