As shoppers continue to turn to online shopping amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many brands have had to accelerate their digital transformation plans. While the holiday shopping season is already competitive, this new need for engaging online content has only heightened the stakes this year.
The retail search landscape also changes drastically during the holidays, and new pandemic-motivated requirements and habits have forced brands to be agile and hyper-aware of industry trends.
Brands that can rapidly respond to all this change — especially keyword trends that play a large role in product visibility — can see significant improvements in page rank across the digital shelf.
3 Tips to Improve Your Holiday Ecommerce Search Strategy
These three tips can help you gain the attention of shoppers and grow sales and market share as part of a holistic holiday ecommerce strategy.
Use Changing Consumer Search Trends to Optimize Your Product Detail Pages
As holiday shopping came earlier this year with a delayed Amazon Prime Day and competing events from other retailers, we’ve started to take a look at how search trends have changed from October and November 2019 year-over-year to October and November 2020.
Consumers are searching retail sites using a much different array of keywords than last year. For example, within the top 200 most popular search terms on Walmart.com, 48% were new.
Get ahead of this change in behavior and provide updated content to retailers that takes into account new and holiday-focused keyword trends. Ecommerce SEO can help you nurture product discovery and increase conversion this holiday season.
Our 2020 Holiday Shopping Keyword Intelligence & Search Trends Report explores holiday searches from 2018 to 2019 with predictions for 2020 to help you get started.
Leverage Enhanced Content to Better Portray Your Brand and Drive Conversion
Enhanced content, also known as A+ content and rich media, can be a valuable part of your holiday ecommerce strategy across multiple categories by helping you better show shoppers the usefulness of your products and the value of your brand. Enhanced content can also help boost conversion 10%, according to 2019 Salsify data.
The top 10% of products on Amazon and Walmart use enhanced content significantly more than the bottom 10% of products, according to 2020 Salsify data.
On Walmart, 35% of these best-performing products use it versus only 6% of the worst-performing products. On Amazon, 33% of the best-performing products use it versus only 3% of the worst-performing products.
Update Product Content at Scale to Keep Pace with Market Changes
Product detail page (PDP) content updates are on the rise. Between 2019 and 2020, Salsify saw a 45% increase in publishes, according to internal Salsify data.
With today’s current pace of change, maintaining the status quo is no longer a viable option. Brands must have a dedicated team to ensure product content is accurate and updated with the latest applicable holiday keyword trends. This process helps support new product discovery and the launch of seasonal product packaging.
A successful holiday ecommerce strategy must have three essential parts to set your team up for success on the digital shelf:
- Optimize your PDPs for discovery;
- Make your PDP experiences high-quality and convincing; and
- Streamline your team, processes, and technologies.
Download “2020 Report: Holiday Shopping Keyword and Search Trends” to learn how to gain a competitive edge with insights into the keywords and search terms that rank every holiday season.
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