SEO for the Season: Christmas Technical SEO Strategy

Your website needs to perform flawlessly during the Christmas shopping surge. Optimising your Technical SEO means search engines can easily crawl, index & serve your content efficiently when traffic spikes.

Page speed is important. It becomes even more critical during the busy Christmas shopping season. Shoppers often have many tabs open. They are researching & comparing their options.

A one-second delay in loading time can have a massive impact on your conversion rates. During the high-stakes Christmas season, you need to minimise these losses as much as possible.

Look at your site’s Core Web Vitals to check your site’s performance.

Tips to improve site performance

• Compress images ruthlessly.
  Tools like TinyPNG can reduce file sizes by 60-80% without noticeable quality loss.

• Use next-generation image formats like WebP.
  WebP image formats are 25-34% smaller than JPEG & PNG image files but remain rich in quality. So your website runs faster without sacrificing the quality of your Christmas campaign images.

• Minify CSS & JavaScript files. Reducing the size of these files can improve your page load performance.

• Avoid multiple page redirects. Every redirect slows down your page load speed. When you use a redirect, the browser must make several HTTP requests to get the page. This adds extra time to your page speed.
  
  During Christmas shopping traffic spikes, every reduced request improves performance.

Mobile traffic increases during the festive season. People shop during their commutes, lunch breaks, and while relaxing in the evenings.
Google’s mobile-first indexing means your mobile experience directly impacts rankings.

Test your customer journey experience thoroughly on mobile devices. Christmas shoppers abandon carts quickly if the purchasing process is difficult. Streamline forms, optimise buttons & ensure payment options work seamlessly across devices.

Implement mobile-specific features like click-to-call buttons for customer service & store locators that integrate with maps applications.

Schema markup is code you can add to your website. It helps search engines and LLM models understand your site’s context. When information is clear, it is more likely to appear as a rich snippet. It can also be shown in response to a question.

Rich snippets become more valuable during the festive season when search results are crowded with competitive listings. Schema markup helps your listings stand out with additional information like prices, availability, ratings & delivery information.

Review schema becomes particularly valuable during the holidays when social proof influences purchase decisions more heavily.

Aggregate rating star ratings display the average score from customer reviews in Google search results. It often shows as gold or yellow stars below a listing. This creates a clear visual that grabs customers’ attention. It can also significantly increase the click-through rate from search results.

Strategic internal linking helps both customers & search engines to understand your festive content hierarchy. Link new seasonal content to high-authority pages (like your homepage) to pass authority, encourage indexing & boost visibility.

Strategic linking is how AI & LLM models understand & process information. So creating internal links is a crucial element to being seen in these advanced models.

LLMs & AI search models prioritise topical authority. They only want to cite sources that they are confident are experts on the subject. Creating hub pages that link to related festive content is the best strategy to develop topical authority & content clusters on your site.
A comprehensive “Christmas Gift Guide” page can link to specific category guides, individual product pages & related blog posts, creating a strong topical cluster around Christmas shopping. This is also helpful for your customer journey, as it makes it extremely easy for customers to navigate your site.

Traditional search engines used to rely heavily on keywords to understand what pages were about. With AI & LLMS they use semantic understanding, which means they look at the relationships between words & topics on your site.

Creating a blog post “Top 10 eco-friendly Christmas Stocking Stuffers” & linking to it on a specific eco-friendly toy provides a clear signal to the AI model that these two pages are semantically related. It can improve the chances of your content appearing in more searches that involve conversations or multiple queries.

AI & LLMs can significantly boost brand awareness & credibility by mentioning or quoting your brand.

Our final tip on internal linking is to include descriptive anchor text that includes relevant keywords. Instead of “click here,” use “Browse our Christmas gift collection”.

Create clean, keyword-rich URLs for Christmas content that will be easy to find & remember.
“/christmas-gifts/” is better than “/seasonal-products/holiday-collection/page1/” for both search engines & customers.

Update & refresh content annually rather than creating entirely new pages with similar content. You can build authority over time rather than starting from scratch every year.

Consider creating a dedicated holiday section with consistent URL structure: “/christmas/gifts/”, “/christmas/decorations/”, “/christmas/events/” makes navigation intuitive whilst supporting SEO efforts.

Every detail matters during the peak Christmas shopping season. The little Technical SEO improvements will compound to improve your conversion rates & ultimately impact your revenue.

By using our technical SEO strategies and tips, you can help your business stand out online.

Get in touch with us for more details or a tailored Technical SEO strategy.

For more Christmas digital marketing tips & strategies, read our Christmas Content Marketing Strategy blog post