The Ultimate Holiday SEO Tips For Shopify Stores To Max Out Sales Like Amazon Sellers

Jun 14, 2024

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3 min read

Do you know?Amazon sellers in the US sold an average of 11,500 products per minute during the holidays. That’s quite an impressive number that many Shopify stores are looking up to. One of the secrets of selling big on Amazon from these high-volume sophisticated sellers is their holiday SEO tips.

In this article, I'm going to share with you the best Amazon SEO tactics that work wonders for Amazon sellers. You can apply these SEO tips to your Shopify store and get ready for the holiday season!

Is Amazon SEO similar to Shopify SEO?

Not really.

The difference

Amazon sellers have the advantage of a bespoke robust product search system. Plus, Amazon is also indexed by Google so sellers can easily get their products found on Google SERPs. Shopify sellers will be on your own from A to Z to build a strong Shopify SEO for your stores.

Furthermore, Amazon has its own algorithm for product ranking, which is called A9. And, Amazon sellers mostly get SEO support from A+ content - a content form provided by Amazon containing rich and detailed text information, images, and pre-built layouts.

Meanwhile, although Shopify sellers don’t have a built-in SEO system in Shopify to rely on, you have tons of SEO apps to help you get the job done.

The similarity

Although it’s true that Amazon sellers have their advantage as Amazon is already a high-traffic website. However, the competition is just as hard when compared with Shopify sellers. Amazon sellers also have to put hard work into optimizing their product listings for SEO so they are found by the right shoppers.

And because Amazon sellers are the best when it comes to applying SEO tactics for holiday selling, we’re here to learn their secrets.

Psst! It's all about the right keywords!

Why you should optimize keywords for the holiday season

It's not because your current keywords or Shopify SEO tips do not work during the holiday season. You need to update your keyword lists and prep your stores for holidays because every holiday has its own unique keyword combinations.

Your potential customers actually include holiday-related keywords in their search commands. For example, for Christmas, online shoppers will add phrases like “Christmas gift” with a specific product-related keyword - such as “ugly sweater Christmas gift for husband”.

Secondly, holiday eCommerce sales will grow 15.5% to $235.86 billionin this year's forecast. Despite the effect of inflation, consumers still have a high demand for online shopping during the holidays. That's for sure an opportunity for eCommerce stores like Shopify to increase their revenue.

Besides the holiday-cheer decoration and preparing your stock, refining your product listing keywords for SEO should be one of the crucial steps in your holiday planning. Think of holiday keyword optimization as your festive digital signage hanging on the doorstep of your Shopify store.

Nail Holiday SEO Like Amazon Sellers: Update Your Seasonal Keyword List

What is a seasonal keyword?

It looks like this: the name of the occasion + a specific seasonally related topic + a target end user group. For example, “Christmas” + “book gifts” + “for moms”. There are many combinations you can think of.

📣 Important note: in this article, we’ll mainly refer to “commercial keywords” which are keywords that can convert into sales, not “informational keywords”. Informational keywords are what customers search for to learn about a specific product or topic while commercial keywords are used when customers have a purchase intent in mind.

How to conduct holiday SEO keyword research?

Keyword research is the backbone of your holiday selling optimization. Extensive research helps shop owners know what customers will search for. Below are 2 effective ways to help you find the best holiday SEO keywords:

#1 - Digging into last year’s holiday search analytics

Amazon sellers can easily extract the keyword report from their Seller Central Account dashboard. From this report, they can review which keywords customers actually used to land on their product listing and save this insight for their next holiday campaign.

For Shopify sellers, you can go to My Shopify > Analytics > Reports and look for the Behavior section where all store search data is located. You can easily choose a Time range to collect real-life holiday SEO keywords.

Behavior section in Shopify Analytics

The best time range to select is from October to December when the idea of buying holiday gifts, decorations, and other household gear starts kicking in the customer's head.

Besides the built-in Analytics report, you can also use different tools to find which keywords have the best performance during last year’s holiday selling season:

If you are usingProduct Filter and Search by Boost, you’ll have a 12-month range of quality reports for your whole site’s product filter search. With our Analytics feature, you’ll have an insight into your customer’s site search behavior.

One thing you can do with the report is to examine which product filters have the most clicks or generate the most sales, and which of your product’s information presented in filter options are viewed more by real-life customers.

→ Get the most out of Analytics feature for your holiday planning here:

4 Tips To Prep For Year-end Sales With Boost's Analytics

With the collected keywords list from the above tools, make sure to check out the search queries that have resulted in a conversion, queries with high Click-through-rate and queries that have high impressions. They might be the most effective keywords to use again this year.

#2 - Competitor analysis - Steal their keywords

Competitor analysis helps you get an idea of how you can make specific changes to your keyword optimization with some high-volume searched keywords.

When it comes to Amazon SEO tactics, one of the most often used activities of Amazon sellers is to “stalk” what other sellers in the same niche are optimizing their keywords. This can also be a good Shopify SEO tip too. You can also use the stalked data for ads, applying the assistance of an Amazon SEM marketing services and landing the page in front of potential customers.

What to look for when doing a competitor analysis?

You should do both a back-in-time competitor’s SEO research and their current SEO activities to know which keywords worked for them last holiday and what they are currently optimizing for. Make a spreadsheet of results you found from the below sources:

Keywords from competitors’ product pages
Keywords from competitors’ main websites
Competitors’ social media
Competitors’ backlinks
Competitors’ reviews
Competitors’ ads (yes, there are tools to do that)

💡 Need extra help with SEO and keywords? Check out these SEO tools and Shopify SEO tips for your store:A Review of the Top Shopify SEO Apps That You Should Try

SEO Checklist For Shopify: Get Your Store In Top Shape With These Vital Tasks

Holiday SEO tips from Amazon sellers: Target long-tail keywords

What is a long-tail keyword? Long-tail keywords are basically composed of a generic keyword and a modifier. For example, with “gaming mouse” as a generic keyword, you can add more details to make it a long-tail keyword such as “best gaming mouse under 1000”.

Long-tail keywords surely don’t have as much high search volume as short-tail keywords do, but they have the specificity that brings you a higher conversion rate.

Image Source: Semrush

One of the keys for Amazon sellers to climb the rankings and sell big is to find less competitive but still highly relevant long-tail keywords to drive traffic to their listings.

How do you find long-tail keywords for your Shopify store?

Try autosuggest

Fly to Amazon and enter their search bar, you’ll immediately get what a conversion-optimized suggestion is.

Keyword auto-suggestion on Amazon

You can also use Google search autosuggestion as well as the Related Searches section to get a grasp of in which direction your holiday-related long-tail keywords should be.

There’s a simple tool calledSoolve which helps generate related long-term keywords on different platforms with the short-tail keywords provided.

Add modifiers

One of the traditional ways to identify long-tail keywords is to add modifiers to the main short-tail keywords. Most-used modifiers are “how”, “what”, “where”, and “why”.

However, remember that we want to target commercial keywords for conversion and sales. So, you’ll need to filter out informational keywords. Hence, go deeper in adding modifiers to your keywords.

Pay attention to holiday-related or buzz-phrase, deal-sensitive words like “Black Friday”, “gift”, “presents”, “sale”, “discount”, “coupon” etc.

You’ll actually need to guess - or do fact-check based on your collected data - what problems or needs customers might want to resolve when shopping for their holiday. Remember, always be specific.

For example, the holiday is the gifting season. So, there will be a high possibility that customers will look for gifts. Now ask, who they will buy gifts for? What that person would like to have? Or what the recipient’s hobbies might be? And do they have a fixed budget in mind? Do you want to target such customers near your store?

Match the possibilities then the best modifiers to add will look somewhat like this: Christmas gift for gardening mom near Texas.

This way, you’ll target more problem-solution-based keyword combinations to improve your conversion rate.

Shopify SEO tips for higher holiday sales: Know where to optimize your holiday keywords

There are 3 important areas where you need to incorporate your researched keywords.

Page’s title (title tag)
Page’s headings
Product page: Product’s main features & description

For Amazon sellers, optimizing keywords in these areas is the killer SEO tactic because the relevance of your product information to a customer’s search query is scored right there.

Is it the same for Shopify? Yes! Shopify sellers are trying to rank high on Google, and Google also reads what Amazon reads first when matching a store’s relevance to a user’s query: it’s the page’s title, headings, and description.

Optimize page titles with high-converting keywords

When updating your page titles, don’t forget to include the most relevant keywords at the beginning of the title. This will help you rank higher with the holiday keywords.

In the product page’s title, learn from the mighty Amazon sellers: they make it sweet and clear about their product with relevant keywords right from the beginning. Their best-performing titles always include:

Brand name
Product line
Material or key feature
Quantity (set of 2 pieces, for example)
Product type or style (i.e. sports legging with pockets)
Color
Size
Targeted users (for women/men, or kids, for example)

Amazon’s product titles are good examples of how you should write your own product titles

💡 You can test if holiday-related keywords perform well on the product’s title or not. Always test to see what converts best for your store.

For the headings, add some holiday-related buzzwords - but remember to make it flow naturally and don’t sound too obvious that you’re trying to get the keyword ranking!

On the product page, optimize the product’s feature list with relevant keywords

Here are a few tips you can copy from Amazon sellers to optimize your listing for better conversion rate and keyword ranking:

Always outline the key features with the main benefits of your products
Always connect the features with the benefits for the customer following the problem-solving format
Present one benefit per row for better readability

For product images, Amazon sellers know the rule "a picture says a thousand words" to their hearts. There are certain rules in optimizing product images for higher product ranking (yes, Google loves them too).

Always use high-quality photos for product images - but remember to optimize their size to reduce loading time
Utilize photos to highlight the product features AND holiday-related deals - don’t just rely on the bullets of highlight features
Update your product photo with holiday decorations or holiday-themed shoots. Change all these new photo names with some keywords. Then insert researched holiday keywords into the image alt tag. If you have a caption for the product photo section, try adding holiday-themed keywords here too

Optimize Shopify filter and site search for holiday sales

Do you have free shipping available? Make that the very first option visible on your product information ANDShopify filter. During the holiday season, the convenience of shipping is the second most important factor that decides a customer’s purchase.

Purchase decision makers according to Amazon buyers (Source:ecomcrew)

Esports Geardisplays Free Shipping Filter first thing in their Product filter

▶ Learn how to optimize Shopify SEO for the Collection page with Boost

When shoppers use your product filters, it means that they are having a purchase intent in mind. So, it’s best to optimize your Shopify filters for their purchase intent. That means using keywords that specify your product’s features or stats and listing them strategically on your filter trees.

For holiday selling optimization, you should make holiday-themed product information the most prominent on the filter tree. For example, a filter option of “Christmas ugly sweaters” product type, “Santa Clause” product tag, or “50% off” product metafield.

Or, alternatively, you can create a separate Holiday Collection like what The Present Finder did:

Source: The Present Finder

Besides optimizing your filter tree with holiday-curated filter options, you should do some optimization for the Instant Search Bar too.

In this on-site search section, remember to:

Use Synonyms: because your visitors won’t use the same words you use to find their desired product. There will be synonyms and misspellings when they hit the search bar. Prepare your store’s product search for these cases.

Take an example from Amazon. With a robustfuzzy search algorithm, Amazon always returns the most relevant products even when shoppers use different words or words with typos to search.

Amazon displays results with correct keywords despite the searcher's typo

Jazz up the No Results Found page with your holiday sale collection or on-sale product category. Don’t make a “No results found” page your site’s UX dead-end.

Nail both UX and SEO for a higher conversion rate with Product Filter and Search by Boost

You don’t need to be a Shopify expert to optimize your store product and instant search. You can easily prep your store for holiday selling with these robust (plus, SEO-armored) product filter options ready to serve on your table:

Conversion-optimized product filter with extensive choices of filter options and customization for any collection or result page
SEO-friendly filter URLs for filter and product pages
Advanced plus SEO-lifting site search features with smart Autocomplete, Search Merchandising, Synonyms, Suggestion Dictionary… just everything you’ll ever need

Try Free Now

No more missing on potential customers - even when their search returns no result - our app handles it for you, with many useful options and redirecting suggestions besides “Search tips”

Last but not least, the Don’ts in your holiday SEO strategy

Let’s make it short and quick - beware and do not commit these “SEO crimes”:

Repeat keywords too many times. Keyword repetition does no use but makes your copy sound like it’s written by a cold-hearted robot. They call it “keyword stuffing”.
Add too many temporary statements like “Currently on sale”, “cheap”, or “bonus” in important keyword areas as they might be blacklisted
Display wall of text. No one likes to read too much while shopping - if they want to read, they’ll open a book, not a store. Use images. Make it short.

Friendly reminder: Always put your site speed on check

Site speed is a part of user experience which is a factor Google uses to determine the ranking of your store. During the holiday season, the traffics will be peaked and might cause slow site loading. You’ll need to prepare your website for all different scenarios to ensure 24/7 fast page loading even during peaked times.

How to prep your Shopify store for high traffic during the holiday season?

First, estimate the number of traffic your site can handle. In most cases, you can get advice from your hosting provider. Then, if your estimated traffic might be much bigger than your site’s capacity, just upgrade your hosting plan.

If the traffic might be too big, consider using a VPS or CN hosting for more power.

→ Read on: 11 Tips to optimize page speed for Shopify stores

Get in the Holiday Spirit and win your biggest sales of the year with Boost!

Wow, you’ve made it this far til this point! Thank you for reading this humble sharing on Amazon SEO tactics for your Shopify stores.

Holiday SEO is essential for any online business. It may sound like “Christmas in July” but these preparations are what it takes to stay ahead in the game (remember, SEO strategy takes time).

Even after this detailed post, if you are still finding it difficult, no worries, we’re here to help! We have the #1 Shopify Filter and Search to help you nail your Shopify product filter and search! Here’s a 14-day free trial for you to enjoy all of the premium features. Try our app today - it takes only a minute to install and see new horizons for yourself!

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Doki Nguyen

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Content Marketing Specialist

June 17, 2024

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6 min read

The Ultimate Holiday SEO Tips For Shopify Stores To Max Out Sales Like Amazon Sellers

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