The Gifting Opportunity Is Massive
The online gifting industry has never been more fruitful than it is today. Partially due to an increase in online purchasing during the pandemic, there has been a surge in the past few years of users both searching for and purchasing gifts online.
There are nearly 1.5 million different “gift” keywords and millions of searches that retailers can capitalize on. The keyword “gift” alone is searched 56,000 times per month (on average).
Holiday and special occasion “gift” keywords have nearly limitless potential for optimization. Within just 2 months, the keyword “christmas gifts” is searched 480,000 times. This doesn’t even include the search volume from the 47,000 keyword iterations of “christmas gifts”, such as “christmas gifts for dad” and “christmas gifts for teenagers”.
By meticulously refining their sites to match the keywords and search trends related to these occasions, businesses can capitalize on the massive search interest that the gifting industry amasses throughout the year. The key to this approach lies in understanding the patterns and preferences of gift shoppers, who are often in search of the perfect item to mark a special occasion. Whether it’s during major holiday seasons, such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or cultural festivals around the world, optimizing for relevant search queries can lead to increased traffic and, ultimately, sales.
SEO for Gifting
First, what is SEO for gifting? SEO for gifting is essentially creating site content to rank for a certain “gifting” keyword grouping, ensuring that the content matches users’ search intent, is optimized for conversion, and is indexable by search engines. Some SEO strategies stop at the first part of that definition, or creating site content to rank for a certain “gifting” keyword grouping. It is important to also keep in mind search intent and conversion or else your content may rank for “gifting” keywords, but will not convert.
Brands that proactively anticipate and align their site content with the intent of gift purchasers before peak periods of holidays can secure a significant advantage over their competitors. This leads to the question: how will I know when to optimize my website for specific holidays?
Understanding Peak Search Interest Periods for Holidays
To understand search patterns for specific keywords, utilize tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Trends. For example, let’s look at the search trends for the keyword “holiday gifts for mom”.
As you can see, there is a massive increase in search interest during the winter holidays. Specifically, last year’s search interest began to rise during the week of November 12-18. Our SEO rule of thumb is to have holiday pages live on the site 3 months before search interest begins for that holiday. So, in this case, we would want to make sure to have our Holiday Gifts for Mom web page published for the 2024 holiday season by August 12th, 2024.
Gifting Keyword Research
Once you understand when to have your site optimized for holiday-specific keywords, you need to focus on how to optimize your site. Optimizing or creating product pages, collections, gift guides, or blogs for holidays and special occasions requires a keen understanding of search intent and the strategic use of keywords.
Start by researching popular gifting-related search terms and phrases relevant to your products. While you want to make sure the keywords you are researching have search volume, it is also important to understand the search intent of each keyword. The best way to understand the search intent of a keyword is to simply analyze the 1st search result page. What types of pages are ranking? Are they product pages, gift guides, blogs, or collections? What kind of information is included on the pages? Then, figure out if you can match that search intent with the content you are creating or optimizing.
For example, say a company that creates sustainably-made, small-batch gifts wants to optimize a page for the keyword “holiday gifts for employees”. The first step would be to analyze the first search results page. When you look at the first 3 search results for “holiday gifts for employees”, there is a trend:
All 3 of the top-ranking pages are collection pages. 2 of the pages are related to corporate gifting, and 1 of the pages is specifically aimed toward gift baskets.
When you enter into each of the ranking pages, you can see that the collection pages host customizable gifts that can be purchased in bulk:
From this research, you can infer that the intent of users searching for “holiday gifts for employees” is to buy customizable, bulk gifts. Therefore, the company crafting sustainably-made, small-batch gifts may want to go after a keyword that is more aligned with their product offerings, such as “sustainable corporate gifts”.
Optimizing Pages for Gifting Keywords
Once you have decided which keywords to optimize your gifting pages for, incorporate these keywords naturally into titles, meta descriptions, and content. Below are some best practices for optimizing your Gifting pages for search:
- For each page, choose one primary keyword and a few secondary keywords to optimize for. The secondary keywords should be closely related to the primary keyword to strengthen the ranking power of the page.
- Do not keyword stuff. Google rewards pages that naturally incorporates keywords and are valuable to users, not pages that are only created to rank.
- Focus on long-tail, specific keywords for product page optimizations. Product pages are the perfect way to rank for niche, long-tail keywords like “brown bamboo cutting board”.
- Prioritize utility above all else. Make sure your pages are genuinely useful to users and answer the questions customers may have before making a purchase.
Using Analytics For Next Year’s Lessons Learned
Leverage Google Search Console and Analytics to turn your SEO efforts into valuable insights for next year’s success. Search Console can reveal which specific holiday-related search terms and landing pages resonated with visitors. Look for keywords with high impressions but low clicks, indicating content gaps you can fill.
Analytics, on the other hand, shows which traffic channels, like organic search or social media, were most effective. Examining top-performing content formats and conversions can further guide your strategy. By analyzing this data, you can move beyond guesswork and prioritize high-performing keywords, winning content formats, and the most impactful marketing channels to ensure your SEO strategy aligns with what shoppers are looking for during the holidays.
6 Additional Gifting SEO Strategies and Tactics
SEO for gifting goes beyond keyword research and site optimization. There are a variety of unique gifting SEO strategies that can drive impactful search traffic and conversions to your website.
1. Gift Guide Creation
Optimizing gift guide layouts for SEO is essential for maximizing visibility and reaching potential customers. Ensure your gift guides are mobile-friendly, with clear, keyword-rich headings and concise descriptions. Utilize alt text for images and leverage internal linking to improve SEO performance. Aim to make these guides comprehensive yet easy to navigate, catering to a wide range of interests to attract a diverse audience. Gift guides are also a great way to showcase related collection pages, like the example below from Alex and Ani:
For enhancing conversions, enrich your gift guides with value-added content like gifting etiquette advice or gift comparison information, like which sneaker materials are best for runners. This not only aids in decision-making but also elevates the shopping experience, making your guide a go-to resource. To build trust, also consider incorporating customer reviews, ratings, or testimonials through video or written content. By focusing on a user-friendly design and offering insightful content beyond product listings, you can create gift guides that attract, engage, and convert visitors more effectively.
2. Bundling Products Into Gift Sets
To drive more holiday sales, creating and prominently featuring product-bundle gift sets on your website can significantly boost visibility and attract buyers looking for convenient, thoughtful gifts. This strategy works because it taps into the shoppers’ desire for hassle-free gifting options that are ready to go, eliminating the need for them to browse through multiple products to compile a gift themselves.
Additionally, bundling products into collections helps users navigate your products and website more easily. Highlight these collections on the homepage and use targeted banners or pop-ups to catch visitors’ attention as soon as they land on your site. By simplifying the decision-making process and offering a curated selection that appeals to various tastes and preferences, you can enhance the shopping experience, increase the average order value, and ultimately, drive more holiday or special occasion-related sales.
3. Gift Registries for Special Occasions
Gift registries are an underutilized, essentially no-cost customer acquisition asset. While gift registries are generally thought to only be for baby showers and weddings, they can be personalized to be used for most life events or celebrations, such as graduations, birthdays, anniversaries, and more.
Most gift retailers do not have gift registries, essentially giving sales away to competitors who have gift registry capabilities. The benefits of utilizing a gift registry strategy include:
- Around 60% of gift-givers that use registries have not purchased from the retailer before, generating a new customer base
- More full-price product sales
- Adding a gift registry increases your value to existing customers
For example, we recently implemented a gift registry strategy for a client that sells baby apparel online. The main facets of our strategy are:
- Install an app that integrates with your existing site platform (such as MyRegistry.com
- Build out a gift registry landing page that is optimized for relevant keywords (ex. “Gift Registry for Baby Showers”)
- Add a call to action to product pages that says “Add to Registry”
- Create “registry” related content that targets users who are in the process of building a gift registry for relevant holidays or occasions
- Target customers who purchased from a registry with incentives to make future purchases on the website
4. Enhancing Images for SEO
Optimizing images on gift product pages is crucial for SEO and user experience. Use descriptive file names and alt text incorporating relevant keywords to improve search visibility. Providing detailed alt-text descriptions of images not only can improve your site’s SEO but will also make your website more accessible.
Additionally, consider compressing images to reduce load times without sacrificing quality, enhancing page speed. These practices not only boost SEO rankings but also ensure a smoother browsing experience for users, driving engagement and conversions.
5. Leveraging Social Proof
Reviews and user-generated content (UGC) are powerful tools for enhancing the SEO and trustworthiness of product pages. By integrating customer feedback and experiences directly onto product and collection pages, businesses can significantly improve their site’s organic search rankings.
Search engines like Google value fresh, relevant content, and UGC provides exactly that, naturally incorporating a variety of keywords related to the product. Furthermore, reviews and UGC serve as social proof, building trust with prospective customers. When visitors see real opinions and experiences from others, their confidence in making a purchase decision increases. This dual impact of boosting both search engine visibility and consumer trust makes reviews and UGC invaluable for online retailers aiming to stand out in a competitive market.
6. Building Backlinks
For gifting websites, gaining backlinks can boost SEO and establish your website’s authority. Merging your backlinking strategy with your content creation process can generate natural backlinks for your website. Creating share-worthy, valuable content on gift ideas, guides, and trends encourages other sites to link back to your content as a resource. Incorporating infographics, how-to guides, and original research can make your content more linkable and shareable across social media platforms, increasing visibility and backlink potential.
Guest blogging on reputable sites in the gifting or related lifestyle sectors can also significantly enhance your backlink profile. By contributing high-quality, insightful content, you not only position your brand as an authority but also tap into the host site’s audience, leading to backlinks and increased traffic. However, it is critical that your guest blog isn’t a sales pitch and that you are providing tangible value to readers to reap the most benefits from a guest blogging strategy.
Forming partnerships with industry influencers, brands, and complementary websites opens up opportunities for collaborative content, giveaways, and events, all of which can generate backlinks. These partnerships can be leveraged to create content that appeals to both parties’ audiences, encouraging natural link sharing and boosting your site’s SEO performance.
