how to write an SEO-optimized holiday gift guide, plus keyword research
Every year the holiday season sneaks up faster than we expect, prompting the shift from our summer vacations to planning a winter’s worth of content to help shoppers find the best gifts and gear. With the immense retail focus on the holiday season, planning is critical, especially with an ever-increasing shift to web and the accompanying heightened competition and costs in paid channels. This is where SEO-optimized gift guides can truly shine.
Follow along and we’ll break down our tips for creating the best gift guides in your space, and we’ll even start the keyword research for you, suggesting some of the top searched and trending topics are heading into the gifting and holiday season. Providing your readers with the most current products, and content that your editors can feel good about to drive traffic to your article.
Jump to a Topic:
How to Optimize Your Gift Guide
why create gift guides?
This one is probably a no-brainer at this point, but we’ll share some of our thoughts anyway.
Gift guide content is flexible and engaging for all channels - email, social, paid etc.
People are searching for this content - gift guides can attract some serious organic search traffic
You can showcase products to drive affiliate sales
Editorial control lets you feature important products or brand partnerships
holiday gift guides & organic search
Over the past two years or so, we’ve seen a shifting tide in Google search results - content is ranking over commerce, even for queries that have historically had transactional intent. This means we’re seeing more and more “best of” articles and gift guides, and fewer product listings and retailers.
Example: 4 of the top 10 search results for “trail running shoes” are content list articles, including the #1 ranking result.
Likewise, we’re seeing an explosion in the traffic and search volume around gift guides specifically. An article from Modern Retail reported an almost 7x increase in traffic to some of the top gift guide sites like Strategist, Wirecutter, and CNET in November and December 2020 compared to the year prior. Sure, these trends are inflated by the impacts of COVID on retail, but the bottom line is more people are looking for gifting content than ever before.
how to SEO optimize your gift guides
Choose your topic strategically. Use keyword research to find popular gift guide topics.
Do your keyword research. See what is trending and what types of products and gifts that people are looking for within your topic.
Go big with product. Adding more products can be a good way to outshine your competitors. Does their list have 10 items? Try adding 15.
Write original product descriptions. Don’t just pull copy from the manufacturer or a retailer. Writing in-depth and original content for each product will help you stand out both to readers and Google.
Link to where to buy the products. If people can’t figure out how to actually shop the products you feature, they’re more likely to bounce and “pogo stick” to another search result. These links help with UX (user experience) and can drive revenue if you have an affiliate program set up.
As with all on-page SEO optimization, your goal should be to create the best content for your target topic and audience. For gift guides, this means including lots of great and popular products, creating a layout that is easy to navigate, and helping people find out where they can go to purchase those products. Yes, aligning your content with high search volume keywords can help, but focusing on the quality and usefulness of the content will go a long way in separating your gift guides from the competition.
keyword research - top outdoors gift guides by search volume
Any strategic content project starts with keyword research, this helps you not only choose topics but can guide the entire creation process. Don’t just stop at these high-level topics, dig in and look at different themes and variations you may find. Remember, keyword research isn’t about stuffing these keywords into the text, it’s about finding the ways that people are talking about your topic and using this information to make a piece of content that will best satisfy their search.
We pulled the search volume for some outdoor sports and activities here. With these, we’re looking at the “topic volume” which is the sum of related keywords under the head term. Running and fishing showed out with the highest volume, but all of these are great niches to dip into.
Another theme that we saw when doing this keyword research was the difference between “ACTIVITY gifts” and “gifts for ACTIVITY.” The search volume here is different for different topics. For example, “skiing gifts” has a topic volume of 390, versus “gifts for skiers” which has a topic volume of 1,600. This delta is different for each topic, so make sure to look specifically for your guides. It’s good to include both variations in the text, but looking at important areas like titles and headings, lean towards the one with more volume.
trending outdoors sports keywords
Aside from these high-level topics, we’ve identified a handful of breakout keywords that are seeing some significant increases in search volume year-over-year. With COVID driving a huge increase in interest, it’s an encouraging sign to see continued growth in many areas like camping, running, and cycling - many of these keywords are seeing 2x or more the volume than COVID-inflated high numbers! This is not an exhaustive list, but it can help to find some popular and unique content to add to your holiday gift guides.
key takeaways
So, we’ve established that gift guides are more important than ever, as search volumes for these guides are growing and Google prioritizes this content in search results. We probably didn’t need to tell you this - looking around, you can see more websites hopping into the space. But it’s important to understand these “whys” because that can help you get ahead of your competitors. Take these trends, and add in some keyword research and optimization, and you’re on your way to gift guide success.
If you’d like to include any products in your upcoming gift guides, please check out our client roster and take a look at our product round ups for what is hitting this holiday season.