Americans and members of many other first world countries are often crippled by ‘political correctness.’ This is especially true around Christmas time… I mean the holiday time. That is the wonderful thing about being a marketer is we get to push the limit a little, have fun, and even use data to back-up why we communicate using words like Christmas and Easter. While the rest of the US is stuck trying to be compliant and sympathetic to others, we marketers get to enjoy a little more freedom, and so can you! You are a marketer, aren’t you?
The Digital Marketing Reason to Promote Christmas
With Christmas around the corner, businesses need to get on the bandwagon now. It IS called Christmas! That is why I am writing this post, to let you know that there is a legitimate reason to celebrate using the word Christmas. There is plenty of online data showing that people use the word ‘Christmas’ when researching and shopping during the festive season. So, if Christmas is a word people are using to search with, why not incorporate it into your online marketing campaigns?
What Does the Data Say About Christmas?
In this example, I used Google Keyword Planner, which stores all the paid keywords used to find websites. The results show the monthly number of searches for related keywords from around the US. As you can see, potential customers are using the keyword ‘Christmas’ quite a lot to find particular gift ideas, decorations, sales, ornaments, etc.
What I also find interesting is that these words have fairly high competitive rates. This means online stores are bidding on and using these keywords to rank higher than their competitors, in the hopes that users will click on their ad. So if other companies are using Christmas as a sales incentive, why can’t you?
Give Christmas Marketing a Chance
Christmas comes around once a year and is a fabulous chance for many stores both online and offline to get back in the black. Use your keywords in the page titles, subheadings, meta titles and descriptions of you web pages so that your product and services can be found. As we can see from the data there is a large volume of people using ‘Christmas’ as part of their search terms and it is an opportunity for your website to be found.
Stocking Stuffing, Not Keyword Stuffing
Please note, only apply keywords to your pages if they make sense. Don’t try to rank for Christmas-related keywords if your pages have no relevancy to Christmas. Keyword stuffing does not work and should be avoided to protect your site from any manual penalties Google might issue. Pages should rank for words that describe them, not just for the sake of getting better rankings. Users are smart and will instantly see that an ad or search result is misleading, resulting in them bouncing off your site, and ultimately lowering your SEO metrics.