The Hallmark Christmas Movie Guide to Ecommerce SEO
One of my favorite guilty pleasures during the holiday season is watching the terrible Christmas movies that the Hallmark Channel airs every year. Obviously, these movies are not created for me, but I can’t help but love how cheesy, predictable, and bleached-white each of these movies are. Why are all of the plots basically the same? Why does it seem like there are only 10 actors these movies have to pick from? I will never have the answers to these questions. But these silly Christmas movies can teach us a broader life lesson beyond “you have to feel the spirit of Christmas” and “everybody needs to leave their high-paying city job, dump their long-term significant other, and move in with the local manger mechanic in a non-descript New England town.”
We’re going to pick some lessons from these movies to explain how you can fix your ecommerce SEO for the busy holiday season.
Lesson One: Don’t Be Afraid To Work With Your Hands
The romantic chemistry in Hallmark movies often centers around our main protagonist and our primary love interest working together on some odd craft or project. The love interest is almost always amazing at this, and they teach our protagonist to remember the simple joys in life by working with their hands or in the community.
When it comes to ecommerce SEO, it’s important to not forget the basics, too. Ecommerce SEO can be an uphill battle if you eschew the basics and fundamentals of your website. Often, ecommerce websites have so many category pages and product pages that it’s easy to wind up with duplicate content. Because of this, you have to make sure your canonical URLs are properly set up in order to make sure you remove any duplicate content. Furthermore, don’t be afraid to leverage that robots.txt file to block bad URLs of filtered pages from search results. It’s all about the basics. Find the exact pages on your website that you want indexed, and make sure that they’re the only ones. Any duplicate content on an ecommerce site can submarine sales.
Lesson Two: Say What You Need To Say
Communication is a central theme to the Hallmark Christmas movie. Typically, a main character withholding the truth from another character drives the central conflict of the film. In one particular example, a male nurse lies to his love interest about his career because he’s afraid nobody could love him for having what he believes to be an unmanly profession. I swear I did not make that plot up.
Usually these movies resolve themselves by the person coming clean and making a romantic gesture to their love interest, solving the whole problem. Just like it’s important to properly communicate to your love interest about your life, it’s important to communicate effectively to search engines about your content.
In ecommerce, it’s difficult to rank for many head-terms that you’d love to rank on. For instance, you’re not going to beat out the big dogs for “Flannel Shirt”. But you might win out for a more specific keyword.
This is where communication within your marketing team comes into play. Knowing which items are performing well in other channels—like social or paid search—can help you discover your long-tail keywords to target in your SEO strategy. Knowing which items are popular and performing well gives you information to invest in optimizing these pages with targeted keywords and content.
Lesson Three: Follow Your Passion And Express Yourself
If there’s one moral these Hallmark movies try to hammer home, it’s that you should always follow what’s in your heart, regardless of what your life currently is. I’m not joking when I say that the vast majority of these movies end with somebody giving up their high-profile job in a big city to move to a small town with the primary protagonist of the film.
Like in these movies, it’s important to make sure you’re expressing your true passion to the world. That’s why you should be blogging frequently on your ecommerce website. According to this research, 99% of customers do not complete a purchase on their first visit to an ecommerce website. That means that creating content that will promote you as a thought leader, generate awareness traffic, and offer more areas to rank in search engines is essential to success for ecommerce.
Lesson Four: Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help
At the end of the day, managing an ecommerce website can be a lot of work. Shoot, just the organic search channel is sometimes a full-time job! Almost every Hallmark Christmas movie contains a plot point where a character has too much on their plate, and breaks down and asks for help from the other characters. Don’t let yourself get to that point! AdVision has experts across social media, paid search and SEO that can help your ecommerce website succeed.
Want to know more? Contact us today!
