Follow our top 5 tips to ensure your online catalogue is indexed and ranking in Google search for Christmas 2022. Helping you drive organic search traffic and generate sales over the festive period.
Written by Ed Jones
Marketing Strategist at YUDU Sentinel
05 December, 2022
Resources | Guides | Improving Your Christmas Catalogue Visibility in Google Search for 2022
As the festive period fast approaches, many of you will be working hard to put the finishing touches to your Christmas catalogue. Adding new seasonal products, checking prices, and optimising your product copy, all for the express purpose of driving sales.
Once your Winter catalogue is ready to go, you’ll accelerate through the publishing phase and into marketing direct to new prospective buyers and existing customers. As part of your overall marketing and sales strategy, the Google Search engine is a key channel.
Alongside email and social media, search engines like Google and Bing have the capacity to drive large volumes of free and targeted traffic from interested customers. You’ll want to make sure your new digital catalogue crawled, indexed, and ranking in search engines as soon as possible. Helping you drive traffic and sales from your newly released online catalogue.
To help you, we have compiled five quick and simple SEO tips to ensure your online catalogue is indexed and available in Google Search to drive sales over the festive season.
When launching a new catalogue, you can’t begin driving organic traffic from Google until it has been crawled and indexed in their search database.
A fast and effective way to check if your new online seasonal catalogue is indexed and visible in Google is with this very simple query.
This query will search the Google index for the exact URL of your festive catalogue. If you don’t return a result in the search engine, not to worry, the following steps will help fix that.
After releasing a new seasonal catalogue, it’s a common oversight for even the most accomplished digital marketing professional to forget about updating their sitemap.
Make it an established step in your launch process to update your sitemap with links to every single catalogue webpage when a new edition is released. When search engine spiders crawl your website, this is the best way for them to find and index new pages on your website.
If you publish your online catalogue with a third-party provider, make sure to check in with them and ensure this a practice they follow.
Another established approach in making Google aware of your Xmas catalogue is to submit your updated sitemap direct through the Google Search Console.
The Google Search Console is a free platform for webmasters, web developers and digital marketing professionals alike. It is an incredible resource to help you improve and optimise your website for both your customers and the Google search engine. There are some powerful tools for web developers, and amazing analytics insights for marketing professionals.
One of the most useful tools is Sitemaps, a feature allowing you to submit your sitemap directly to Google. Where it can be crawled and your online catalogue URLs indexed. With any future updates automatically detected as Google regularly crawls submitted sitemaps.
Once in the Google Search Console, you can access invaluable insights into the indexation status of your sitemap URLs. Including whether they have any crawl errors, or have been excluded from the Google Search engine for a specific reason. Offering identifiable reasons that can then be troubleshot.
Another great tool from the Google Search Console is the URL inspection tool. Creating insight that can help you to improve the visibility of your digital catalogue. These include:
All of these functions help speed up the indexation of new content. Not to mention troubleshooting any issues you might encounter when launching a new catalogue. Combing perfectly to improve and optimise the visibility of your Xmas catalogue in Google Search.
Backlinks (also known as inbound links) continue to be important for SEO. They represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one website to another, signalling to search engines about the quality of your content. Resulting in higher search rankings and the increase in organic traffic that brings.
Building and earning quality backlinks to your online digital catalogue is a proven approach to increasing rankings and traffic from Google. Below are a collection of approaches that can help you to quickly create quality backlinks:
If you can get your digital catalogue indexed and ranking in the Google search engine, you’re well on your way to driving traffic and generating sales.
While we’ve curated this series of tips for improving the visibility of your Christmas catalogue, they can be applied to any new or seasonal catalogue. Of course, the key to performing well in Google centres around the quality of content you are creating.
Focus on getting the foundations of your content right, and all the steps above will come a little easier. Especially when you're looking to build a healthy backlink profile to your digital catalogue.
Good luck and Happy Holidays.
Take a look at these related guides and content we think you might find useful.
A guide to getting your online catalogue ready for the busiest time of the year.
Read this guideExplore a range of strategies to drive sales using digital catalogues.
Read this guideFollow these simple tactics to engage customers and drive sales with your digital catalogue.
Read this guide