How To Create A Great Holiday Gift Guide
If you’re a blogger or other tastemaker, you are no doubt putting together a gift guide for your readers. Gift guides – those invaluable compendiums of just the right objects to give this holiday season – are worth the effort: they’re a great way to drive traffic to your blog or website, and will likely lead to new followers and an increase in your affiliate income.
However, gift guides are time-consuming to produce: from identifying just the right products to presenting them attractively on your blog, you will likely spend a significant amount of time and energy before clicking Publish.
To ensure that all this effort pays off, follow our guidelines below for creating the perfect gift guide:
Narrow Your Focus
To rank well in Google, target your gift guide at a particular set of recipients – for example, twenty-somethings, elderly parents, shoe lovers, women who love the color pink. Unless you’re Amazon or Huffington Post, guides with a more specific focus will rank higher than more general topics. This is the power of the long-tail keyword at work.
In addition, do a little research on Google before settling on a topic, to determine how many people are searching for what you’re offering, and which websites you’d be competing against. For example, if you’re considering the topic “The 2015 Gift Guide For Shoe Lovers”, make use of the following tools to see if it’s a good idea:
Google Keyword Tool (Adwords account required) – When we plug our example into the Google Keyword Tool, we learn that the search volume is relatively low at 90-130 searches per month for the past year. This is actually good news. While you may dream about thousands of people reading your post, it’s important to recognize that a low search volume means you have a good opportunity to rank well, and to attract a good percentage of those who are searching. It’s very difficult for a small site to rank well for high-volume keywords, and 100 new visitors to your website per post per month is nothing to sneeze at.
Google Search – The Keyword Tool doesn’t tell the whole story. Before you decide on a topic, search for it on Google to see how deep the search results go and who else is writing similar content. In the case of our example, the search results are not even 2 pages deep, and many of them are from a year or two ago and will likely be rejected by searchers who are looking for gifts this year. With the right SEO and content, there’s a good opportunity here to stand out.
Once you’ve settled on a topic, pay attention to SEO. Make sure the SEO title and URL of your post are short and descriptive. In addition, write a meta description tag that’s compelling, and make your post at least 500 words. Following these tips helps Google to find your post and understand how great it is.
Go For The Share
Google isn’t the only way to get people to notice your gift guide. Shares on Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook can also drive significant traffic to your post. The key to getting people to share your gift guide is to be funny, unique, or completely relatable. A good example of a very shareable gift guide is Style-Wire’s hilarious Awkward Gift Guide series, one section of which covers gift suggestions for the mother-in-law who hates you. Awesome!
Other possible very-shareable topics include Emergency Back-up Gifts For Work Colleagues, Hostess Gifts for the Control Freak, and so on. Mine the crazy in your own life and you may just come up with a great gift guide that the Twittersphere will love.
Make It Pretty
Your readers shop from these guides, so they need to look pretty, show the products clearly, and provide relevant information. Rather than spend hours in Photoshop, save time by using a tool like the Society of Shop bookmarklet to curate great gifts from around the web and display them beautifully on your blog – automagically – with no design experience required. Presentation really does matter in this case, so use the right tool for the job.
Linking up with Style Elixir