eCommerce SEO checklist: preparing for peak season

Throughout the year many B2C businesses look forward to seasonal peaks such as Christmas, summer sales and Black Friday, and businesses those that prepare for these periods usually outperform competitors that don't prepared properly. If done correctly you could see a lift in your conversion rate by up to 20% - so it is well worth taking the time to plan ahead. 

Successful ecommerce brands use peak season planning as a valuable opportunity to expand on sales, visibility and improve user journey.

Instead of neglecting your SEO and treating it as a last-minute activity, make sure this year you are fully prepared with our eCommerce SEO checklist. Successful ecommerce brands use peak season planning as a valuable opportunity to expand on sales, visibility, and improve user journey which is really important for customers to be able to find what they are looking for and not become a pain point.  

There are several reasons why it is important to get on top of your ecommerce SEO. Benefits and things to consider, include: 

• Undergoing a complete technical audit prior to the seasonal event 
• Improve site speed, fixing crawl errors, and correcting indexing issues 
• Create proper landing pages for specific season products or services 
• Target high intent keywords and search terms to rank for in Google 
• Set up the correct tracking to be able to monitor new users and additional metrics 

Most importantly, remember to continue to focus on SEO proofing your website even after seasonal demands. 

Before any content or product optimisation takes place, we always recommend starting with fixing your website’s backend - or as we like to say, ‘getting the house in order’. By doing this it builds a strong foundation for Google, and avoids penalties for backend errors.  

When completing an audit, the usual issues tend to be:  

• Broken links (internal and external)  
• 404 errors 
• Meta description issues either missing or duplicate 
• Meta title issues either missing or duplicate 
• Mobile useability 
• Crawlability 

Some of the most useful tools we use here at Cartwright, are: 

• SemRush 
• Page Speed Insights 
• Otterly AI 

Creating a structured SEO approachfor your website leading up to seasonal events and non-seasonal periods, means you can regularly adapt and check for website issues. It is recommended that you refresh the content on your websiteevery three to six months. 

Site speed should also remain a priority because slow loading websites and landing pages can lead to increased bounce rates. Compressing images, optimising core web vitals and strong web hosting are all additional ways to support your website.  

One common mistake that ecommerce businesses make isbelieving they need to create a new seasonal landing page every year - then deleting them. Instead, we advise creating an evergreen URL that works continually each yearand builds authority over time. 

For example: 

• /black-friday/ 
• /christmas-gifts/ 
• /summer-sale/ 

Rather than: 

• /black-friday-2026/ 
• /black-friday-2027/ 

Keeping URLs evergreen allows them to retain backlinks, rankings and historical authority, making future campaigns more effective. 

A strong seasonal SEO strategy starts months before the event itself. Building and maintaining these landing pages throughout the year provides search engines with more time to crawl, index and understand their relevance of the page. 

Most importantly, don't delete these pages once the season ends. Instead, update and repurpose them for future campaigns.

AI-generated search results are becoming increasingly important and we are seeing more requests for higher visibility within AI. This means it is essential for ecommerce brands to think beyond just ranking higher in Google. 

To improve visibility within AI-powered search experiences: 

• Implement comprehensive schema markup 
• Add product, review and FAQ structured data 
• Ensure category and product content is clearly organised 
• Keep content short, sharp, and to the point 
• Build trust through customer reviews and user-generated content 

Search engines and AI platforms both rely on structured, well-organised information to understand products and answer user queries accurately. 

Content should be written to answer real customer questions directly and clearly, or short and sweet. This not only improves user experience but also increases the likelihood of being cited in AI-generated responses in Google or LLMs. A well-structured ecommerce SEO checklist should include both traditional SEO best practices and AI search optimisation to maximise visibility across all search platforms.

SEO doesn’t just end once the user hits your website. User journey plays a vital role in supporting the customer and most importantly converting their traffic into sales.  

Always check:  

• Website and landing page bounce rates 
• Click behaviour (can be reviewed using Microsoft Clarity) 
• Conversion paths 
• Scroll depths (also reviewed in Microsoft Clarity) 

Don’t forget, regular testing always helps to identify any issues or pain points for customers. 

As you’d expect, product pages and category pages tend to be the most viewed and searched pages, therefore they are the MVPs of your website. So, you need to make sure these are optimised to their fullest potential. 

• Product descriptions are unique and optimised 
• Plenty of internal and external linking (this increases the pages authority) 
• Product imagery is optimised and compressed 
• Reviews are visible and up to date 
• Targeting relevant keywords

Something to note; if a product is no longer available or has been discontinued,ensure you redirect those pages to link to another page of similar content. This is to prevent any sticking point or hurdles for customers to checkout correctly.

Furthermore, cross sells is especially important to continually check, making sure each recommended product aligns nicely with the original product page. This supports the user journey and the average order value.

Our belief,  if you want long term success and lead generation, you must prioritise SEO.  

Many businesses invest in SEO for six to twelve months andexpect this to be enough toset them up for years to come - but that unfortunately isn’t the case. 

While you may think a twelve-month stretch will ‘complete’ the website, your competitors will be constantly optimising in more ways than one. With ever-changing behaviours  and the AI market now taking over, now more than ever you need to work  for those top spots in Google, AI overviews, and LLMs. 

Regular updates should include:  

• Content refresh 
• Link building 
• Performance analysis  
• Regular audits 
• Category optimisations 

Search visibility is earned through consistency over time with ongoing developments - not a six-to-twelve-month stretch.

Reach out to our friendly team who can analyse your website and complete a free audit for you to ensure you have an up-to-date eCommerce SEO checklist then Get in touch today.