In this post, we talk about how you can use the Diwali festival season to your advantage and generate a lot of visitors by optimizing your SEO accordingly.
The Delight of Diwali
There’s just one week to go for Diwali, which is arguably the biggest holiday on the Indian festival calendar. Needless to say, the event is celebrated with much fanfare. People go out to purchase many new items and shopping on Diwali has become a huge part of the festive tradition.
Brick and mortar shops have taken advantage of the Diwali craze by offering discounts on clothes and consumer durables. Online retailers have also jumped on board as you can see from the advertising and promotion of the Amazon and Flipkart Diwali sales.
Of course, e-commerce websites have the most to gain during the month of October from Diwali. However, this holiday is huge and so no marketer can afford to let the opportunity pass by. All online companies can enter the fray. That is why you should get a website if you haven’t already, and then alter your site and add new content in the appropriate manner.
Optimize your Site’s SEO for the Diwali Season
Just take a nice long look at this SEO infographic for Diwali.
Diwali Data & Statistics
SEMrush, the world’s leading search engine marketing organization collaborated with Indian internet payment gateway Razorpay to conduct a study regarding online Diwali marketing. The research was based on an Indian database with 118 million keywords and can prove very useful.
Knowing that India is the second most populous nation, it is safe to say that there will be a lot of people searching on the internet for Diwali products like shirts, firecrackers, gadgets, gifts, and presents.
How do you take advantage of this information? Rather than blindly approaching it, let’s try to delve deeper.
Diwali Infographic Breakdown
SEO for the Diwali season is summed up in one image thanks to the above research. On the festival of lights, let us shine some light regarding the online statistics for Diwali.
Transactions
First off, the study states that there are nearly 2x as many transactions during the Diwali season, as you can see with a sharp increase of 91%. That is a massive boom in comparison to normal days.
Searches
SEMrush forecasts almost 1 million more Diwali-related searches this year than there were in October 2016 (from 1,220,000 to 2,196,000). Even if it doesn’t reach that high, it is still exponential growth and further hammers the point that specialized SEO cannot be ignored.
Customers
Now a little bit about the buyer’s persona. Looking at age and gender, males account for 70% of the searches and 55% of the top spenders are 25 – 34 years old. 25% of them are from 18-24 years old. So, place more emphasis on adults.
While this may seem counter-intuitive since children will celebrate more, it is still the adults who are doing the shopping for them. Target your ads to the entire family, not just children.
Industries
What industry benefits the most from the Diwali festival? As stated earlier, e-commerce tops the expenditure list (to no one’s surprise) with 22%. Travel and home items aren’t too far behind though, with 18% and 14% respectively.
Even if you are in a different industry, you can still cash in with special Diwali themed products, services, or offers. This isn’t too much of a surprise.
Locations
What is a surprise is that Diwali search terms aren’t specific to India. The USA has 74,000 people searching for Diwali in Google while the UK has 40,500. Canada is 4th with 12,100 while Australia rounds out the top five with 8,100 searches. Although India is larger than all of those combined (135,000), it is still a significant amount of people with large disposable incomes.
Keywords
As far as long-tail keywords go, the three highest are ‘Diwali crackers online’, ‘Diwali lights online’, ‘Diwali gifts online’. All of them have a search volume of 1,000 or more. You want to go after a word that has a big enough search volume but not a lot of competitors. Try to find the sweet spot.
Advertisers
Now, to advertising. Amazon and Flipkart are among the top five Google advertisers. They are joined by Snapdeal, Safari India, and Shop Clues. The Diwali searches themselves gain traction in August, increase during September, and peak in October before dipping off.
Bidding for top Diwali-related keywords can help you rank. If you can’t compete with the big dogs via Google Ads, use Facebook campaigns and posts instead.
SEMrush & SEO in India
All in all, this is a very insightful study by SEMrush, one of the top SEO companies. SEMrush is a comprehensive digital marketing suite offering competitive data.
Their software has site analysis tools and research reports and covers not just SEO, but PPC, social media, and video advertising research too. They are steadily gaining users and traction in India as many people make use of their free and paid tools.
SEO for Diwali
If you want to capitalize on the burst during the Diwali season, you have to fine-tune your content. You can offer special discounts for Diwali or even promo codes to take advantage of the festive mood and spirit. Try some other incentives as well. Get creative. Don’t just burst crackers, explode your company’s search rankings as well.
You should take a look at what you can offer to your customers specifically for Diwali. Think about what the customer is looking for and build on that. By tweaking your keywords a bit or writing posts about the special topics, you can bring more visitors to your site.
You can adapt, ride the Diwali wave and boost your company’s sales – or you can do nothing and lose out on a magnificent opportunity to promote your products and services.
The whole study is proof that your SEO and keywords cannot just remain stagnant year round. What works well during regular days may not have the same effect during festival seasons like Christmas or Valentine’s Day.
Keep this data in mind when developing a digital marketing strategy for the Diwali season. Take away whatever you want from it, but make use of it. Just like good defeats evil, we hope you can conquer your SEO demons this Diwali.
Optimize Your SEO with Opteamize
The importance of optimizing your search results cannot be understated, especially during periods of high inflation for the search terms. This is not exclusive to Diwali either. New Year’s, Mother’s Day, and Pongal will see other specific search terms receive a boost.
Opteamize is a digital marketing agency which specializes in providing search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing services (SEM) for companies both large and small. We work as a lead and revenue generating partner alongside your company to help your business grow.
Opteamize is not your typical SEO company and we place a lot of focus on the technical and content aspects of SEO. This is where tools from SEMrush are most useful. For more information about what we do, contact us today.
Update: For more SEMrush content, Take a look at our blog post What Did We Learn From the SEMrush Surgery?