With the busy holiday shopping season about to begin, now is a great time to be thinking about creating Gift Guides for your website or blog.
Gift Guides are curated collections, usually around a theme, that allow customers to find things for family and friends that they might not otherwise have thought of. Gift Guides are also likely to be shared on social media for friends and family to see, especially when they are easy to navigate and are visually appealing!
Gift Guides are great for your website or blog from an SEO standpoint, because they allow you to use keywords that you might not be using on your product listing pages. For example, “best gifts for a food lover”, or “vintage gifts for someone who has everything”.
More Search Engine Traffic
To get more search engine traffic to your Gift Guides, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
- Do some keyword research to find the best keywords to use for your Gift Guides.
- Include the word “gift” or “gift guide” in your collection title or blog title.
- Give customers a reason why the items you’ve selected for your Gift Guide would make nice gifts. For example, “this unique [item] would make a great gift for the woman who has everything”. Or another example, “Give this set of personalized coffee mugs to the coffee lover in your life. They will enjoy this gift that is truly one-of-a-kind”. You get the idea.
- By helping your customers envision who they are buying for, you are making it easier for them to buy on the spot.
Gift Guide Options
There are several ways you can create Gift Guides for your Shopify website. Here are just two ideas:
- Create a new main Collection called “Gift Guides”, and then sub-collections for the types of Gift Guides you are going to create. For example “Gifts for Coffee Lovers”, “Gifts for Sports Fans”.
TIP: Avoid creating generic Gift Guides, such as “Gifts for Women” or “Gifts for Men”. Be more specific, and you will get more qualified traffic from searches. - Create a Blog called “Gift Guides” and then create separate blog posts for each Gift Guide that are part of the Gift Guides blog.
NOTES:
- When you create Collections, the Collections show up on your store and are more obvious that they are shopable. The Collections can be “hidden” when the season passes.
- When you create a new Blog for gift guides, each article can contain links to your products by inserting image links or Buy Button links. Blog posts also allow you to add more text about why an item in your shop would make a great gift – without having to change the product description.
Gift Guide Examples
Need some inspiration for creating your Gift Guides? Here are some examples to get your creative juices flowing!
16 Vintage Stocking Stuffer Ideas (for Grownups) – This gift guide is an example of the image created using Canva.
The Gift of Vintage -This gift guide is an example of what a Polyvore set looks like on a blog.
Graduation Gifts With Vintage Flair – This gift guide is an example of a blog post that has inserted images (the products at the very bottom of the page).
The Vintage Unscripted 2016 Holiday Gift Catalog – This gift guide is a magazine style, flip the pages gift guide created using a tool called AnyFlip.
The gift guides above were featured in a Shopify Blog post – Squad Goals: Four Collaboration ideas to Boost Your Small Business’ Sales check it out for even more information.
- Polyvore – If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to create a gift guide image for your blog that has clickable links, check out Polyvore! Once you create a “set” in Polyvore using items from your store, you can click on the “Blog” option to save that set and can then copy and paste the HTML code from that set and add it to your blog article. When a customer reads your post and clicks on one of the items, they are taken to that product. NOTE: You can edit the link in the Polyvore code after copying it to your blog so that the product link goes directly to the product within your website, instead of to the product first on Polyvore and then a second click to your website.
- Canva – Another tool that can be helpful for creating gift guide collage images is Canva. Canva includes templates that you can use to create eye-catching, magazine style gift guides. You can then import an image created in Canva into your blog post or collection page.
- Social Media – Another way to create gift guides is on your social media platforms! For example, you could create a Facebook Slideshow that includes a curated collection for a gift guide. Each product featured in the slideshow can be tagged in Facebook so when a viewer sees the slideshow, they can click a product and go instantly to your website. You could also create Pinterest Gift Boards and pin your curated gifts there – so many possibilities for gift boards!
What are some clever Gift Guide themes YOU would like to shop? Share in a comment below!
Have questions about this article? Post your question in a comment, and I will be happy to answer you.