The shopping season is already upon us, and you might be wondering how you can turn this holiday spirit into more business for your online store. There are already so many shoppers who will default directly to Amazon to search for gifts (55 % to be exact), which means you have to focus hard on getting all those potential customers who will be looking elsewhere for their purchases. We have some tips so you can make the holidays work in your favour and boost your SEO. Black Friday and Thanksgiving have already come and gone, but you still have time for the other big ones: Christmas and New Year. Read on to see how you can quickly optimise your page and get that Holiday traffic working for you.
Mobile
Google already told us that the mobile experience has redefined consumers’ shopping journeys in many aspects. This mobile-first behaviour not only applies in physical retail stores, but also online shops, which makes sense with 34% of online retail purchases now happening on mobile devices. What does this mean for you? A potential customer visiting your site from their mobile device must have an optimal experience!
What you can do today:
- Check your site’s overall mobile readiness with a Free Website Audit
- Pay attention to the speed results your site gets. If a visitor has to wait an eternity for your site to load, they are going to get frustrated and likely take their business elsewhere. Common culprits for slow loading sites are heavy images, use of Flash, and external media embedded on your site (such as videos, slideshows, etc.)
- Make sure your store name and phone number are visible and accurate on your site. If you have a physical location and serve customers locally, make sure that it is easily visible on your page. This information should stay consistent across all listings you have online, most importantly, your Google My Business Listing. If you are on online-only business, you still need a Google Brand Page!
Shopping Guide
Gift guides are great for you, your customers and your SEO. They include your main keywords, give you an opportunity to link to your other site content, and are a great way to get more traffic because of the interest they generate.
Online sales are forecast to be as much as $117 billion in the US alone, so get a chunk of that pie by making a great holiday shopping guide that includes your most popular products or product categories.
What you can do today:
- Choose the products you’ll include based on what sold well last holiday season and what is currently popular across various categories.
- Appeal to the different types of customers you have, segmenting your guide by prices, gender, interests, etc. For some inspiration, you can check out The Grommet which has various ‘collections’ clearly segmented for different types of shoppers.
- Create your guide as a page on your site, make sure you link to it from other pages on your site, and don’t make it too text heavy (or too image heavy). You can make the URL and Titles somewhat generic and even reuse your page next holidays!
- For some detailed insight and instructions on a gift guide that supercharges your SEO, check out Smart Insights guide to eCommerce buyers guides.
Leverage Social
You’re not much until you’re on Social Media, and it provides endless opportunities to get traffic to your site and increase business by promoting your holiday discounts, promotions and your gift guide! It’s important to get started soon on this.
What you can today:
- Hashtags: Plan out your hashtags for the entirety of the season. We all know hashtags are king especially on Instagram and Twitter, as many people use them to search. You can get some inspiration with a tool like ritetag to see what hashtags are popular.
- Promotions: plan to target your loyal customers first, and don’t just pick a discount % that you see other shops running. It still has to make sense for you to run a promotion. If it does try out different approaches with different groups such as gift bundles, free shipping, etc.
- Pinterest: create a collection of boards with different holiday gift ideas. “Gifts for Her”, “Gifts for Travellers”, etc. focusing on your customers’ interests and needs, and linking back to your site (and gift guide!). Create descriptive captions and don’t focus too much on hashtags as they don’t really rule Pinterest the way they do Instagram. There are some demographics which use Pinterest more actively than others so make sure to see the platform fits your at least one of your target groups.
Remember your ultimate objective with social is to drive traffic back to your site!
Enjoy your holiday optimising and remember you can get even more tips with our Free Website Report.
