Holiday shopping is starting to rev up, as Black Friday and Cyber Monday kick off the season. Both these dates, as well as the weeks leading up to Christmas, provide a huge boost of not only foot traffic, but e-commerce sales as well. This means that you’ll want to take advantage of this opportunity by making sure your online marketing practices, such as SEO are up to par.
Get ahead of the competition this holiday season by partnering with an online marketing and SEO company in Markham to help optimize your site for higher conversion rates. Keep reading to learn our top 5 SEO marketing tips to increase your holiday sales.
Review Where You Are
Before doing anything, you should first analyze your current rankings. Quickly checking your organic search performance can go a long in way in helping you improve optimization. Use Google Analytics to see which pages are garnering the most views and longest page visits, then cross-check these results with your keywords. This will help you get an idea of what you are already doing well, and what needs to be improved.
Keep in mind that that are certain pages, like your homepage, that are probably already doing well, and tweaking your keywords might not impact your overall performance too much. For best results, focus on optimizing pages that are performing in the middle of the pack.
Know Your Keywords
You should already have a list of the best performing keywords for your business, however, to maximize shopping traffic this season, it also helps to curate a list of holiday-specific keywords. Doing this will help attract new customers searching for the perfect gift. Explore Google Trends reports to see which search terms consumers are frequently using and update your holiday keywords accordingly.
Start Writing Now
If you’re familiar with the 45-day rule, you’ll know that it’s crucial to start publishing content sooner rather than later. As the rule notes, publishing content only a week before a major holiday will help you engage in just about 50% of search engine traffic, and not to mention having to beat the competition that’s already had a headstart; but if you start at least 45 days in advance you will be able to participate in over 90% of search traffic.
As you can see, it’s important to start putting your keywords into action soon in order for your efforts to have the most impact as it does take some time for Google to scan your changes.
Based on your keyword research, curate a list of topics that match the buyer journey for your most popular products. And keep in mind that, rather than thinking about transactional keywords like “buy X” or “order X online”, it’s more impactful to work with questions customers might have before they’re ready to buy – this is where blog posts, product videos, and other content marketing materials come in and add huge value to your conversion rates, as various media are a great way to target these kind of questions, and in effect, boost your rankings.
Holiday Landing Pages
Landing pages are a crucial aspect for attracting leads for your business, but they are also a great way to specifically market products you want to push for the holidays. On your landing pages, you should optimize meta tags for holiday and product keywords, have a description ad copy, and include an enticing headline.
It’s also beneficial to include interactive content, such as videos, to engage and provide information value to visitors. You may also consider creating timestamps such as a “coming soon” title to create anticipation, or a “limited time offer” to create a sense of urgency and entice visitors to make a purchase sooner.
Don’t Forget About Mobile
Mobile sales are rising every year – last year, nearly 30% of all holiday retail sales were influenced by shopping-related mobile services. This number is only expected to rise higher as more on-the-go shoppers turn to their smartphones to quickly complete their shopping, so it’s crucial that you invest time into making sure your mobile site is up to par. Ensuring that you have a fast, responsive, and attractive mobile site will go a long way in helping garner traffic and conversions.