How To Optimize Your Website For The Upcoming Holiday Season

For many businesses out there, the holiday seasons means good news- the biggest selling period of the entire year. Research has shown that most businesses retail sales peak by about 20% during the holidays. As such, many e-commerce businesses and companies start preparing for the holiday season early. Some start by looking at their merchandising strategy, and consider promotional deals with the optimization of offers, while others look to more advertisements, updating their stocks and more.

However, one of the most important things to focus on for the season is the online visibility of retailers. Read on to find out how to boost your online visibility to make the most out of the holiday season this year.

Start Creating your Site’s Holiday Content Now

Regardless of what product you intend to sell, be it beauty products, fashion, music or other equipment, the crucial thing that will drive holiday shoppers to your website is content. Content you should focus on includes landing pages, blog posts and deal pages. Such content allows you to first attract visitors to your site, which then increases the chances of them purchasing something from your site.

However, you may wonder why it is important to start creating good content during summer months. There is a simple logic behind this- the earlier you publish your content, the earlier search engines like Google will start to index the content. This helps the content to rank higher in search engine result pages. If you want to go one step further and increase the chances of the different search engines picking your content up, you can include these pages in your sitemap.

By creating your content early, your content will be indexed earlier as compared to other sites who have yet to push out their content. Hence, when search volume begins to spike in the months leading to the long awaited holiday months, your site will ride the upward wave along with the increase in searches.

One trick you can consider if you find that it is too early to roll out exclusive deals is to add in such information later nearing the holiday months. This means that customers who stumble upon your page will not find out about the exclusive holiday promotions and deals that you are intending to offer, but are still able to be engaged by the content you have posted on your site. There will also be enough content for search engines to rank it.

Analyze Your Content Posted from Last Year

One key thing to note is to analyze what content you have posted last year during the holiday season, and the results that it brought. Reviewing your own content helps to give you a sense of what worked and what requires improvement through the data on your site. It can also help you see if there are any potential opportunities, or any missed ones. Analyzing your past work helps to ensure you do not make the same mistakes and helps open doors of opportunities for you moving forward.

You can start by extracting the data from last year and analyzing rankings of your pages. Look at how they did in the months leading up to the holiday season. This can help you to assess any potential challenges you may face, such as if top performing pages have slipped in rankings. Identify the content you need to create. An important point to remember is that all SEO content should first begin with a keyword research.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile Performance

Nowadays, more and more people are using mobile devices to make their purchases as mobile devices are convenient and can be used on the go. As such, you need to ensure your website is suitable to use on a mobile device even before the holiday season begins. Even during non-holiday periods, optimizing your site for mobile performance will definitely bring you benefits as customers are always looking for user-friendliness and ease in transactions. The mobile market holds great potential. If you do not optimize your site for mobile performance, you will risk losing business to your competitors whose sites have better mobile performance. Do not put potential customers on the line just because of the lack of user-friendliness of your site on a mobile device.

Improve the Speed of Your Site

Page speed can be a source of frustration. It is important that your page speed is fast enough all year round, but especially during the holiday season when the site traffic is likely to be higher. Furthermore, if your page loads extremely slowly, it will negatively impact your website’s results on search engine pages.

Ensure that your website can load quickly, and that there are no jarring technical issues that will lead to crashes of your website to ensure your customers can assess your site quickly and efficiently. If you are unsure how you can improve your page’s load time, consult a professional who can help identify and fix issues on your site.

Integrate SEO and SEM Campaigns into Your Site

You can get both the SEO and SEM teams to share a list of keywords that each team plans to target. It is highly likely that there will be many overlaps in the phrases. Look through each list and identify the keyword that has the largest potential to drive the most relevant traffic towards the site. The team can then work together to optimize relevant landing pages, as well as other important pages. To get the best results, coordinate promotional strategies and target the phrases identified.

The next step would be to create landing pages that is feasible for both teams to use. Landing pages are known to be SEO and SEM strategies’ backbones. Usually, each team will make use of the assets they each have to target new customers. However, one thing to consider is this- there will be a considerable number of overlaps in targets and keywords during the holiday season. As such, it is more efficient to get both the SEM and SEO team to work from the same set of landing pages. In order to garner more attention and traffic for both channels, consider showcasing hot selling, popular items and think about how your business can value-add to other specific products.

Improve the Email Deliverability of Your Site

Email deliverability simply means whether emails that are sent from your domain are actually delivered and received by your intended recipients. When you send an email to your existing or potential customers, you likely want them to receive the email. However, the message you are trying to send will not be received by them if they did not get mail in their inbox. In order to ensure everything is working correctly, you can check some settings.

Firstly, ensure your domain name has DMARC set up on it. Scammers out there are always actively looking for quality domains and hack into the list of email addresses attached to it. These usually happen to domains that are not protected well or lack monitoring by DMARC tools and other security policies. Furthermore, if you have a mailing list, you can opt to send an email at least once weekly to your subscribers. This can help you sieve out the good quality subscribers from the bad ones.

Optimize Your Website

The holiday season is one of the most important periods for business and websites. If you are still confused over how you can optimize your website for the upcoming holiday season, you may consider engaging a professional who can help you in SEO and web design. If you are on the lookout for the best people to help you optimize your website, feel free to visit us today. We have a team that can help you improve different aspects of your website, including web design, SEO and PPC. Contact us to find out more about what we can do for you.