All businesses regardless of size want to increase revenue through sales in the virtual and the real-world market. Since Christmas is fast approaching, many business owners are trying to find out effective strategies to drive traffic to their sites or bring customers to their brick and mortar stores.
Like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Christmas is a major holiday season that can drive sales because it’s a time when people think of buying gifts and presents for loved ones. If you operate a business website, you must optimize it for this season. In 2017, Black Friday alone was able to give online retailers staggering revenues of $7.9 billion, according to Adobe Analytics. You must not let this opportunity pass by your business this 2018.
Since BFCM has come and gone, your main concern today is to boost your sales this Christmas season. Here are some practical SEO tips you can consider to boost your sales during the Holidays.
1. Use Specific Holiday Keywords
An effective keyword campaign can help to drive additional traffic to your site. By searching specific holiday keywords that are relevant in your industry, your website will have more traffic. You also need to associate the search terms your target audience frequently use with specific keywords to lead users to your website or landing pages.
Once you have identified most searched specific keywords applicable to your site, use these key terms in your blog and social advertisements to entice more people to visit your website.
The tools you can use for your keyword search include:
- Google Suggest
- Google Adwords Keyword Planner
- io
- SEMrush
- SpyFu
- LSI Keyword Generator
- io
Create keyword search terms like Christmas, Christmas Eve, etc. to drive traffic to your site.
2. Create a SEO-Friendly URL
The URL of your website is the very first thing your targeted customer goes through if they want to interact with you. Always make sure that when building your URLs, your SEO is taken into consideration. Avoid the use of stopping keywords in your URL as they can hurt your rankings. Build your URLs to make them friendly to both users and search engines.
Here are things you need to remember when building your URLs:
- Avoid using stop keywords (i.e. but, how, what)
- Use holiday specific keywords (ex. Christmas)
- Your new URLs should be readable (watch out for symbols like %, numbers,etc.)
- Use hyphens instead of underscores
- Remove unnecessary punctuation
3. Create Landing Pages Exclusively for Your Christmas Offer
We have always emphasized this in our previous posts. Building pages exclusively for your holiday deals can be of great help in attracting organic traffic. Most e commerce sites have already realized the importance of enticing landing pages for specific events. They even promote these pages on social media before the start of the event to make the page rank well in the search engine.
Your landing pages should have a clear, visible and understandable call to action. The CTA will prompt your visitor to act according to his/her needs. The success of a page can be measured by its ability to make visitors do what you want them to do.
4. Create Content that’s Focused on Your Holiday Sale
As you are gearing towards holiday traffic and sales, you should focus on generating content that are relevant to the yuletide season. You may emphasize that Christmas is a season of celebration, family reunions, reconciliation, and of course gift giving. All these can give you the chance to relate keywords to ideas that will ultimately lead users to your landing pages.
You may also post videos of your product demos to boost your SEO and drive better sales. In order to come up with an effective content marketing strategy, you should abide by these guidelines:
- The density of your focus keyword should be between three and five percent
- Focus on creating holiday season content
- As much as possible, post your content 45 days before major holidays or any targeted holiday sale. Follow the 45-day rule of SEO
- Avoid keyword stuffing. Use related terms and phrases instead to prevent repetition of important terms
- Break content down to bullet points to make them more concise
5. Build Holiday Sale Links
Link building is an important aspect of any business website regardless of the season. Since you are promoting your website for the holidays, you should build internal and external links to drive organic traffic to your site and possibly generate sales.
Make it a point to link to pages with high reputation. Linking to high-authority pages can help to make your landing pages receive exceptional rankings. Using both internal and external links can help establish strong relations with other bloggers.
6. Know Your Competitors
In business, it is important to know who you are competing against. Discover their strengths and weaknesses. Emulate strategies that make them stand out, master those and develop your own style. This should make you stand even with your competitors this season and beyond.
7. Create Gift Guides and Videos Specifically for the Holiday
Make your targeted customers feel special this holiday season by creating gift guides and tips they would love. This will give them ideas of what gifts to buy at the least possible cost.
When creating the gift guide, make your audience learn about your products and how it can be of help to their future owners. This helps to convince your audience to make a purchase. If your gift guide is posted on YouTube, it would certainly give you an edge. According to Google, 68% of shoppers go to YouTube for information if they are not sure what to buy.
8. Promote Your Products on Social Media
Social media can help you obtain internal and external links for your audience. Most industries today are actively involved in a lot of social media channels. This resulted from the desire of businesses to know and understand the wants of their target market. Social media has become a common and easy platform for businesses to get in touch and interact with customers.
The Benefits of social media channels include:
- Increased brand awareness
- Presence of ready audience
- Increased engagement with customers
- Enables sellers to establish relationship with customers
- Easy to establish social networking site for content specifically intended for the holidays
- Makes contests easy to organize
- It’s easy to catch the eye of foster visitors through social media
Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest can greatly help to promote your business this Holiday season. If you can make a very interesting offer, many among your audience will gladly click your link and share your content with their contacts.
10. Create user-friendly Environment on Mobile Devices
You might not know this, but 70% of holiday gift guide videos are being viewed on smartphones. This is because many consumers have realized the benefits of shopping online such as staying away from traffic jams, avoidance of unplanned purchases, and being able to do important things while your order is in transit.
Since the holiday season is here, you must prepare your site for the holiday rush. Optimize it and check its speed on desktop as well as on mobile to make it able to withstand competition.
One way to improve your page loading speed is to make sure that your images are not too heavy. Images that are more than 70 kb in size may affect your site’s loading time. Optimize your site for desktop and mobile to make it provide satisfactory user experience and rank well in search pages.
These facts will tell you the importance of optimizing your site for mobile devices.
- 18% of local searches on smartphones lead to same day purchase
- 87% of smartphone users use the search engine once a day at the very least
- 31% of online shoppers make purchases with smartphones
- 61% of online shoppers who visit sites that are not optimized for mobile are likely to buy from competitors
- 58% of users want the load times of mobile sites to be faster than desktop sites
10. Audit Your Site for Technical Problems
Make a review of your SEO basics to make sure that your website is truly optimized. This means conducting a site review to make sure that:
- Error 404 pages are resolved
- Lost landing pages, broken links, and 301 redirects are fixed
- Page speed is optimized
- The organic search performance of your site is working
- Your site can handle the holiday traffic load
- Your site is secure (use https)
- Your site has a clear call to action
11. Make Sure that Your Servers can Handle the Holiday Load
Being one of the biggest sale events of the years, you can expect Christmas and New Years to bring your site heavy traffic, and you don’t want that influx of potential customers to go somewhere else because your site can’t accommodate them. Avoid this by making sure your servers can handle heavy loads. Always do a double check of your servers before your holiday promo begins.
12. Apply Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics to determine which web pages are not contributing much to your lead generation / conversion campaign. This can help you make an informed decision for your campaign next year.
13. Use Email Marketing
Don’t forget to grab every opportunity to get the email addresses of potential customers. You can do this when they interact with you either on your site or through social media. Through email marketing, you can connect to specific persons to personally promote your holiday sale. This can help make people feel a sense of importance and this should work to boost sales.
14. SEO-Optimize Landing Pages for Online Shoppers
The number of online shoppers has rapidly increased nowadays. In fact, 71% of consumers prefer to shop online because they believe that they can get better deals online than in brick and mortar stores.
The number of digital shoppers in the U.S. is expected to reach 224 million by 2019, and it’s just a few days away. So while there is time, you should begin immediately by optimizing your website and landing pages this Holiday season. And by the way, before you begin, examine the product pages of your closest competitors. This will give you a hint where to strike in order to get the edge.
The right marketing strategy can always can make any business stand in the midst of competition. It makes users know your products and services easily and convince them of available benefits.
This holiday season, you should devise a SEO-optimized online Holiday marketing strategy. A strategy that will boost the visibility of your business, drive more traffic to your site, improve page loading speed, and promote mobile friendliness could be your best approach to achieve your objectives!
Make your website stand out in the crowd with an excellent SEO-driven sales strategy. Be sure it happens by tapping a team of experts in the digital marketing arena – like Muzeum Marketing.
With Muzeum Marketing, you can be sure to reach your digital marketing goals. You may contact us at (303) 466-3055 or 1-888-311-1053 for a site review and evaluation. We will open doors for your business in the digital world!
