Another holiday season is just around the corner. As a matter of fact, you may already have plans for your personal or family holidays such as preparing a gift list and putting holiday decorations in place. But what about your business website – have you prepared it for the holiday season?
People who are familiar with how the virtual market works know too well that SEO takes time and effort before you see results. With the holidays fast approaching, it might be a bit too late for you to start your holiday SEO campaign. It is important for a business website to get a slice of the holiday market pie. Thus, it is imperative for you, the business manager, to take effective steps to make your business gain some traction in time for the holiday season.
To emphasize the importance of creating a holiday season campaign for your business, here are a few steps you can do to make the most of the time left for you to be a part of the big market during the holiday rush.
1. Evaluate Your Present Standing
This implies that you must know the overall status of your SEO. Additionally, you should also look out for unoptimized areas because these can drag your site downhill. Make simple changes in areas that need attention. These may seem immaterial but they can create a certain degree of impact on your current rankings.
While strengthening weak points do help, you must also be aware of what makes your website do well with the search engines. Apply those principles into your holiday pages where special deals or products are offered.
2. Review Your Titles and Product Descriptions
People surf the web more often than usual during the holiday season. You should take this as a marketing opportunity by optimizing the titles and descriptions of your products, as they have a big influence on your click-through rates.
When we optimize, we usually connect our product titles and descriptions to keywords to make them visible to search engines. While this is generally important, you may treat the holiday season a bit differently – optimize your titles and descriptions for the user. This calls for a good understanding of who your customers are and what sort of products they are looking for during this season. You may also try to tailor some of your product titles and descriptions to people who want to buy gifts for Christmas.
3. Check Your Site’s Load Times
Your website’s load times matter so much in the virtual market. Even a one-second delay can have an impact on user experience, and cause a your conversion rate to drop by as much as 7%, according to a recent study. This is something you can’t afford to see during the holidays.
If your website’s load times are going up, look at the photos in your site because they are sometimes too “heavy” and cause longer load times. Have your photos sized properly to improve the speed of your website. If the problem persists, you may go a bit deeper into your site’s architecture to discover the cause of your page loading problems.
4. Don’t Ignore Mobile
Phones and tablets are presently being used for online shopping. This means mobile optimization is a must for every business website not just for the holidays but throughout the entire year. As for the holiday season, when you create holiday landing pages, you must make sure that they are mobile friendly. This enables you to serve mobile users who are looking to make purchases through their hand held devices. Your website should be able to deliver satisfactory mobile experience. Otherwise you will be left out by competitors whose websites are able to serve the mobile market.
A lot of website owners don’t consider making their website mobile friendly in the deepest sense. As a matter of fact, many websites don’t have the “click to call” button which is essential for any website that targets the mobile market. Websites that give mobile users the ability to call can certainly benefit from this feature.
5. Ride on the Influence of Social Media
Do not underestimate the influence of social media in your holiday marketing campaign. Many companies, both real and virtual, actually use it to reach out to their audience and target market.
Pinterest for example stands out in the gift promotion and holiday content aspect of online marketing. If you can create holiday boards that are optimized with keywords that contain your holiday products in the title and description, Pinterest would be a good provider of traffic to your holiday pages.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are also valuable social media resources that can provide links to your site. You can use them to showcase your holiday specials to your audience and drive traffic to your website.
6. Consider PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click and Adwords can mean extra advertising cost but they are a great option that really work especially now that marketing time is running short. Many companies are actually using PPC advertising up to this moment.
SEO takes time to get your key terms to the top of the search engines, but PPC can place your ad to a spot where people can see it. Just manage your campaign well because competition for top keywords is stiff and prices tend to go up these days. Don’t get too aggressive to the point of bidding blindly.
7. Put it on Record for the Next Holiday Season
After putting so much effort and time to your online holiday season marketing campaign, make sure that all of your strategies that work as well as the ones that didn’t fare well are properly recorded. This will serve as your reference for your marketing campaign strategies during next year’s holiday season. Being on track of your performance, you will be able to prepare your business website for future holiday seasons.
8. Start Planning for Next Year
Okay, let’s say you are a bit late for this year’s holiday marketing campaign for your website. This should mean that you have to prepare early for next year.
While your next year’s holiday marketing campaign may not be too clear at this point in time, the things you learn this year can serve as your guide for next year’s holiday marketing strategies. It really is too early to start creating holiday pages for next year, but to start researching for next season’s keywords can be beneficial to your business.
Is your SEO campaign giving your business enough value this holiday season?
If you want to see a difference in your site’s performance, let Muzeum Marketing evaluate your website. We can help improve your site’s strengths, eliminate its weaknesses and make it visible in the virtual world.
Make your website create a difference in your business this holiday season and beyond. Just give us a call at (303)-466-3055 or 1-888-311-1053. It will be our first step together towards a fruitful journey in the digital market.
