Boost Your Holiday Season Ecommerce Traffic with Smart SEO

The holiday season creates many pressures on small businesses as they prepare to order and stock sufficiently for the expected sales rush. Paying attention to holiday season SEO may not appear to be very important, but it needs to be appreciated that as a task, SEO is never quite complete and requires constant attention. The holiday season is a good opportunity to revisit your SEO strategy; however you would do well to start well before the season onset as you would have to allow enough time for Google to take cognizance of the modifications.

Current Situation Analysis

Before you rush into purchasing AdWords or altering Meta tags and descriptions, you would do well to conduct an analysis of the state of your search engine optimization. This is advisable because without checking the performance of organic searches, you could possibly do more harm than good. Identify the pages that are gathering the most page views and the longest time spent using Google Analytics and then verify the results with the keywords that are your best-performing. This analysis will inform you what is currently being done well. Bear in mind that the homepage is possibly performing well so there’s not too much to be gained by tweaking it, but you could get substantial gains by optimizing other pages that are not performing so well. For a really professional analysis, you can contact a reputed Utah SEO services company.

SEO

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Identify Best Keywords

While, you already have included best-performing keywords in your website or at least have identified new ones, you should consider making a list of keywords that are holiday-specific to attract customers looking for gifts in the high season. To get an idea of the search terms being favored by web surfers, delve deep into reports generated by Google Trends and update your keywords appropriately.

Publish Now

After the list of holiday-specific keywords has been updated, it can be tempting to postpone the task of writing the blogs till later. However, the sooner you action these keywords and publish your content, the quicker they stand a chance to be discovered by Google and start impacting your web traffic. Experts opine in the latest SEO guide that it is best to allow at least 45 days, enabling participation by about 90% of the traffic. In contrast, publishing content with just a week before the start of the holiday season, dips the figure to about 50%.

Give Pre-Launch Indications

A great idea for locking in interest of your loyal customers is to design preview pages of the holiday offers. These pages will serve to create a buzz about the things to come, even if you have not tied up all the details and can’t commit the specifics. Not only will this activity be of interest to your customers but also the opportunity to start link building on relevant holiday searches helps your SEO. Google bots also favor pages that are constantly updated so ensure that the ‘Coming Soon” page is kept on being updated after it is created, especially during the holiday season. This will guarantee increased web traffic and boost holiday sales.

Use Links Smartly

Good SEO strategy is all about internal and external links that serve to increase the opportunity of searchers discovering your page as well as enhance the content credibility. When you are taking stock of your current SEO performance, you should note the pages that are already performing well. When you evolve your holiday season linking strategy, you can use these pages as landing pages for the display of sales promotions and optimizing the existing exposure.

Optimize Page Load Times

Site visitors do not like waiting and even the delay of a second impacts customer satisfaction by as much as 16% and decreases conversion rate by a whopping 7%. Hence, while optimizing your site performance for the holiday season, pay special attention to the page loading times; you can use the Site Speed tab in Google Analytics to monitor the loading times and check it against the performance of the page. Ensure all images are optimized for the web and the sizes compressed to the maximum without losing quality.

Get Included in Google Shopping

It is well established that feeds of Google Shopping have a conversion rate that is far superior to other PPC forms besides possessing a cost-per-click that is substantially lower. If you can get your product feed included in Google Shopping you are sure to gain extra visibility and enhance customer loyalty.

Sumit

About Author
Sumit is Tech blogger. He contributes to the Blogging, Tech News and Web Design section on TechnoSpices.

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