Get your website SEO ready for Holiday Shopping

• Teo

“Happiness is not in money, but in shopping”

And it couldn’t be more true. Especially during the holiday season, where even the thought of buying lovely and thoughtful presents for your loved ones gives you a rush of excitement and joy. This holiday season is even more special as many of us are finally going to be meeting our loved ones after a very long time with lockdowns finally easing a little, countrywide.

Which is why these last few months of the year, leading up to the start of the New Year will be all about festivities and the holiday shopping season. There is Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and all the wonderful festive days to get together with family and loved ones. It truly will be the most wonderful time of the year. For everyone. Including e-commerce businesses. Every year, and more so this time around, the holiday season provides e-commerce businesses with a huge opportunity to reach their sales goals. So now is the time to review your company’s marketing plan and strategy for the year and the goals that still need to be met. By leveraging the influx of holiday shopping traffic coming onto your website, you can end the year on a profitable and successful note.

However, in order to deal with all the potential holiday shopping traffic, you need to prepare your website right now to avoid any glitches and backlogs. Your website needs to be optimised in the best possible manner to be able to provide an exceptional customer experience. And one way to do that is to really focus on your SEO efforts which will not only help to improve your website’s visibility by increasing your rankings but will also help you make the most of the upcoming holiday shopping season.

An SEO audit will not only help you uncover any underlying problems within your website’s infrastructure that might cause a less than favourable customer experience but will also enable you to lean on your strengths, helping you to craft the best holiday shopping experience for them. The following is a breakdown of a few things to bear in mind while revamping your website, holiday style.

Check your relevant keywords

The best place to start any SEO effort is your targeted keywords. You need to decide which words you wish to rank for and incorporate them into your holiday related content. Since the holiday season is all about getting as many conversions as possible, creating a sense of urgency by incorporating phrases such as ‘sale’, ‘buy now’ and ‘instock’, will encourage them to make a purchase.

Develop new holiday content

It would be a good idea to refresh and update existing holiday content from last year, wherever relevant. However, with the rapidly changing consumer trends and preferences it is important to generate new, interesting and valuable content that will help solve customer’s concerns and draw them in. Make sure to use an engaging writing style, with impeccable grammar and punctuation, because no one enjoys a sloppy read.

Speed things up

Shoppers are usually in a hurry, and more so during the holiday shopping season when they are in what we like to call a buying frenzy. If your website takes more than 2-3 seconds to load, they’ll instantly go to the next option on the search results page. To shorten loading times, it’s advised to compress images and videos without compromising on the quality. Keep the search engines in mind

It’s extremely important to optimise the titles and product descriptions to show up in the search engines. A few points to remember here are to always add alt attributes to images and incorporate keywords appropriately. The meta description, titles, headings and subheadings all need to be reviewed and optimised for search engine results. Another thing to bear in mind is use of a descriptive anchor text for links and a URL that is simple and easy to remember.

Optimise for mobile

More and more people are now using their mobile phones to search for products and even make purchases online. This requires that your website be not only mobile friendly, but also mobile optimised, not only giving the best user experience but also giving you the coveted position in the search results. This will increase your visibility, bringing in more traffic and possibly more conversions.

Be ready for the traffic

While some companies spend tons of effort perfecting their website, a crucial point they miss out on is whether the site will be able to handle the influx of traffic without crashing or compromising on loading times. It is therefore imperative to take preemptive steps and discuss with the website developer whether you have a stronghold in place.

Start now

You may think you have some time before the holiday season begins in full swing, but SEO takes time. Starting right away will help you identify the problems such as broken URLs, lack of internal links, bounce rates and unsecured pages, and rectify them before the season officially begins.

If all these aforementioned tips are making your head spin, and you’re unsure of where to start, we are more than happy to help and guide you every step of the way. Our experienced team at Yaseo will not only help you perform an in-depth SEO audit, but will also help you to align your strategy with your holiday shopping season goals, enabling you to streamline your website’s shopper experience and help you sail through the holiday season smoothly, and profitably. So don’t hesitate to reach us out on info@yaseo.co.uk so that we can get started right away.

If you are still looking for motivation I’ll end with Houston Barnett-Gearhart’s saying from last year, “The best time to prepare for the holidays was 6 months ago. The second best time is now.” So let’s get on, shall we?