For online stores and offline retailers, building a website is a must have for any successful business. As a general rule, online shoppers research purchases online before buying. Therefore, every holiday season becomes a critical turning point for many online businesses as well as offline businesses. This is the time of year when most people spend spend spend. Whether you have a website or are still building, we’ll help you get your website ready for the holiday season with these easy tricks.
1. Analyze the past
The first way to prep your online business for the holiday season is to see what worked well last year. Check out your Google Analytics or SiteWit profile to see what worked well. Which pages on your website were your visitors looking at, how many visitors did you get over all and when did you start marketing for the season?
If you’re new to the game, this is a great time to set up your tracking systems and prepare for this time next year. Using your data to drive more sales is a great way to get your business ready for the holiday season.
2. Optimize for Search Engines
Whether you are building a new website or updating your homepage for the holiday season, search engine optimization is critical. However, it does take time. So although it may be a little late in the game to optimize for this season, you still can create new content for your website now. And continue to optimize for your general terms in preparation for 2015. (This is why we have a comprehensive SEO scan for online businesses looking to add keywords to overlooked areas of their websites).
Choose your keywords wisely. For example if you have online recipes on your website, you may want to begin writing content that optimizes for keywords such as “best holiday recipe 2014” or “online recipes for Christmas 2014.” Your best bet is to optimize for long-tail keywords.
3. Content marketing
Once you choose your keywords, add more pages to your website, creating content for each of your keywords. You can use the Tumblr widget to create a blog, which is an easy way to update your website with new content.
Share the content on social media and with your friends. If you have an email subscriber list, send the content to them. Make sure your content is holiday-related and optimized for long-tail keywords so that online shoppers have a better chance of finding your online business.
Tell us, what are you doing to get your website ready for the holiday season? Share your ideas with our online business readers.