Optimize Your eCommerce Store to Boost Holiday Sales

Online eCommerce stores generate a significant portion of the revenue during the holiday or festive season. This is the time when their sales peak and sometimes, even their servers tank.

There are many reasons you would want to improve your search engine rankings and implement all the SEO recommendations before the upcoming holiday season.

According to a Forrester report, 71% of consumers use search engines to discover new products and services, and 74% use search engines to read reviews and comparisons before making a purchase.

Your prospective customers and clients may have different intentions of using the search engines, but ultimately, every journey ends with buying from you, buying from one of your competitors, or abandoning or postponing the idea of buying. This depends on the current need of the user and the type of information he or she can find on search engines.

To be able to sell more during the holiday season, you need to understand why your prospective customers and clients are looking for information and then provide that information.

Remember that in terms of improving your search engine rankings for the holiday season you may not be able to compete with multinational retail stores like Amazon and Walmart, but you can certainly create unique content to get some edge over them. It involves understanding your audience and then implementing your search engine optimization strategy accordingly.

It is always better to start improving your search engine rankings 2-3 months in advance because search engines like Google take some time crawling, indexing and then readjusting rankings for your various product pages and blog posts.

Holistically improving your search engine rankings depends on which stage of the sales funnel you are targeting your customers. Do you want to inform them? Do you want to educate them? Do you want to engage them? Why must they find information relevant to increasing your sales during the holiday season? Here are a few things you can do.

Do a Website Audit

Conduct an audit for your product page. Maybe you wrote product descriptions and web page copy some years ago when you were not quite aware of search engine optimisation, or were in a great hurry and didn’t have much time.

If you already have lots of pages and product listings, it’s a good time to conduct an audit of your website content and see how you can optimize it for SEO. You might want to pay attention to the following aspects –

• Is the content optimised for your main keywords, alternative keywords and longtail search phrases?
• Are your page titles optimised?
• Are your descriptions optimised?
• Are canonicals set where required?
• Do your images and videos have alternative text?
• Are your pages interlinked?
• Do you have an updated site map?
• Is information on your website updated?
• Are there dead links on your website?
• Do you have content on various holiday seasons and festivals?

It is always better to spruce up your existing content before creating new content.

Understand Search Intent to Boost Holiday Sales

Don’t always assume that when people search for products you are selling they want to buy them or they want to buy them from you. Knowing searchers intent is very important. Normally, searchers carry out the following types of searches:

• Informational search – what’s the latest model of the iPhone, which mobile phone has the best camera, which is the best Internet TV available these days, who is Julian Assange, and so on.
• Navigational search – mostly used when people don’t want to enter the URL of a website (or don’t know what is the URL) and simply enter the name in the search bar.
• Transactional search – the name of the exact product people want to buy, something like “Samsung Galaxy S 10”.

Knowing searchers intent is very important for optimisation. If you want to cover all your bases, you might want to optimize your website for all categories of searchers intent because even if people don’t want to buy from you instantly, they may buy the next day, the next week or some another day in future.

SEO + UX = Success

A lot of times, your website SEO isn’t optimal because the it hasn’t been designed by a professional agency or is full of junk code. The loading time is very long. The website schema is not well-defined. The images and graphics are very heavy. The navigation bar is confusing and disorganised. All in all, the website looks unprofessional.

You may have optimised your website but if your it does not look up to the mark and professional, people are not going to buy from you. Looking for a reliable e-commerce development partner? Check out this page to learn about our e-commerce website development services both for B2B and B2C businesses.

Include Festival Keywords

Holiday shopping is very specific. People will search for “dry fruit basket for Diwali” or “chocolate gift pack for Christmas” rather than simply “dry fruit basket” or “chocolate gift pack”.

It is always better to write blog posts like “10 great gift ideas for the upcoming festive season” or “How to choose the best Christmas gift for my teenage son?”

A great thing about the holiday season is that lots of activities are happening in your neighbourhood, among your staff and even in your personal life. Take inspiration from these activities. For example, most of the localities organize Diwali Melas and Christmas carnivals. See if your business can associate with them. Then, write about your association. Publish photographs. Publish videos. Such content can generate lots of search engine traffic.

Optimize Your Store for Voice Search

An increasing number of people are using voice commands to look up information on the Internet. Make sure, for this holiday season, you optimize your website for voice commands. Devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo are becoming commonplace. Even on mobile phones, due to Siri and Google Assistant, people use voice commands to search for information about products and services.

A Google survey has revealed that people use voice commands to get more information on deals and sales, information about upcoming events like holidays and festivals, customer support, local businesses and personalised tips.

52% people use voice search to access information about deals, sales and promotions, and what would be the best time to promote deals, sales and promotions than the holiday season?

People use conversational phrases when using voice search. For example, instead of using “food delivery service”, they will use “best food delivery service near me” or, “best holiday season offers for purchasing a new mobile phone”. Try to make sure you have content catering to voice commands and voice search on your website.

Use a Content-Driven Approach

Google Analytics can tell you for what keywords and search terms your website draws traffic from search engines. In case you are generating traffic for all the wrong reasons, you can make changes to your website content and product listings to target the keywords you actually need traffic for.

Google Analytics can also tell you which sections or links generate the traffic the most and which links have the highest bounce rate. You can use this data to make amends to improve your search engine rankings for the upcoming holiday season.

Your insights can also reveal various demographic details that you can use for better targeting. For example, around the Diwali festival, you would like to get traffic from those regions where Diwali is celebrated the most. Similarly, around Christmas, you would want to get traffic from regions where more people celebrate Christmas. These details can be revealed through Google Analytics.

As mentioned above, you cannot improve your search engine rankings for the coming holiday season in a hurry. How search engines react to your search engine optimisation efforts is not in your control. What you can do is, take all the steps that make it easier for the search engines like Google to crawl your content as easily and seamlessly as possible.

After that, it depends on the age of your domain and the number of authoritative websites linking to you, and sometimes, the buzz that you have been able to generate on social media and social networking websites when your links begin to show up in search engine results.

Therefore, start optimising your website as early as possible so that you can have a lead. Looking for a search engine optimisation SEO partner who can help you improve your search engine rankings for the upcoming holiday season? We provide professional SEO services for e-commerce websites and services industry. Check out this link for more details.