The holidays are right around the corner. How does your e-commerce site rank against your competition? Whether your holiday sales strategy is set in place, or you are still working through some adjustments, we have five components to include to ensure your season is a success.
Responsive Design
Is your website Responsive, or mobile friendly? If not, now is definitely the time to make the conversion. This year, and going forward, the majority of online sales will come from mobile devices. If your website requires pinching and zooming, your customers will abandon your site for a competitor who offers a better user experience on phones. Not to mention, responsive websites receive preference in search engine rankings. Don't miss out on valuable sales because your online shopping experience is not convenient across devices, or because Google penalizes your site for not being mobile-friendly.Load Time
Let's face it. As a human population, our attention span has diminished to mere seconds. If your website takes too long to load, visitors aren't going to stay around to wait for it. What are some ways to speed up your load time?
- Make sure your images are the correct size. If they are too large, they will drag down the website's speed.
- Implement Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). "AMP makes web pages fast, and fast pages help with purchase conversions." Although AMP is not yet a requirement for websites, Google is starting to place a lot of focus on this feature.
Organic Search Rankings
Sure, your customers (or potential customers) can easily find you by searching your company or brand's name. But can they find you by searching for your products? If the answer is no, there are some steps you can take to improve your search presence, to ensure you are also found through searches of non-branded terms.
- Update your website content. Peruse your site, and take some time to pepper in additional keywords throughout your site (but be sure not to keyword stuff!). This is also a good time to beef up your content, especially on your homepage. Make sure everything is current and relevant, and provides the end-user the information they are looking for.
- Revisit your meta tags. Have you taken a look at your website's meta tags in a while? Now is an opportunity to update existing metas, and to add new ones. Make sure your meta descriptions have strong keywords, and your keywords are all still relevant. Don't forget about location-based modifiers within your keywords if you have a local, brick and mortar shop.
- Do your inside pages have their own meta tags added? If the answer is no, this could be affecting your search rankings. When your website only has meta tags in place for the home page, all other pages pull from the same meta title and description. Google sees this as duplicate content, which can, and eventually will, lead to penalties.
PPC Strategy
As an e-commerce company, one of your biggest focuses is advertising your products, especially during the holiday shopping season. Do you advertise through Pay Per Click (PPC) methods? Whether you have a large digital advertising budget, or a smaller one, PPC is something to consider to boost online sales and to reach new customers. If you're already advertising with PPC, what does your strategy look like?- Do you have your budget set in place? If not, now is the time to develop your budget and have it approved.
- Are you creating new ads or are they already set in stone? You will want to create ads that are holiday and sales focused to attract the most shoppers. Don't forget to set up A/B testing!
- Google has recently launched Expanded Text Ads through Adwords. You now have the opportunity to write ads with two headline fields (up to 30 characters), and an expanded description field (up to 80 characters). This gives you much more room to play with ad content.
- Do your ads and their corresponding pages' content mesh well? If not, now is the time to either update page content to make sure the ads fit, or re-write your ads.
Social Media Strategy
By now, we all know how crucial social media is for businesses of all sizes. If you're selling products online, you should absolutely be taking advantage of the accessibility of social media. The holiday season is a great time to not only promote your products through social media, but to also keep your customers engaged, and informed.- Share your promotions and sales through all of your social accounts. People will be looking specifically for deals throughout the remaining months of the year.
- Offer contests and giveaways for new or best-selling products to keep your customers excited. Ask them to Retweet, share, or tag a friend to expand your exposure.
- Highlight new or featured products with great visual content - videos are even better than still images. Let your customers know what's great about new products, and share with prospects why your brand stands out from your competition.
- Are you taking advantage of social advertising? Make sure to set aside some of your advertising budget for social media.
- Determine whether you will be promoting your page, CTA, or website through page ads, or if you will be promoting your content through sponsored posts. Who is your target audience and/or demographic? This is important to make sure you are reaching the right people for your brand.
If you need help getting your e-commerce strategy top notch for the busiest sales season of the year, we would love to be your guide. Contact us to set up a time to talk.
