If you own a retail business, it’s a great time to plan for holiday season marketing and it’s never too early to plan for the smashing time of the year 2019 right?
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, New year sale is coming ahead. While ranking in Google organically is not something you can do overnight, You should really stand out from the crowd to make a huge sales and ranking.
Let’s explore some holiday season tips to improve ranking, generate revenue and crushing competitors during this holiday season.
Holiday SEO Tips 2019:
- Trace your site loading time and performance
- Be in Know 2018 Holiday Marketing Trends
- Holiday SEO: Don’t forget Seasonal Keywords
- Create individual landing pages for promotions (Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales)
- Merge SEO with Your Other Marketing Activities
Trace Your Website Loading Time and Performances:
One of the major challenges for e-commerce business website is page load time and performance.
Research says, if the web page hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds, the users won’t like the slow site. Especially in holiday sales season slow load page, broken links or other redirection/common issues leads the user to purchase somewhere else online.
Speeding up the website is a ranking factor (Google).
Check your website performance and load time regularly to make sure aren’t have on-going issues. Take a look and prepare a checklist for the regular task;
- Slow page speed
- Broken links
- Redirected URLs
- Canonical URL
- Internal Links
- Unsecured pages
- Duplicate content
- Landing pages
How fast your website loads on website and mobile browser?
Let’s have some tools to try it.
Tools To Check It:
Site Performance
Google Pagespeed Insights
Pingdom
GTMetrix
Mobile Compatibility
Mobile-Friendly Test
Bing Mobile Friendly Tool
Rankwatch Mobile Friendly Tool
Be in Know 2018 Holiday Marketing Trends:
Are you ready for holiday season festive? The holiday season is huge particularly for US markets and it’s not too early for retailers and e-commerce to kick off holiday marketing campaigns and sales to drive in.
Retailers must know about mobile and online sales (brand awareness, product recommendations) for holiday purchasing order. Mobile will dominate the shopping experience during 2018 holiday shopping season.
It’s really too difficult to consider the last year trends/stats, it is crucial to measure the website performance (Load time and mobile-friendly) to impress the online customers.
It’s challenging part, look at the pages were most visited last year and prioritize those pages to work up for 2019, also get an idea about eCommerce holiday marketing statistics to beat up competitors.
Important Metrics To Measure:
What regions your visitors from
Most driven traffic pages
Realtime updates on websites
Measure the performance of site (Clicks, Impression, CTR, Position and More)
Indexing and Crawl Errors
Tools to Measure Metrics:
Google analytics
Google Search Console
Above tools helps to learn about site performance, most visited pages, search queries, top-ranking pages, bounce rate and more.
General Holiday marketing Statistics:
- Holiday retail sales crossed the $1 trillion mark for the first time in 2018.
- The average American shopper spent $846 on gifts in 2018 — a 14 percent increase from 2017.
- Holiday eCommerce sales were responsible for $126 billion in 2018 — a 16.5 percent increase from the $108.2 billion generated in 2017.
- Clothing and accessories, electronics, and toys are the top items people shop for during the Thanksgiving period.
- In 2018, Cyber Monday generated $7.9 billion in online sales — making it the biggest sales day in US e-commerce history.
- Black Friday is the busiest traffic day of the year.
- Cyber Monday is the largest online shopping day of the year — with 47 percent of all online spend during the Thanksgiving period expected to occur on Cyber Monday.
- About 40 percent of all holiday sales in the US takes place on Amazon.
- An email was responsible for 24 percent of sales during the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday period.
- Black Friday and Thanksgiving searches and sales peak at 8 PM.
Mobile Marketing Statistics:
- Mobile e-commerce sales increased by 32.6 percent in 2018 — accounting for 44 percent of all holiday eCommerce sales.
- 66 percent of shoppers used their mobile device to make purchase decisions over the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday period.
- Smartphones were also responsible for 42.6 percent of sales.
- Mobile devices were responsible for 54.3 percent of all visits to retail sites on Cyber Monday 2018, compared to 34.7 percent of visits from desktops.
- 71 percent of people will use their mobile device to research or make a purchase during the holiday season.
General E-commerce Statistics
- 2019 retail sales is projected to increase up to 4.4 percent to more than $3.84 trillion.
- 2019 online sales is expected to grow up to 12 percent to $764.8 billion.
- The average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.89 percent.
- 55 percent of people abandon shopping carts due to high extra costs such as shipping rates, fees, and taxes.
- 75 percent of shoppers expect free delivery on their online orders.
Reason for Abandonment During Checkout:
Holiday SEO : Don’t forget Seasonal Keywords:
The holiday season is one the prime period for retailers and eCommerce business. It’s time to strategize a marketing plan to increase profits during 2019 sales.
However online brands start focusing on direct sales from other platforms Adwords, Email marketing, and social media marketing.
Some of the companies forget to build organic traffic or sales, it happens only companies don’t know the importance of the event and holiday season keywords and organic seo strategy.
What are the seasonal keywords?
Seasonal keywords mean the keyword which drives more traffic on during a specific time of the year. Search keywords based on holiday and events like Black Friday, valentine, Cyber Monday, New Year, Christmas sale, etc.
Let’s take a topic about Black Friday sale, first have to look on high volume keywords for the month of November, so it would help a business to optimize content, and landing page creation.
Create content for your target audience and optimize with seasonal keywords (Long-tail keywords) to drive organic traffic for a website, which helps to improve organic ranking. Long-tail keywords have low search volume and specific keywords that match what exactly user search for.
To increase click-through rate and conversions, run a campaign based on broad keywords / long tail keyword rather than highly competitive keywords.
Explore keywords based on
What
How
When
Who
Where
Tools to find Trending Keywords:
Google Trends
Google Keyword Planner
SEMrush Keyword Tool
Quora
How to stand out from the crowd:
Static pages – Create specific landing pages with CTA
Blog Post – Create post/pages with target keywords to optimize content
Promotion – Social Media / Email (Content promotion is to build brand-aware around audiences)
Optimizing seasonal keywords from an SEO point is tends to increase search volume for a certain time period and there are one more benefits of creating seasonal content
Create Individual landing pages for promotions:
Although we’re in the month of October, still we’ve time to optimize landing pages for holiday season promotions. If you sell products online, keep in mind customers visits websites and landing on a number of pages not just from home page URL. Before pushing up the promotions, take some time to review your landing pages.
Few Landing page tips:
- Optimize landing page for mobile users
- Pay attention page quick load
- Make your message simple and clear
- Give crystal clear Call-to-action
- Measure website visits and views
- Reduce your attention ratio
- Use interactive conversion forms
- Increase Urgency and reduce distractions
- Grammar and Spelling matters
- Place the right image, that speaks much
- Easy navigation to relevant content
- Use seasonal theme and colours on pages
- Enable social sharing icons
Don’t wait, start creating or optimization for landing pages content. Create a page and make them hidden from users (302 redirects). This will help to crawl or render the pages by google, bing or other search engines.
Most important thing is to add landing page URL to XML sitemap, website sitemap, website navigation and internal linking.
A typical goal of these new holiday season landing pages is to drive a large number of traffic and organic ranking (search queries).
Merge SEO with Your Other Marketing Activities:
SEO is the most important marketing activity to drive traffic organically to your websites on a regular basis. Make your holiday marketing strategies work on other platforms.
- Combine Paid Search/PPC with seo strategy
- Social media Strategy
Combine Paid Search / PPC with SEO strategy:
SEO and PPC are different marketing platforms with unique roles for a website. Ultimately goals are to gain customers and traffic to your website.
Pay attention to ad text
Test your ad using keyword data
Another strategy for PPC and paid search is to significantly increase your budget on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This allows you to show your ads more frequently and drive increased traffic to your site.
Social media strategy to drive traffic:
Whether a business or a blog, social media has the potential to drive referral traffic to the website. Social media also has an impact on SEO ranking. The number of users on social media platforms in 2018 grew to an estimated 2.6 billion and the number is expected to climb to 3 billion by 2021.
How to convert social media visitors to traffic:
- Identify the right channel to promote
- Choose content to share (Infographics, Reviews, Tutorials, etc)
- When is the right time to post?
- Build a relationship
- Use Facebook ads for remarketing
- Run giveaways to drive referral traffic
- Use facebook messenger as customer support
- Use Instagram to sell products
Once you determine to create a social media strategy plan and roll them out.
Holiday Marketing Infographic:
Ready to Start Optimizing?
Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales make businesses/ retailer sellers gain traffic and sales during the week. Start an action plan, prepare a checklist to track your activity over the holiday season plan. Don’t forget to measure your action plan weekly to analyze your success.
If your business in the retail industry, know about last year industries category reach and work on it. Especially categories like Electronics, Toys, Clothing, Games could drive in plenty of traffic around holiday sale.
Backtrack the Check List;
Website page speed
Mobile-friendly website
Creative landing page
Choose relevant keywords
A study about last year holiday season sale
Merge SEO with SEM marketing efforts
Measure your success and adjust your strategy
I hope these holiday season SEO tips have given some ideas on how to boost up during the period.
Turn your visitors to happy customers.
The holidays are a busy time for all but also a fantastic marketing opportunity, “Work on these tips to make all your holiday marketing sales dreams come true!”
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