Last week we wrote about the holiday selling season kicking off very soon and as we stated in our previous article, careful planning in advance is key to maximise conversions during the most important dates in terms of online shopping - Black Friday, Cyber Monday and pre-Christmas in general. In our next article due by the end of this week we will be getting more in detail about how to prepare your website for the month of December when literally millions of potential customers hit the net just to find the perfect holiday gift; in this article, it’s all about preparing your online shop for November 27th and November 30th. We’re sure everyone who’s in any kind of eCommerce business knows about these 2 days marking Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you don’t, you may want to think about another line of business that has nothing to do with selling stuff online.
So what are the things you need to have in place to be ready for the end of this month’s online shopping bonanza? Here are our 5 tips to optimize eCommerce for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
1. How well is your traffic doing?
Before making any changes to your website SEO or Adwords and social media campaigns, you should be very well aware of how your eCommerce website is doing at the moment. What has been driving traffic the most? What pages are mostly visited? What keywords drive organic traffic to your website? What social media campaigns have been successful the most in terms of conversions? What products have you sold the most in the past 6 months? What product pages lead to most conversions?
These are just some of the questions you need to be answering before planning your next move. Once you have all the data for the past year, 6 months and 3 months, you will be able to identify major traffic trends that affect your sales and conversions. Also, this will give you an idea of what products to push during the holiday season and what keywords to use in your holiday campaigns in order to maximise traffic.
2. List holiday specific keywords you want to use
While tracking your website data you can easily find out your top performing keywords. Now these keywords should be used with holiday specific keywords both in your website content and in your online campaigns. You can use a number of softwares to find out the most relevant holiday keywords and select the ones that mostly adapt to your niche and your brand (we personally suggest to try out Google Trends as it is very easy to use regardless of your SEO knowledge and skills).
3. The 45-day content rule
According to digital marketing reports, you should publish your targeted and optimised content at least 45 days before a holiday or event you are preparing your website for. This will allow your website to participate in 90% or more of search traffic for the keywords related to that particular holiday.
4. Let your brand’s fans know you are ready for the holidays!
The people that subscribed to your newsletters and follow you on social media are your biggest asset. Not only these people are more likely to visit and purchase from you during the holidays but they’re also your best promoters in terms of sharing your content with their peers.
This is why you should design holiday gift guides and special holiday campaigns and promotional content in advance and share it with your fans. These users will be more likely to shop from you if they know they’ll get a special discount; they may also spread the word about your website with friends and family. To maximise the so called “click of the mouse”, enable social media sharing buttons in all your newsletter campaigns, holiday gift guide pages and holiday posts on your website.
5. Pay attention to your most valuable links
To make sure potential customers land on your website and discover your products, you need to be smart with your links. When linking both from your newsletters and social media to your website or vice versa, make sure to link to those pages or accounts that are already doing well in terms of traffic/social media followers.
Also, use your website’s most visited pages to display all your holiday promotions, discounts and calls to action. Link your social media to these particular pages rather than to any page on your website. If your homepage is not displaying a specific promotion you are advertising on your Facebook/Twitter/in your newsletter, link the post to the page that does feature the holiday promotion, not to your homepage.
If you have any specific questions regarding holiday marketing strategy, shoot us a quick email and our team of professionals at Zaproo will be more than happy to reply!