If your product or service can possibly be given as a gift, you have the chance to do a little last-minute optimization before Christmas.
As a business owner, you need to think ahead when optimizing for the holiday season – in other words, if what you’re selling is actually seasonal, you should have been doing keyword optimization and link-building back in July as it can take some time for changes to your optimization strategies to have an impact. However, you can also boost your sales this Christmas by thinking about SEO now.
If you have already identified this year’s ‘must have’ product for your industry, focus on optimizing for it on pages that are re-indexed regularly so the cache will update. Writing themed ‘linkbait’ blog posts, and developing internal linking strategies can help here as well.
Always avoid using the manufacturers’ standard product descriptions on your website if you are using a popular vendor or affiliate. Create carefully constructed product descriptions that hit all the relevant keywords and build from there.
Social media is an important aspect of any marketing campaign, so fully utilize Pinterest, Google+, Twitter and Facebook to drive traffic and boost conversions.
If you’ve really messed up and not done any holiday optimization, consider using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google and Facebook to save your bacon. Bidding on relevant keywords to show up at the top of search lets you focus on the products for which you anticipate there will be the highest demand, as well as those on which your profits per sale are highest. Track your PPC campaigns closely over the holiday and beyond, as you may find this additional tactic worth-while long term.
Remember that the purpose of your holiday season campaigns is not just to drive traffic itself, but to convert said traffic into sales. There are dozens of tools you can use to help you improve user experience and conversion rates. A-B testing tools are available to help you judge the impact of a new landing page design, and tracking tools can be utilized to help you understand how your users are interacting with your site, what links they are clicking, and what pages are being ignored.