Web Moves Blog

The holiday shopping season is approaching and you’ve worked hard this year to improve the SEO of your website. Now its getting to the busiest month of the year and you are checking your web stats everyday to see if sales and traffic are increasing.

You’re thinking to yourself, what can I do in the next few weeks to generate more sales? Clearly its too late to make any drastic changes to the SEO campaign? And you would be right, what follows are some simple tips you can implement today to capture more sales during the holiday season.

1. Be competitively priced.
Are your products competitively priced during this season? You should be checking your pricing against your competitors ( your customers will be ), more than likely they will be offering discounts. The easiest way to get the sale is to offer cheaper products. If you can not match your competitor’s pricing, than make sure you can offer something else to close the sale. ( keep reading )

2. Offer special services.
Discounts are great, but sometimes good old fashion service can seal the deal with your shoppers. Offering gift wrapping, gift cards or simply a follow up call ( from a real person ) after the order is placed can get you the extra sales this holiday.

3. Bet on referrals
People like to share their good ( or bad ) experiences and a great way to generate extra sales during the next month is to ask your customers to refer you, this is dead simple but often overlooked. You can do this by placing a ‘tell a friend’ feature at the last stage of the checkout or by including a message in the order confirmation email.

4. Update your website
Still have the same homepage from last Christmas? Now is the time to start updating your website with holiday season specials / designs if you have not done so. But be careful not to make your website look like a over decorated Christmas tree! Limit your changes to no more than 3 spots per page and keep the theme consistent. For example;

Website header image / banner

Website logo

Homepage Specials / Banners

5. Create top lists for the holiday season
Lists can be great linkbait and viral material, this year put a dollar spin to it for shoppers suffering from the economic crisis; setup a dedicated landing page for lists such as:

• Our top Christmas gift ideas under $50.00
• Top 10 gifts to give this holiday season
• Top Christmas gift ideas that won’t break the bank
• What Santa’s elves want this Christmas

Don’t over SEO this page, but rather treat this page as a piece to grab visual attention; use creative writing and if you can, put a funny spin on it. Don’t forget to give people the ability to share this page by social media.

6. Update your stocklist
Don’t get caught with your pants down, remove items that are out of stock or nearly out of stock from the top categories. There is nothing worst for a customer to order something for Christmas than finding out it’s going to take 2 months to be delivered. You can bet they will ask for a refund and tell all their friends about the horrible experience.

7. Clearly display your operating and delivery dates during the holidays
Same as above, shoppers want to know if their purchase will be received prior to the holidays. Make it clear to them when they will receive their goods, if you are offering special delivery services during these few weeks, this needs to be displayed on the website prior to the checkout stage, preferably on the product description page.

8. Check & optimize your pay per click ads
If you are running PPC ads such as Google Adwords, now is the time to go through your Ad copy and include some season specific messages. You can also create new ad blocks and link it to the top lists you created in Tip 5.

9. Observe religiously themed advertisements.
If your website appeals to an international market, be careful to observe and limit religiously themed ads and graphics. It may be the holiday season for everyone but it may not be a religious occasion for all. On the other hand, if your target audience does observe the holiday season religiously, than by all means target your promotions towards their religion.

10. Get organized this week!
Don’t wait until the last minute to contact your web designer or developer for updates and changes, give them plenty of notice and they will appreciate you for it. ( Who knows, they might even send you a card this year. )

Bonus Tips.

• Pay your web hosting bills – no website = no sales
• Check your payment gateway provider’s status – Some providers shut shop early or have shorter operating periods.
• Manage your staff’s hours – No one to pack your orders or answer phones? How will you survive these holidays?
• Optimize your website for speed – If your site has a lot of 3rd party add-ons, try disabling a few to speed up the browsing experience.
• Update your news / blog – No one likes to shop from neglected websites. Add something to your news / blog.
• Run through the checkout process yourself from another computer / browser – You might notice some bugs or copy that needs fixing.

We hope you have found these tips useful to get more sales this holiday season and please share these tips with people you think that might benefit.
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