How To Improve Your eCommerce SEO In Time For Holidays

Here’s a few magical tweaks to improve your eCommerce SEO and boost those sales just in time for the Holiday Shopping Rush this year.

Improve eCommerce SEO for the Holidays

Christmas spirit for eCommerce store owners means Holiday spending; where every last one of us are emptying our pockets to fill those wishes.

It is the time of the year that represents the peak of spending, meaning that it could also be a peak for your eCommerce sales.

But only if you’re prepared.

By now probably every business owner understands the benefits of proper SEO, but don’t let the approaching holiday euphoria blind you from doing some last minute eCommerce SEO optimization to boost those sales.

If you want to direct these shoppers enchanted by Christmas glamour into your sales funnel, your shining offers better stand out. Boosting your eCommerce SEO for the Holidays is not something you can do overnight, so if you’re not ready by Black Friday (24th of November, in case you’re not good with calendars) you’ve already missed the opportunity.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of eCommerce SEO tips that you still have time to implement before the first ʽho-ho-hoʼ echoes in the minds of consumers with hungry, glittering eyes.

1. Check up on Your Elves

With the Christmas spirit approaching, you need to turn your online store into a magical Santa’s factory.

Although you’re not located on the North Pole, that doesn’t mean you don’t have your elves that will take care of your customer’s needs. They’re not small and green with pointed ears, but they’re also capable to set the whole machinery in motion and go by the name of key performance indicators (KPIs).

Just as Santa’s creatures are able to understand the deepest desires of every ʽgood boy and girlʼ, your KPIs will enable you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your website so you can take the right action on time. The only problem with your elves is that they’re not magical, and people want magic at this time of year. So you’ll need to check up on your little helpers and measure the overall performance of your site, making sure that the magic is in place and ready.

Of course, it’s just too much to keep track of all of them, so you should focus on the most important ones:

  • Cart abandonment rate
  • On-site search terms
  • Gross margin
  • Page loading time
  • Customer lifetime value
  • and the conversion rate.

This is going to require an investment in your e-commerce analytics.

There are numerous tools for the measurement of the overall site performance, again, you don’t have time (nor reason) to use them all – simply choose a reporting tool according to your needs which will allow you to keep track only of those helpers that are truly crucial.

2. Go Dickensian

christmas shopping

Are you feeling a strong urge to get good old Dickens off the shelf?

Well, even if it doesn’t, you can’t undervalue the sense of overwhelming nostalgia this time of year.

Did you know that good ‘ol nostalgia has been tied to shifts in search results?

This means that the search patterns of your customers can and probably will change significantly during the Holiday season, so you’ll have to adapt your language. With changes in search patterns comes a change in Google search results, so you need to make sure that your keywords jive with seasonal search intent.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should rediscover your literary talent — you must simply target the most commonly used holiday phrases – gift, best, cheap, dealsalthough risking some creativity might set you apart even further.

 

Don’t forget to optimize the most important elements of your pages for your holiday keywords. Be careful how you implement them in your title tags and meta descriptions and don’t stuff your URLs with them.

You’ve probably noticed that these ʽDickensian wordsʼ are actually not that rare all-year-round, but they do hold a powerful magic during the holidays.

That’s why another smart thing to do is to re-purpose your older content.

GWM, leading SEO Brisbane experts constantly point out, full-time dedication is the crucial part of good SEO, so you probably have some nice inbound links to reuse.

Your Christmas guide for 2018 could also be the one for 2019 – simply update the year and popular products and brands that come with it. Changing the slug and redirecting the URL might seem ʽtoo easyʼ, but it’s all about nostalgia after all.

3. Make Way For The Ghosts

We didn’t mention Dickens just for the sake of style…

When the holiday season comes every last one of us shows some character traits of his famous Ebenezer Scrooge. It’s not that all of us are old grumpy misanthropes, but the rapidly increasing rhythm of modern life has made us pretty insensitive and forgetful. We easily forget about the people who are important to us, maybe even some family members.

Many people use the Holiday Shopping Season as an opportunity to give a gift in the attempt to make up for some of this ‘forgetfulness’. And the redemption in this consumer society has only one form – buying presents.

Since we usually have this revelation just before the stroke of midnight, all the shoppers are in a frenzy as if they’ve been swept away by the three Ghosts of Christmas just like in the story.

The speed of your website has never been more important!

Besides the fact it’s one of the most significant ranking factors it’s also the backbone of users’ experience. You don’t want your loading time to stand as an obstacle on their road to ʽChristmas redemptionʼ, so you need to check and boost your website speed.

When it comes to eCommerce SEO, you need to make your delivery of static content faster, so investment in a CDN is mandatory.

You should also definitely use browser caching and resize your images, and try to keep it down with social media plug-ins. Minifying CSS, HTML, and JavaScript is an old trick and using asynchronous scripts you’ll be able to skip slow-loading elements and therefore let your vital data load first.

mobile shopping stats

One look at the mobile marketing statistics should make you optimize your website for mobile buyers, and if you’ve been putting it off now’s the time to do it.

The same way the three Ghosts drag Scrooge through the past, present, and future in just one night, the Christmas spirit is dragging online shoppers through multiple mobile sales channels.

That means that most of the shopping is performed literary on the run, while desktop devices have stayed home. In this frenzy, people are switching from one mobile device to another, which means that your service must be seamless across all of them. That’s why you need to use only static images for your mobile homepage, make sure your zoom features such as pinch and double tap are top-notch, and reduce the possibility of typos during checkout with the integration of a touch-optimized keyboard.

As we’ve already mentioned, eCommerce SEO requires full-time dedication, but if yours has become a bit rusty these three tips will definitely get it back in shape for holidays. With your elves in place, your words of nostalgia, and your ghosts running wild, not a single shopper will utter the infamous ʽBuh! Humbug!ʼ.