Technology

SEO for your eCommerce site: Holiday shopping edition

Posted by Pixafy Team

SEO for your eCommerce site: Holiday shopping edition | Pixafy

Black Friday and Cyber Monday — 2 days of shopping madness. We’ve all seen what happens when the masses converge in a store, wreaking havoc everywhere. Thankfully, now you can do all of your shopping online, allowing you to get all the gifts you need while avoiding a stampede.

Optimizing SEO for your eCommerce site is a great way to boost sales and generate new customers during the busy holiday shopping rush. Pixafy’s SEO expert, Project Manager Alan Gagnon, shares some tips to help improve your SEO results, as well as a few things you should try to avoid.

1Start promoting your great deals

Will you be offering free shipping during the holidays? Perhaps free gift wrapping? If so, start promoting these additional incentives ASAP! Change the title tags on your website to include any special promotions you’ll be doing over the holidays. People will be searching for “free” so it’s important that if you are offering something for free (or 20% off, for example), that you properly promote it. This is also a great opportunity to utilize your social media pages. Be sure to advertise your great deals on Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media tools you have at your disposal. Be sure to include rich, creative, and unique sales promotional copy that will grab a customer’s attention.

2. Review what worked in the past

If you have Google Analytics (which you should) and have had it for over a year, it would be a good idea to check out the data from the previous holiday season. See which pages your customers visited the most on your site and use that to your advantage. If you saw that a lot of people made purchases on a particular page, try moving more products to that page, or create a stronger call to action that will direct them there.

3. Create holiday-specific categories on your site

Let’s say your website sells shirts. You probably have different categories for different types of shirts — long sleeve, shirt sleeve, tank top, etc. With the holiday shopping rush, you want to make sure to create holiday-specific categories. “Gifts”, “Gifts for Dad”, “Holiday Deals”, are all different names you could use to help get better SEO results. These categories should reflect what shoppers are searching for in search engines.

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Check out our guide to getting your site holiday traffic-ready:

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4. Partner with circular websites

If you have some really great Black Friday promotions, consider partnering with another site that could help get your products to a larger audience. Sites like BlackFriday.com and FatWallet.com are good examples of how you can extend your SEO reach. But make sure that these are reputable sites that do not spam customers with an overwhelming amount of emails. Bombarding a potential customer with your deals is not an effective way of getting a purchase.

5. Reviews for your products

Create an email campaign requesting customers to review your products. If you have a great promotion going on during the holidays, you want to make sure there are some great reviews up for potential new customers to use as a reference. This email campaign should have some sort of incentive to entice the customer to write a review. Offering an extra 10% off their next purchase could be that little something extra that will convince them to write one.

Favorable product reviews are great, but one thing you should not do is purchase or write fake reviews. This might be a given but it happens surprisingly often. Fake reviews are usually very obvious to identify — if there is a product with 10 negative reviews and then 1 review that is absolutely glowing, that could be an indicator right there. Your company will lose credibility if you do this.

With these tips and tools you should have no problem getting shoppers to your site. Now buckle up and get ready, because here they come!

Is your eCommerce site ready for holiday traffic? Check out how we can take your site to the next level!