Countless e-commerce sites are fighting for a slice of this holiday season’s profits. Your website is facing stiff competition not only from the largest online retailers but also from countless smaller firms that are looking to attract the same customers as you. While you might think that your website is running smoothly, you may notice that you’re not attracting nearly as many early holiday shoppers as you thought.
Don’t wait for Cyber Monday to start making changes. Optimize your site right now and grab as much business as you can before New Year’s Day.
IMAGE: PIXABAY
Refine Your Keyword List
Stuffing hundreds of keywords into a single page in the hopes that search engines latch onto them is an antiquated practice at best. Bing, Google, and DuckDuckGo all provide research guidelines that clearly specify keyword stuffing isn’t going to do the trick.
When first selecting keywords, make a list based on:
- The number of searches that bring people in per keyword
- How relevant the keyword is to your product
- Whether the merchandise is most important to a specific subsection of the market
You’ll probably still have a long list, so refine it by getting rid of keywords that don’t help showcase your product as unique.
Fix All Broken Links
Imagine a customer plans to order a whole set of expensive private label items from your e-commerce site to give as gifts. Maybe they’re someone with a large extended family or a small business owner who plans on rewarding their employees with something special for the holidays. They click on the link to place an order and are promptly taken to a page displaying a 404 error.
It’s reasonable to assume that this shopper would take their business elsewhere. If you know of any broken links anywhere on your e-commerce site, then now is the time to fix them to prevent this kind of scenario. Users might occasionally email or text you about these issues. Make sure you follow their suggestions or they might think you’re ignoring the needs of your clientele.
Invest in a broken link checker that can automatically scan your site and find any faulty hyperlinks. A quality link checking tool will also ensure you’re not linking to any blacklisted or parked domains. Savvy webmasters often run these on a schedule so they’re altered to any problems before shoppers find them.
Drum Up Demand For Contrived Holidays
Maybe you deal in pop culture goods and are therefore in a position to promote sales on the anniversary of something that happened in a movie or TV show. Perhaps you could use someday in electronics history to promote your tech items. While you don’t want to manufacture so many holidays that consumers lose interest in what you’re selling, promoting a few special dates that aren’t part of the normal holiday season can be a good idea. The trend has quickly gone viral on an international scale.
Online shoppers in China spend billions on days celebrating young singles and slightly unusual dates in the summer. Be sure to promote yourself on Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, but don’t be afraid to pick several other dates as well.
Clean Your Email List
Check to make sure that the email or SMS newsletter box on your site works properly. Customers may be entering their contact information only to have it end up in the bit bucket. Once you’re sure that the widget works, run all the contact information you’ve collected through an address auditor. Sending out coupons and offers to accounts that no longer exists just wastes bandwidth.
Build Landing Pages To Grab Potential Customers
Businesses that create more than 40 landing pages can generate up to 12 times as many leads as those who only have a few, so don’t forget about your landing pages. While you need these pages to drive people to your site, too many graphics and an excessive number of links just make them look like spam. Be sure that you’re enticing people to visit your site and open their wallets when they get there.
Improving Your Site In Time For The Holidays
In most cases, it takes only a few minor adjustments to get your site optimized for the holiday season. If you need some major improvements, then you need to get to work right away. Any time you spend waiting gives your competition the opportunity to improve their e-commerce site before you improve yours.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels then we have a lot to choose from.
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