Planning is essential to get ahead in the upcoming holiday season. You need to get on top of your digital marketing and SEO game long before Seattle begins dressing up in Christmas lights. Thousands shop online and offline for gifts, cards, and vouchers long before the bells start ringing. Traditionally, Christmas shopping starts on Black Friday in Seattle. However, most customers start browsing suitable gift options from September and October. Last year, people in the US had spent close to $123 billion on shopping!
That’s an impressive number any eCommerce site would want to be a part of. It is difficult for new brands to find a foothold amidst the competitive eCommerce landscape in Seattle. That is the primary reason why having a digital marketing strategy is not enough. You will need to integrate SEO along with your marketing strategy to harness the full potential of your plan.
Let us go through the entire strategizing part step by step.
#1. Planning
Every successful campaign begins with planning. Find out how much business you typically receive during the holiday seasons. Usually successful and popular companies in and around the Seattle area receive between 30 to 50% of their profits during the holiday season only. If that’s the case for you too, then you will need to plan for the next big holiday sale very carefully.
Apart from readying your inventory for the holiday business, you need to think about crafting a dedicated landing page and Christmas or holiday-themed content. That includes images, videos, product descriptions, and metadata. Investing in a content schedule can help you achieve the targeted level of visibility by the holidays.
Before diving into the new plan, remember to complete the following –
- Analysis of the products/services that have performed well during the holidays last year
- Identification of the products that brought the sales/profits down
- Determining which queries drove the most traffic
- Assessing your keyword game for the year
- Revisiting your landing pages and checking their conversion rates
Do not forget to capitalize on both paid and organic advertisements. Social media listening should help you find out about the latest keyword trends and popular queries. Social media sites like Interest and Instagram are ideal for brushing up on holiday-themed ideas for small and large businesses in and around Seattle.
#2. Technical aspects
Here is where we delve deeper into the SEO part of marketing. Apart from promoting your offers and products on social media, you need to pay attention to the technical aspects of your site. Common issues like higher loading times and slower pages can drag your site performance down.
Loading time
While creating new landing pages, always ensure that it does not add to the bulk of your site’s loading speed. Run speed tests to find which pages are the slowest. Fix the slow pages and broken links before you upload a new landing page for the season. Mobile consumers rarely have the time or patience for pages than take longer than 3 seconds to load. Keep your consumer experience (CX) in mind before finalizing the landing page.
Redirects and broken links
You can use free broken link detector tools to find redirects and old links that lead nowhere. Free tools generally show limited results. Turning to a reliable SEO team for feedback on your site’s link juice is a good idea immediately before the holidays. Check out Clientsurge SEO for more information on how page deletions and redirects can impact your overall visibility.
Monitoring the site
It is imperative to be on the watch 24/7 for crawl errors, downtime, and dead pages. Sometimes, small factors can deter site performance. Without a strong SEO team by your side, it is impossible to maintain the necessary level of vigilance. Always work with a dedicated team of SEO experts to ensure that your consumers can access your website at all times.
Structured data
There is no visibility without structured content at the moment. Structured data provides additional information to the search engines whenever necessary. They contribute to site visibility and searchability considerably. In 2019, Google considers structured data to be one of the essential ranking signals for eCommerce websites.
#3. The consumer experience at checkout
While consumer experience is essential everywhere, you need to ensure that your checkout process is simple and not intimidating for the buyer. According to feedback from users, who have abandoned carts, the presence of too many steps and additional charges during checkout have deterred them from buying a product numerous times. According to Statista, the abandoning rate of shopping carts is more than 70% during the holiday seasons.
Here’s what a Seattle-based business can do to minimize the shopping cart abandonment rates –
- Decrease the number of pages during checkout.
- Minimize the number of forms before payment.
- Integrate multiple secure payment gateways.
- Provide the option of checking out as a guest.
No matter what checkout strategy you finalize, always rely on unbiased A/B tests for the best results.
#4. Metrics monitoring
Irrespective of how elaborate or straightforward your marketing plans are, how do you plan to measure their impact? You need to know how much profit you are making directly due to your marketing plans. You should always set up measurement plans for your digital strategy. That should make measuring the ROI of your marketing and SEO endeavors quantifiable.
Track your keywords and monitor the different sources of direct traffic. These are the two most important metrics that can determine the performance of any business all year round.
Devising a marketing plan for any business, new or old, is not challenging. Merging the SEO strategy with the digital plan is, however, tricky. To enjoy the best visibility and traffic, it is imperative for the marketing team to consider including link health, website speed, page traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates into account. The only way to be completely ready for the holiday traffic is by beginning work on your visibility long before the celebrations begin.