How to Prepare Your Website for the Holidays
Now is the time to prepare your website for the holidays! By taking a few simple steps, you can ensure that your site is ready to handle the holiday rush and provide a positive experience for your visitors. To help you with this process, we’ve created a list of ten things that both lead generation and eCommerce websites should consider implementing this holiday season.
- Review Your SEO strategy
- Update Local Listings
- Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
- Improve Your Site Speed
- Run A/B Tests to Optimize for Conversions
- Analyze Last Year’s Holiday Traffic
- Enable Google Shopping Campaigns
- Use a Retargeting Strategy
- QA Your Checkout Process
- Add On-Site Customer Chat Support
Holiday Preparation for Lead Generation Websites:
1. Review Your SEO Strategy
As the holiday season approaches, it is important that businesses take stock of their SEO strategies and make any necessary adjustments in order to make sure their sites are visible to their target audience. This means that your website needs to be fully optimized for search engines, with strong meta titles and descriptions that include relevant keywords, as well as other on-page SEO best practices. Additionally, consider creating holiday-themed blog content or creating tailored landing pages to attract organic traffic.
2. Update Local Listings
As a brick and mortar business, it is essential to make sure that your local listings are up-to-date and accurate. This means updating your name, address, phone number, and holiday hours on online directories like Google My Business and Yelp. Customers often turn to these online platforms in order to search for businesses in their area, so it is crucial that your information is correct and optimized for keywords that searchers may be using. By maintaining accurate listings, you will also improve customer loyalty by giving potential customers the confidence that they need to choose you over your competitors.
3. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
In today’s digital world, it’s essential for all businesses to make sure their websites are mobile-friendly. With the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, more and more people are using these devices to look for services or do their holiday shopping. If your website isn’t built with a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes, you could be missing out on a huge share of potential customers. By making sure your website is mobile-friendly, you not only stay ahead of your competitors, but you also ensure that your customers have a seamless experience when they’re browsing or shopping on your site.
4. Improve Your Site Speed
Site speed is a crucial factor in providing a positive user experience and maintaining a strong search engine ranking. During this holiday season, when competition is fierce and every potential customer counts, it is especially important to make sure your website loads quickly and runs smoothly. With responsive design techniques and careful attention to page load times, you can ensure that your site offers the best possible experience for visitors, and that you don’t miss out on valuable leads or sales opportunities.
5. Run A/B Tests to Optimize for Conversions
If you’re not already running A/B tests on your website, now is the time to start. A/B testing is a powerful tool for optimizing your site and making the most out of holiday traffic. With this technique, you can easily test different versions of your website by switching out images or text, and see which one performs better in terms of generating leads or attracting more visitors. There are many conversion rate optimization and A/B testing tools available, with our personal favorites being Google Optimize and HotJar.
Holiday Preparation for eCommerce Websites:
1. Analyze Last Year’s Holiday Traffic
One of the best ways to prepare for the upcoming holiday season is to analyze your website’s traffic from last year. By looking at this data in Google Analytics, you can get a sense of how much traffic to expect and which areas of your site might need some improvement. For example, analyzing past data will allow you to identify areas where visitors frequently got stuck or encountered errors, helping you to pinpoint potential problems before they become serious issues during this year’s holiday rush. Overall, taking the time to analyze past holiday data is one of the best ways to ensure that your website runs smoothly even under pressure.
2. Enable Google Shopping Campaigns
If you sell products online, or are looking to start, Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns can be an effective way to increase holiday sales. By setting up a campaign, you can showcase your products in search results, allowing potential customers to see pricing and product information before they even click through to your website. If you already have Google Shopping campaigns set up, now is the time to optimize your product catalog and to ensure that all product titles and descriptions contain relevant keywords.
3. Use a Retargeting Strategy
Retargeting is a highly effective marketing strategy used to stay top-of-mind with potential customers who have visited your website. By placing a retargeting pixel on your site, you can serve ads to people who have already shown an interest in your products. This is particularly effective when done through platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, as their targeting capabilities make it easy to continue nurturing the relationships that you have already established while also persuading those customers to make holiday purchases.
4. QA Your Checkout Process
To ensure that your website can handle the increased traffic and sales during this time, it’s important to thoroughly QA your checkout process. This involves testing all of the individual steps in the process, from adding items to the cart to entering shipping information. By identifying and fixing any potential issues now, you can be sure that your site will run smoothly and efficiently through the holiday rush. Additionally, you may want to consider offering users additional options during checkout, such as gift wrapping, installment payments, or backorders. By doing so, you can increase sales even further and appeal to a wider range of customers during this crucial time of year.
5. Add On-Site Customer Chat Support
Another great way to prepare your website for the holidays is to add on-site customer chat support. This feature allows customers who have questions or need help to quickly chat with a customer service representative in real-time, and can be a lifesaver during the holiday rush. Not only does on-site chat support allow you to provide better assistance to your customers, but it also has the potential to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. With on-site chat support, you and your team will be able to focus on providing an exceptional shopping experience for your customers, ensuring that everyone has a happy holiday season!
Conclusion
If you want to prepare your website for the holidays, it’s important to start as soon as possible. By taking care of things like SEO, site speed, and customer support, you can ensure that your website is able to handle the increased traffic and sales. Don’t wait until the last minute! If you need help implementing any of these changes on your website, our team of website developers and digital marketers are here for you. Schedule a free consultation with us today to get started.
