As part of our site readiness blog post series, we thought it was crucial for you all to know about content relevancy on-site. Because who wants to look at content that’s irrelevant to them? Let us help you get ready for the holidays in this department…
Mobile Friendliness: For many businesses, the percentage of searches conducted on mobile devices has already surpassed those from desktops and tablets. Here’s a quick test to determine if your site has a mobile-friendly design and is well-positioned to capture rising demand from customers on-the-go: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool offers quick insights and actionable steps you can put in place today and impact your holiday performance this year.
Dedicated holiday destinations provide a unique way to target holiday specific keywords with significantly inflated search volume without compromising the focus of your existing site design.
- Create a section of your site that is solely dedicated to your holiday collection, and optimize this page/category to satisfy the search intent of your holiday shoppers
- Include keyword modifiers like “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday,” “Holiday 2015,” “Best of,” and “Gift Guide”
Outline what will be featured most prominently in your holiday merchandising strategy. Do your customers typically buy for others, buy for themselves, or a little bit of both?
Buying for Others: These users will search for ‘gifts,’ and want to see a section of your site dedicated to that intent.
- Create a ‘Gifts’ navigational element to boost visibility and populate this category with more granular pages by gift type
- Create a long-form, interactive content piece that walks your customers through the gift-buying process
- Impact: Interactive design elements capture the attention of digital shoppers and hold them on the page longer, ultimately signaling to search engines that this content is ideally suited for competitive search terms. The more often your customers bounce, the less likely you are to appear for that type of search in the future!
Buying for Themselves: These shoppers are highly motivated by BOGO offers and tiered pricing discounts, so take advantage of their attention while you have it, and share offers that reward Shop-for-Yourself behavior. Whenever possible, prominently display free shipping offers to encourage conversions. Dynamic banner plugins like Monetate provide a simple overlay solution that can be applied to many types of pages on your site.
- Impact: Pages that boast strong conversion rates for high volume seasonal terms are quickly rewarded by search algorithms with more prominent visibility at the top of search results pages.
Managing coupons, discounts & promotions: Affiliate sites provide a great opportunity for additional conversions through the holiday period, but they shouldn’t be the only place your users can find details about ongoing promotions, upcoming events, and how to redeem special offers.
Create a resource page under your Customer Service content library that presents the brand’s official position on coupons and special offers. This doesn’t need to be a repository for coupon codes and current promotions, but rather an educational resource that lives on your site.
Without an optimized, branded search result for “coupon” keywords, you are effectively ceding all related traffic opportunities directly to affiliates and competitors. Make them work for it!
