What you Should do with your Website to Maximize Leads, Conversions, and Sales for the End of the Year
The holiday season is when many businesses generate a substantial portion of their annual revenue. This includes online sales now more than ever. And if you start planning early, you can avoid some common mistakes and unnecessary headaches. A strategic plan backed by analytics will likely lead to better results. This guide will help your business make the most out of the holidays so you and your co-workers can enjoy the time spent with your family and friends even more.
Prepare Early and Make Data-Driven Decisions
Preparing your website to increase sales for the holiday season can come in many different forms. Some examples include:
- Plan Content: Plan holiday content around what you’ll be selling and get it on your website as soon as you possibly can. It should be unique, quality content that is geared towards your audience. Even though the content may not get many clicks before the holiday season, you want to give it some time to settle in Google’s (or another search engine’s) search index. If you give the content some time to start ranking, you’ll see the clicks start to roll in in the winter. Planning to have content on your website ahead of time is a great practice to get the most out of organic search, and not just during the holidays.
- Repurpose Old Content: Don’t let old holiday content go to waste. Even though it may be older content, your website may have web pages from previous holiday seasons that can still serve a purpose. Adjusting the headers, meta titles, and meta descriptions for SEO can make a world of difference in terms of traffic, and it’s not nearly as time-consuming as developing a new page. Refresh the content on the page as well to make it as applicable to the current year. Do this as early as you can because SEO work will take some time to have an impact in search results.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions: Take a look at your data from last year (if you have it). Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and Google Ads are great resources for digital marketing. Making data-driven decisions is so important in all aspects of business, especially when it comes to your website. Review last year’s data and ask yourself what needs to be changed and why? If something worked well last year, how can you leverage it to make it bigger and better this year?
- Update Your Ad Landing Page: If you’re advertising and have created custom landing pages, updating them for the holiday season is a great practice. Content that is current and specific has a higher chance of converting a site visitor to a lead or customer.
- Website Health: Make sure your website is ready from a technical standpoint. Work with your web developers or your website host to ensure this. The last thing you want during a busy season is to have people experiencing technical glitches on your website, potentially not being able to purchase your product or service. Test out adding something to your cart, purchasing an item, etc. on both desktop and mobile devices to make sure that everything is working properly.
Changing Your Keyword Targeting to Increase Online Sales for the Holidays
Many factors go into keyword targeting, including seasonality. By looking at data and studying trends, you may find that certain keywords perform better or worse depending on the time of year.
Some common resources for doing keyword research include SEMRush and Google Search Console. SEMRush is best used for conducting keyword research and analyzing what your competitors are ranking for, while Google Search Console is best used for analyzing your own business. Based on what you find, you can adjust which keywords you’re using on each page, and even identify if you need to create some new pages to target new keywords.
With our tourism clients, after conducting keyword research, we develop new web pages specifically for winter-based events and vacation destinations. This is so that we can include more keywords based around the holiday season.
A great example of changing your keyword targeting for the holiday season comes from the cooking/recipe industry. People are always searching for recipes, but searches for holiday-specific recipes see a large spike in traffic in the winter. If a business in this industry changed their keyword targeting strategy to include holiday keywords, especially on their homepage, it’s likely that they would see an increase in traffic and conversions.
Reviews, Testimonials, and/or Case Studies
When your audience is shopping online, they want to make sure that they’re getting a high-quality product or service from a reputable company. Positive or negative reviews, testimonials, and/or case studies can greatly influence opinion. For example, if someone is looking to buy new running shoes and all of the reviews say that they’re the best running shoes they’ve ever worn, they’re going to be more inclined to buy that product.
To get reviews, testimonials, or case studies on your website, you have a few different options.
- Embedding: Almost every review system, including popular ones such as Yelp and Google, have ways to embed them directly onto your website so that the reviews automatically update. This can be through the review system directly or through a plugin that’s compatible with your website.
- Quotes: You can take quotes from a review or a testimonial and paste them on your website. This gives you the ability to choose which reviews or testimonials are on your website.
- Case Study Pages: Case studies are a very effective way of showing a potential client or customer your value. These are especially effective for B2B businesses, such as manufacturing companies, because when making a large decision, a potential client will want to hear a story about previous work to decide if your business is a good fit.
- Get Reviews on Other Sites: Although a review on another site isn’t the same thing as having it on your own, it can help to generate clicks as long as the other website provides a link. This is also known as generating backlinks. Some sites will do this on their own, but you can reach out to companies and ask them to do this, even proposing a link-for-link strategy if it would benefit both businesses.
Optimizing your Google Business Profile
The Mannix Marketing Google Business profile is on the right of this screenshot. Your Google Business profile is what appears on Google Maps listings when someone searches for your business by name, and occasionally when someone is searching for your industry. An optimized listing helps your business get found on search results more frequently, often appearing above organic search results for specific queries.
Optimize your Google Business Profile by adding the following:
- All applicable information, such as address, phone number, email, etc.
- An in-depth description, detailing what your business does and what sets you apart from competitors.
- Photos and videos of your business and/or the product/service you sell.
- Post often. This can help you increase in rankings, which can be crucial to driving traffic to both your website and to your brick-and-mortar store. It’s also a platform to promote any sales or promotions you may have.
We’ve seen greater success with B2C companies because people tend to search for them more frequently on Google Maps, but this can make a great impact on B2B companies too.
Promotional Photos and Videos
High quality promotional photos and videos can really set your product or service apart from competitors. Showcasing exactly what you’re offering helps a potential customer understand why they should buy from your business. On top of that, photos and videos that contain real examples (not stock photography) help to build trust with your audience.
Running Paid Ads on Search Engines
The holiday season is a great time of year to run advertisements on Google or another search engine, especially for B2C businesses. Before running ads, it’s a good idea to plan ahead so you have a clear strategy with pages that back it up. A high-quality, optimized, and well-organized landing page can help you achieve more conversions.
It’s also important to test out some keywords and landing pages so that you can decide which will work best when the holiday season actually starts. When it comes to pay-per click (PPC) ads, you want as many users to convert as possible. Analyzing old keyword and landing page performance can help you improve the quality of users.
View our overview of Google Ads here.
Use Social Media
Although it’s technically not on your website, your social media presence can work with your website to maximize sales. Think of it as another way of marketing your goods and services. You can easily connect it with your website to drive people to buy your products, either directly in the post or by having a link to your website. Making sure that all of your possible marketing channels are working together can help you increase online sales for the holidays.
You can also run paid advertisements on social media. Paid social media is a great tool to guarantee that your product or service is getting in front of potential customers. With certain social media platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, a customer might even be able to buy your product without even leaving the app! This can also lead to an increase in followers, meaning that even if someone doesn’t immediately buy your product, they’re keeping up-to-date with your business and its products.
Get Help With Planning Your Holiday Season SEO or PPC Strategy
If you want to make the most out of your holiday season, Mannix Marketing is ready to work with you. We can help you implement these data-driven strategies so that your business is maximizing its potential this winter. Contact us or schedule a consultation today!
