With the holiday season right around the corner, many online retailers are stocking up on additional inventory and planning out their holiday promotions. But surprisingly, SEO is often overlooked during the holiday planning even though it accounts for over 60% of all traffic on the web. If SEO isn’t part of your preparation plans for Q4, then you may be missing out on a huge opportunity. Let’s take a look at what online retailers can do now to maximize traffic this holiday season.
What’s New with SEO this Year?
Mobile. 2016 has proven to be a quiet year in the world of SEO with very few SEO updates However, nearly all of which are related to mobile search. Google is making it very clear that mobile search is a major priority for them and should be for website owners. In particular, we saw “an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal” as Google puts it. This means that websites which are mobile-friendly will typically rank better than those that are not.
How can online retailers tell if their websites are mobile friendly? Luckily Google has provided a free and easy to use tool that will show store owners if their website is mobile-friendly. Just enter the URL of your home page, a category page, and a product page. Google will then show you whether or not your site is deemed “mobile-friendly.” If your website passes, you’ll get a nice message like this.
It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to see the impact of any website changes in Google. That said, now’s the best time to start focusing on SEO for the holiday rush.
Assuming the SEO basics are already in place, let’s take a look at what online retailers can do right now to maximize sales in Q4.
Make Mobile a Priority
We talked briefly about the importance of mobile search and how to check if your website is mobile-friendly. So what do you do if your website isn’t mobile-friendly?
The best way to improve your website for mobile users is to have a “responsive web design.” This will automatically modify and resize the website layout to provide the best user experience for desktop, tablet, and smartphone users. Not only is this a great way to improve mobile rankings, it’s also a great way to increase conversion rates. Having a website that’s more user friendly for mobile users will general result in a higher conversion rate for visitors on mobile devices.
Speed Up the Website
Site speed has long been a focus for Google and other search engines. They want to give their users the best experience possible since slower websites with long load times can be frustrating for searchers. To accomplish this, Google started using page speed as a ranking factor back in 2010. This mean if you’re site is too slow, your rankings may be suffering.
However, having a fast website is good for more than just SEO. Amazon did a study and discovered that for every 100ms of load time there was a 1% decrease in sales. So not only can site speed help with your SEO efforts, it can also increase your conversion rates and revenue!
So how fast does your website need to be? Well, the faster the better, but ideally the website shouldn’t take longer than 2-3 seconds to load. Not sure what your load time is? No problem. WebPageTest.org has a free tool that quickly shows you your page speed. Just enter the URL of your homepage, a category page, and a product page to see the load time of your website.
Did your website fall below the 3-second mark? If so, good job! If your website took a bit longer then there are a few things we can do to speed up the website.
Head over to Google’s free page speed analysis tool. This will give you a complete list of what you can do to improve your page speed as well as specific instructions on how to do it. A developer should be able to take this information and start working to improve the website speed. However, this can sometimes prove to be a time consuming and costly undertaking.
For online retailers looking for a faster and cheaper solution, there’s CloudFlare. CloudFlare automatically speeds up the website by using their optimized servers, compressing files, enabling caching, and much more. It even comes with many security features to help prevent against cyber-attacks. With plans starting at $0/month it’s hard to pass up on this powerful tool. Just be sure to consult with a professional developer to ensure there are no conflicts with installing CloudFlare.
It’s Time to Build Some Links
Link-building is hands down the most important aspect of SEO. The number and quality of links from other websites to yours is the most powerful ranking factor in Google. Quality is underlined for a reason. Many online retailers have been penalized for building links that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This typically includes excessive directory links, blog comment spam, article directories, forum profile links, private blog networks, and any paid links. These types of link-related penalties can result in a traffic drop of 25% to completely being excluded from Google.
So how do you get other websites to link to you? While there are dozens of ways to get other websites to link to you, I’m just going to focus on those that are the easiest and most effective.
Turn Your Products into Links
Business owners love links and bloggers love products. One of the easiest and most effective ways to obtain links to your website is to offer bloggers free product in exchange for a review. This works very well and can have a strong impact on rankings. Groovy Groomsmen Gifts was able to increase its rankings for “groomsmen gifts” from #15 to #1 by networking and showing their products to influencers in the wedding industry.
Do you sell jewelry? Find some fashion blogs. Do you sell furniture? Find some interior design blogs. Not only can this increase your rankings but it can often result in additional referral visits, just in time for the holiday season.
How do you find bloggers in your industry? Just search “[industry] blog list” into Google for a list of relevant sites. Then start sending out emails asking if they’d be interested in doing a product review.
Leverage Your Expertise with Guest Blogging
It’s not easy to keep a blog fresh with new content each day or week. This is one of the reasons that many bloggers open up their sites for relevant experts to contribute guest posts. The blogger gets free content and the contributor gets a link. It’s a win-win for everyone. The link is usually placed in the author bio at the end of the article or within the content.
Finding guest blogging opportunities is easy. Just head over to google and search any of the following queries to quickly find relevant sites that are looking for guest bloggers.
- [keyword] inurl:write-for-us
- [keyword] inurl:guest-post
- [keyword] inurl:guest-blog
- [keyword] inurl:guest-writer
- [keyword] inurl:/contribute/
From there, start sending out emails asking to contribute content and watch the links roll in. MVP Visuals, an online retailer of trade show supplies, was able to rank top 5 for “custom tents” and “custom table covers” by guest blogging on authoritative business blogs.
Content Marketing
“Create good content.” If you’ve read anything about SEO or link building, chances are you’ve heard this mantra echoed countless times. What you rarely hear is how to create good content and leverage it for links. I’m a firm believer that any task, no matter how big or small, can be broken into an easy step-by-step process. So let’s give it a try with content marketing.
- Pick an interesting topic – One of the best ways to do this is to head over to Quora and search your keyword. This will give you dozens of questions related to your business that customers are actively search for. Pick a topic where you can add a lot of value from your knowledge and experience.
- Scope out the competition – Search your topic into Google to see what’s already ranking on page 1. Then take note of the outline for each of the articles to ensure they’re included in your piece of content. You want to have the most comprehensive article on the web for your topic.
- Create the content – Put together the content and be sure to spruce it up with images, videos, quotes from experts, downloadable PDF’s, or anything else that can make it truly amazing. Take your time and create something that’s comprehensive and better than everything else on the web.
- Promote the content to relevant websites – It doesn’t matter how good your content is if no one sees it. Find relevant blogs using the “[industry] blog list” query in Google and ask if it’s something they’d be interested in linking to. Also, find relevant resource pages by searching “[industry] inurl:resources” and then send an email asking if it’s a good fit for their resource page.
Keep in mind this is just one approach to content marketing, but one that’s quick and effective. There are some great resources on the web that go into much more detail and can help you to increase search rankings and traffic. Content marketing takes time, but if you start now you can begin to reap the benefits just in time for the holiday frenzy.
These are just a few of the many ways to ensure your SEO is ready for Q4. With so much search revenue at stake this holiday season, it may be worth consulting with an SEO expert. A talented SEO service provider can optimize the website, clean up any technical issues, and even build powerful links to help improve rankings. In either case, it’s best to start focusing on these areas of opportunity to ensure a successful Q4.
180 Marketing specializes in SEO for e-commerce sites.
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