Late for Holiday Search? Not for Conversions!

If your site isn’t showing up for the keywords you want this holiday season, it may be too late to catch the main rush of holiday shopping. It usually takes a couple of weeks to see much movement from SEO strategies, and in a couple of weeks, Christmas shopping will be over.

It’s definitely not too late to increase conversions, though. Here are some steps to take at your e-commerce site right now:

• Make sure your shopping cart works. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve gone to a site that’s disappointing its owner and found that the cart wasn’t working properly. It’s a good plan to check every now and then anyway, but at this time of year, it’s a must.
• Make sure customers have a way to contact you if they need help. Online shopping is up this year by 26%. That means not only that people are doing more of their shopping online, but that people who haven’t shopped online before are now trying it out. Make it easy for them with a phone number that gets answered by human beings, or an email address that clearly shows how long it takes for you to respond.
• If you also have a brick and mortar store, make certain that your address, phone number, and store hours are shown prominently on your home page. Top right hand corner, in fact. And make sure that info shows up well when people visit your site on mobile devices, too.

Brick and click shops can do things in the store, as well:

• Ask all your customers, “Have you visited our website?”  The website can support the store and the store can support the website, too.
• Add a coupon for online purchases to the bag when you check people out, and they’re likely to go to your online shop later to pick up the item they resisted in the store.
• When you run out of an item, show it to customers on the website and offer to have it shipped to their home for free. (Do this only if you can fulfill the order, of course!)