Christmas is just around the corner, so you’re expecting to enjoy a boost in sales throughout the festive period, right? Of course! So is every other business, what is going to put you ahead of them?
Optimisation, having a fully optimised website that is specifically prepared for Christmas before your competitors. This will put you ahead and you know what they say about early birds.
Following up from last year’s blog, in this blog article, Ricemedia shows how you can optimise your website in time for a very happy Christmas.
Time
Timing is important and you want to start optimising your website as soon as possible. You wouldn’t decorate your store in December, that would be terrible idea and would really affect your business. This is the same for your website, you shouldn’t be conducting your on-site optimisation or audit in December.
You want to conduct all of your optimisation as early as possible if you want to feel the effect of these optimisations in December. So it’s ideal to start about now.
Long Form Keyword
Conducting keyword research can be very beneficial. Whether it’s looking at what phrases to target to your pages, what kind of content to produce or where to target your PPC campaign, you’ll want to conduct keyword research to better target your audience and what they’re searching for.
I recommend looking at long form keywords and phrases around Christmas, the more detailed the better. Lets use for an example, ‘christmas presents ideas’; it will be swamped with businesses competing over a phrase like that. While it’s very searchable but you’ll find yourself in a crowded marketplace.
But if you change your keyword to ‘last minute christmas present ideas for my wife’, while it is not as highly searched, your content is more likely to be read and less expensive for a PPC campaign. Focusing on long form keywords will have less searches but, because that person is searching for something specific, will return a higher quality of potential lead and that’s what you want as they’re more likely to result in a conversion.
Speed
It’s common knowledge that more and more people are turning to ordering and purchasing online, Christmas being one of the busiest times of year. With that in mind, loading speed is important. Site speed is a key factor that can result in sales or shopping cart abandonment and losing a customer.
So how can you improve your site speed?
This can be done by:
- Reduce server response time
- Compress your HTML, CSS or Javascript
- Enable browser caching
- Optimising image
- Reduce redirects
- Reduce the number of plugins on your site
Mobile
Having your site optimised for mobile users can both improve your site’s SEO value and improve on your potential customer’s user experience. This is nothing new as SEOs have been predicting this large shift in how users search, titling it as Mobilegeddon and it is currently happening now.
As of Google’s latest update in their search algorithm, Google has released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that is going to give a boost to pages that are optimised for mobile use.
This could not have come at a better time as it does reflect the change in how users make their searches. As of last week, for the first time in google’s history, mobile searches has over taken searches made through a desktop computer. This is a dramatic shift in how audiences search and view websites.
With more people owning smartphones and tablets, it has changed how consumers make purchases online and when they make them. Online shops don’t keep working hours and mobile shoppers buy whenever they want, not optimising your site for mobile shoppers has been described as closing a physical shop an extra day in a working week.
How do you optimise your site for mobile users?
A basic strategy is to create a mobile or responsive version of your website with new content. Simply using the same content for your current site will be considered repetitive content, which would affect your site’s SEO negatively as well as affect the usability of your mobile site. Large paragraphs of texts will not translate well, visually, for a user.
Going back to usability, that is what this latest version of Google search algorithm is looking for in mobile sites. It is looking for fast reacting, optimised and adaptive design. When some companies redesign their sites for mobile users, they forget that a massive majority of mobile browsers are not just using a smaller computer but a touch screen device.
By adaptive design, which is a large investment, is having a high end website designed to detect and identify a user’s device, generating a page to match the device’s capabilities.
Creating a site that meets the needs for mobile users will win you brownie points with google’s latest search algorithm.
These were Ricemedia’s optimization tips and trick to put your website this Christmas. Remember, timing is an issue and you want to start optimising as soon as possible to prepared for the festive season. So if you’re interested in how Ricemedia can optimise your website for Christmas, get in touch now!
