As Christmas is getting ever closer, little more than nine weeks away, online retailers need to boost their online presence and ensure that all is in place for what is the busiest period of the year for most.
September sales hit by blip
Online sales in September slowed to an average of 10% across all sectors – down significantly from the running average of 20%. Online retailers have been hard hit by two main factors 1) high street retail launching early promotions and 2) the potential disruption of impending postal strikes.
The news is not all doom and gloom – many analysts see September as a temporary blip in the otherwise exemplary online record – and online still continues to outperform high street retail in most aspects.
Getting everything in place now is highly critical and SEO can significantly improve your success at Christmas.
Beat the postal strike and use long tail SEO
As an online retailer ensure that, as a
minimum, you are ahead of the postal strike issues.
Enrich your content and have all delivery issues answered with prominent calls to action, FAQs and how you are well-positioned to counter any postal issues.
A good marketer should now be looking to use
LTaS long tail SEO to capitalise on longer keyword searches that uses their standard keywords added to “guaranteed Christmas delivery”.
If you look through Google keyword trends searches for “Christmas delivery” spike enormously between now and mid-December. Build your content around these longer keyword searches and you are well placed to gain sales.
How SEO can help
Online success can be heightened by a thorough search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign in the weeks leading up to Christmas as the LTaS example above shows.
Timing is now critical to catch the Christmas sales rush and the product we believe will have the best direct effect on sales is our
Web Trafficker Instant (WTI).
WTI is the only product we guarantee to have an impact within a determined period. We work solely with White Hat SEO and unlike other unethical SEO we never make guarantees in other aspects.
Web Trafficker Instant
WTI uses our existing website which has high authority and PageRank. This site is regularly indexed by Google and other search engines and all content we build on this website is quickly recognised by search engines.
WTI works as follows:-
- We create a custom SEO article that is positively seeded with your content and keywords.
- The article looks and behaves in exactly the same way as your website
- We host it on our high ranking website.
- The article has all links leading straight through to your website and visitors click straight through to your website.
- The guarantee we make is that if our custom SEO article does not rank on page 1 of Google UK within 28 days you don’t pay*
Web Trafficker Instants work exceedingly well and are an ideal way to generate quick and targeted traffic. We also regard WTI as a great trust earner and introduction to SEO and our capabilities.
Help shopper make informed decisions
If you are already a client or you are already experiencing good traffic volumes there are many other ways that SEO can help with Christmas sales.
Another excellent process that will undoubtedly help with gaining both visitor loyalty and search engine rankings will be to add rich content.
Content writing is key to online success.
Online shoppers are increasingly using
longer tail search queries and use the internet as a fact finding tool before committing to a purchase. Make sure that your site is a wealth of information, leave no questions unanswered and this will bring rewards both from visitors but also from search engines that will index your site better as they recognise your website as being a source of relevant information.
Online Stock to Run Out Before Christmas
Countering some of the gloom is that some sectors will experience stock shortages. As a retailer you will know your business intimately and will have a good understanding of your projected sales in the last quarter of 2009. Last year however many online retailers were left with excess stock as the economic downturn really hit home.
This year, stock of must-have technology products and toys are forecast to run out well in advance of Christmas as online retailers may well be more cautious in stocking products. Striking the balance between stock/forecast and actual sales will be hard but all indications show that online will continue to outperform high street retail.
E-commerce sites selling toys, gadgets and televisions will be most in demand as sales of these products peak at Christmas.
*Refer to our Terms and Conditions
here for full details.
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