5 Tips to Plan Out Your Website for the Holidays

We’ve just stepped into the second half of the year, meaning it’s only a few months away before the holidays kick in. There’s Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and ho-ho-ho, Christmas and New Year.?

Taking advantage of the major shopping events can help take your business to the next level – so you need to make sure that your website is ready for this upcoming holiday season.

We've put up a quick checklist for you when it comes to optimising your website for the holiday shopping season. Consider the following suggestions for ensuring that your website is ready to meet the increased demand for your products or services during this busy holiday season.

1.?Organise your promotions

Yes, planning promotions for months in the future may seem premature, but preparation really is key! Specifically, you should deal with:

●????The goods and services you'll be promoting in time for the coming season

●????Describe any special discounts or incentives that you want to provide.

-??????Regardless of whether or not you plan to use a loss leader product in your marketing campaigns.

●????Exactly how many things you'll need to sell to break even or reach particular profit levels for your holiday promotions to be considered successful

On the other hand, the best time to plan stock levels is well in advance of Black Friday, when you can take advantage of bulk discounts!

2.?Determine holiday-specific keywords you’re aiming to use

Identifying which items or services you'll be promoting throughout the Christmas season means keeping an eye out for any new SEO keywords you'll need to include in your advertising. Continue to utilise your current search keywords but consider adding the following modifiers to your key phrases to attract Christmas shoppers.

●????2022

●????Holiday 2022

●????Christmas 2022

●????Black Friday 2022

●????Holiday shopping 2022

For the time being, keep in mind when deciding which keywords to include in your holiday-themed SEO strategy may be difficult to predict based on previous years’ data. This is especially true when trying to market something that has never been offered before.

The best advice is to rely on your intuition in these situations. In order to locate holiday bargains on items like yours, think about the terms that you would type into the search engines in order to do so. Every prospective holiday shopping search engine result page (SERP) is not going to be a home run, yet a few victories can still have a major impact on your campaign's success.

3.?Start your holiday content creation

As soon as you've figured out the keywords you want to target, you'll need to begin the content creation process, which can take a long time to get right.

In particular, you'll have to deal with the following issues:

●????Many eCommerce businesses may add a new "Gifts" or "Holiday Deals" page to their current sites in order to serve holiday gift buyers. Your web developer or designer should be contacted well in advance of the holiday season if you want to use this strategy to market your holiday promotions.

●????You may wish to develop a new logo or set of social media icons or perhaps a series of new banner adverts to commemorate the Christmas season. You should begin working on these tasks as soon as you’ve decided on your promotions because they will require your time or collaboration with an outside contractor.

●????You'll need to write fresh web articles that include the holiday phrases you'd like your website to be found for if you're going for a new set of target keywords. These additional "to do" items for your writers should be included as soon as possible if you create your online material in-house. Consider hiring freelance writers to handle your articles, but make sure you get your orders in before they get overburdened with Christmas work.

When it comes to creating Holiday content, a little planning goes a long way in reducing the stress that this season normally brings!

4.?Determining resource shortfalls

Check your website's resources to see whether a rush of Christmas consumers would expose any problems. For instance:

●????Is it possible for your hosting account to manage more traffic?

A successful holiday promotion will flood your site with fresh visitors from referring sites. If they see "Bandwidth Exceeded," you may lose the interest of potential buyers. Before launching your site, check with your host.

●????Is it possible that your payment processor is anticipating more payments?

Account managers may want to know if your payment processor will boost sales. To avoid getting shut down by Paypal, minimise your fast income.

●????Do you have the internal resources required to manage sales over the holidays?

Many establishments recruit seasonal help over the holidays. If you're understaffed and can’t provide outstanding customer service and timely deliveries, your company's image might suffer.

It's better to be over-prepared than scrambled, even if you don't require the web's largest hosting package or a crew of twenty additional employees to deal with the Christmas surge. Ensure that your holiday sales figures are not ruined by unexpected setbacks by making your sales estimates as precise as possible and planning appropriately.

5.?Hype your customers

Finally, promote upcoming specials to your consumers. Consider how Hollywood advertises new films. It doesn't ship movies to cinemas and hope for good word-of-mouth. Instead, it employs trailers, press tours, and internet advertising to promote films.

Holiday sales are similar. To increase interest and excitement, suggest to frequent readers about seasonal offers. Offer unique coupons in return for email newsletter signups.

Building enthusiasm for Christmas shopping is limitless. By getting your promotions in order early and ensuring they're supported, you'll reduce the stress associated with large-scale events like the Christmas shopping season and raise the possibility that your sales efforts will result in fantastic returns for your business.

Have you already begun preparing for your 2022 holiday promotions? If not yet, you can rely on the expertise of the Elephant in the Boardroom to get your business get in shape for the Holidays! For further information, please see www.elephantintheboardroom.com.au .