Prepare Your Website Now For Christmas Shopping Online

Christmas shopping online has become easier for consumers and harder for merchants.

Think back about 10 - 15 years ago. Amazon crashed. Most major retailers were just thinking about robust internet shopping strategies. Consumers were very cautious, hell, even paranoid about giving up their credit card to a web site, and with good reason.

That being said, the technology to make online holiday shopping easier and more convenient has advanced in light years. Credit cards are much more secure and many consumers buy Christmas gifts online to take advantage of internet-only deals.

So the big question is, when should you have your site ready for Christmas gift buying?

How about starting your strategy right now? Or for next year, start plotting your marketing and ad campaigns in July? Sure, the joke is about Christmas in July, but for serious retailers who depend upon the holiday season to make a lot of their profit, now is the time to start getting ready.

Christmas Shopping Online Keywords You Can Use

Here are a few key things to think about if you're a retailer who wants to sell a lot of stuff from your site during the holiday season:

Keyword research planning - you need to figure out the holiday and Christmas shopping terms. Google Trends can give you some very high level details:

Keyword research tools, such as Wordtracker yield some valuable terms you can use to develop your content strategy:

christmas shopping online
christmas shopping deals
online christmas shopping
christmas shopping
shopping for christmas
christmas gift shopping
shop for christmas
what to get your boyfriend for christmas
christmas list ideas
christmas gift ideas for teens
christmas present ideas
after christmas sales
unique christmas gifts
inexpensive christmas gifts
christmas gift ideas
great christmas gifts
best christmas gifts
christmas wish list

While these are specific to Christmas, don't forget to use your generic words and phrases to find some deeper, long-tail keyword phrases to pair with your online Christmas shopping strategy:

black and white striped shirt
customize your own shirt
funny maternity shirts
hawaiian shirts for men
american flag tee shirts
white button down shirt

Not only do you need to figure specific Christmas shopping terms into your strategy, but you'll also have to start creating and optimizing specific pages that must be ready to publish and get indexed as soon as the Christmas shopping season kicks off.

Begin creating those pages now, but either don't publish them, or put in a robots.txt file with "no index" in the command.

Is your ordering form easy to fill out? Have you created goals and funnels to measure shopping cart abandonment? Be sure you only ask for the specific information you really need.

Finally, is your website mobile-friendly, and does it render well on tablet devices, such as the Kindle and iPad? More and more people are using these hand helds to shop with, so be sure you take the time now, if need be, and get a responsive web design template created, tested and done.

You can read more about Google's mobile-friendly algorithm update here.

Want to learn more about optimizing your site for increased online sales? Come to one of Invenio SEO's training classes, and get the knowledge, tactics, strategies and hands-on exercise experience to get your web pages to show up higher in search results.

You now have the option of learning basic SEO online from Invenio.

Until we meet again, stay safely between the ditches!

All the very best to you,

Nancy McDonald