Category Archives for Ecommerce SEO

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How to Prep Your Site for the Holiday Rush

We may just be ringing in October but it’s time for everyone to start planning for the holidays. This is especially true if you are a business owner in any industry.

From legal advisors to retail shippers, the holidays present unique opportunities for business owners to draw in crowds eager to take advantage of advertised deals during the holidays.

While decorating the office is always fun from October through December, the true key to holiday success is updating your website.

Why Start Prepping for the Holidays Now?

As with all things in search engine optimization (SEO) optimizing your website for the holidays takes planning, scheduling, research, and most of all, time.

A great SEO holiday strategy isn’t something that happens with the push of a button. Optimization results take time, so starting as soon as October can be the optimal move for getting your site on the map when the right time comes.

At Atlantic Digital Marketing, we help our clients stay ahead of the curve and can help you get your site optimized for the holiday rush.

Follow our top tips below and start making your site festive.

  1. Research What Customers Want

Just because you have a hot item you’ve got geared up for the holidays, doesn’t mean that it’s exactly what’s on your audience’s wishlist. Sure, you can tout your latest service, but it’s essential to create holiday content that caters towards your audience’s actual needs.

This type of content is what SEOs deem “helpful” and “relevant.” As a business person, you already know that time is money, and people who want to spend money, don’t want to waste a lot of time finding what they need.

By following social media threads, checking industry feeds on sites like Reddit, or just sending out a poll to your audience asking how you can help them this holiday season, you can quickly find the answers you need to create content that meets their desires.

So, how do you create relevant pieces? Curate content that delivers the right answers to the following wants:

  • Solutions to industry or personal pain points
  • The latest audience demands
  • More information about a specific service or product
  • How your product can make their lives easier in the new year

  1. Plan Your Content Strategy

Whether you have holiday deals in store for your patrons or not, if you want to succeed into the new year, planning your content strategy is essential.

You should never find yourself fumbling for the easiest piece to create at the last second. Although it may fulfill your quota, it will likely do nothing for your SEO strategy.

Take the time to perform keyword research, topic relevance, and when the best time of the seasons would be to release certain topics.

The last thing you want to do is publish a blog prepping audiences for New Years celebrations on New Year’s Eve.

Planning ahead helps you map out your content success and ensures your content release will be stress-free into 2023.

 

  1. Look to the Ghosts of Holidays Past

If your brand has participated in holiday content strategies in the past, take a moment to look back on your former attempts. Pull up your analytics and crunch the numbers before you dive head-first into a new strategic season.

Ask yourself: What types of content pieces worked well with audiences and in what delivery medium? Did that poll you advertised last year draw in a decent amount of revenue? How often did you post during the most successful holiday seasons? And most importantly, what types of posts were utter failures?

Each holiday content season should aim to be better than the last. So, make sure that you learn from past efforts and give your content team a genuine start in the right direction these holidays.

 

  1. How Will You Share Your Content?

Creating awesome content is only half the battle. The next step is ensuring your content is shared across all of the right platforms.

When it comes to the holiday season, we say leave no stone unturned. Make sure your audience sees your content and takes advantage of all the amazing deals, offers, and services your brand has in store for the coming months.

Social media pages are an excellent way to get content buzzing throughout your core target audience. Once a few people catch on to your content, they’ll share it with those who it’s relevant to, and over time, your sales will begin to increase.

Email marketing is also a great way to get your word out to audience members that may not be involved in the social media sensation. While you may not receive as many conversions from email marketing, you’re bound to attract the attention of a fair amount of loyal, long-time customers.

  1. Double-Down On Content Creation

It may seem obvious that you’ll need to crank out the content during the holiday season. However, on top of daily tasks and striving to be your best from your brick and mortar location, doubling down on your content may seem an insurmountable task.

The trick here is to take advantage of your digital marketing team or join up with a local SEO agency. Having people dedicated solely to writing your content can help you double and even triple your content output.

The more relevant content you can put out, the better your odds are of showing up on coveted search engine ranking positions.

  1. Start Working With Your Development Team Early

In most cases, you’ll want to “decorate” your site with timely images, fonts, and color schemes. While these can be planned out for quick execution, the key word here is “planned.”

Reach out to your development team months in advance with your holiday site ideas. They can ensure your ideas are all fleshed out and ready for display on your site during the right time of the year.

Reach the Top of Search Engine Results With Atlantic Digital Marketing

If you’re ready for your brand to make the top of search engine results and the holiday lists of your target audience, we’re so glad you’re starting now.

Getting your site and physical location ready for the rush is a daunting task. If managing your business and planning online marketing strategies sounds like a lot, that’s because it most definitely is.

Let Atlantic Digital Marketing take on the marketing responsibilities for you with one of our tailored SEO strategies.

Contact us today to schedule your free consultation with our SEO experts.

E-commerce 101: What You Need to Know

E-commerce SEO, sometimes called Shop SEO, is a specialized form of SEO that deals specifically with online storefronts (or shops).

Why Optimize for E-commerce Sites?

Currently, E-commerce has a 10% market share of retail sales in the United States, but this market is expected to increase every year. Amazon is currently the industry leader, followed by such big box stores as Target and Walmart that have embraced the online storefront as well.

Competition in the E-commerce realm is therefore fierce, which makes top quality E-commerce SEO essential. While much of the SEO that can be implemented for E-commerce sites is the same as for any other type of site, there are many essential requirements Google has put in place specifically for this niche.

Let’s talk about a few of these elements.

  1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO, an element of on-page SEO, refers to optimizing the coding of a website, rather than its content. Poor coding will impact the site’s rankings.

Take site speed, for one example.  According to research, most people will “bounce” from a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load on their device. If that’s not bad enough, Google’s web crawlers can detect how long a page takes to load, and will penalize it if it takes too long. This is a special problem for E-commerce sites, which tend to be very image heavy. Images should be resized before being uploaded to the site.

Another essential element for E-commerce sites is that every page be secure, so a security certificate should be purchased (designated by https://, rather than http://, in the URL). Not only is this safer for the businesses’ customers, but Google penalizes sites that don’t have such security in place.

 

  1. On Page SEO/ Blog

On page SEO – focusing on quality content – is especially important for E-commerce sites. Typically, the only text an E-commerce site has on its category pages is captions for each product photo. That’s why it’s important for each photo to be optimized via its name, alt text and description. No opportunity should be lost to place keywords on each page. If possible, clicking on a photo on the category page should take the user to a specific page for that product, where keyword-rich text describing the product can be used.

Search engines also reward fresh content. An integrated blog on a site, with regular, keyword-rich entries, provides the content that search engines like, but also helps build brand loyalty with customers who will appreciate the entries.

 

  1. Keywords Research and Implementation

Long-tailed keywords are essential for E-commerce SEO success. For example, a car enthusiast who needs new items for his or her classic car will not do a search on “car rims.” It is far more likely that they will search for “black rims for muscle cars,” or “chrome Mustang emblems” or “1954 Chevy quarter panel.” People who do a search on exactly what they want, which is why they use such long phrases, are far more likely to convert from a visitor to a purchaser on their first visit.

Choosing the right keywords is extremely important when the E-commerce site is in a very competitive niche. That’s why researching one’s competitor’s keywords is a good idea. Keywords must be relevant to the business. It does no good to “trick” someone to come to an E-commerce site by following a specific keyword, only to find that the site is not what they thought it would be.

By paying attention to these three elements, E-commerce SEO helps ensure that sites are rewarded by search engines with high rankings, and by converting visitors to customers.

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