4 Tips to Boost Your Small Business Website in The Holiday Season

The holiday season provides an excellent opportunity for people to make sales and increase revenue. Customers are in the shopping mood and the average spending during this season is around $794 on gifts alone. The US retail industry generates around $3 trillion around this time.

If you want a piece of this pie, you need to make sure your website is optimized for it. Most of the holiday shoppers shop online or at least research online before they make a purchase in-store.

It is important to provide a great website experience to customers if you want to make sales. This article provides some tips on how to boost your small business website during the holiday season:

1. Amp up Website Performance

It isn’t uncommon for websites to become overwhelmed by the holiday rush. Many small business websites crash or experience similar problems during the holiday sale season. That’s why it is important to optimize your website as much as you can.

Don’t hesitate to splurge a little on this optimization as it can benefit you over a long time. Here are some factors you should look into:

Website Speed – Most visitors to your website will expect it to load in 3 to 4 seconds. According to Google, around 53% of your visitors will leave your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Make sure your website is fast and every page loads quickly.

Mobile-Friendliness – More than half of the traffic comes from a mobile platform so it is important to make sure your website delivers a good mobile performance. Invest in a responsive website because it looks great on all devices, especially mobile. Mobile-friendliness is also a ranking factor.

Hosting Service – Low speeds and frequent website crashes are often caused by poor hosting service. Consider switching to a better hosting service and use a VPS instead of shared hosting for your website. That will ensure its performance remains smooth.

Website Structure – Make sure your website has great structure and is easy to navigate. Poor website structure doesn’t just affect user experience, but also your ranking.

Product Pages – All product pages should be optimized before sales or holiday season. Make sure you provide the most up-to-date content to your audiences. Add good-quality product images and rewrite product descriptions if you need to.

Checkout Process – Optimize the checkout process as much as you can. Remove any distraction that might disrupt the process to improve the conversion rates. 

The idea is to provide the smoothest user experience to your audience. A good website will help boost your reputation and will also help you rank higher on the search engine results pages.

Also Read: 5 Ways Your Small Business can Impress First Time Customer

2. Add a Holiday Theme to the Décor

When you post-holiday content, declare holiday sales, and provide related discounts, you create expectations. When your prospective customers some to a plain, regular website after following a Christmas ad, you defy that expectation and disrupt the shopping experience.

It is important to incorporate a holiday theme to your website during this season. It has an impact on your customer’s behavior and helps create a unique atmosphere. This is similar to decorating your brick and mortar store during the holidays.

Fortunately, the process isn’t difficult or expensive. You can just add a few holiday banners and festive décor to bring the spirit to your site. You can also include some holiday-related pictures to add the festive cheer to your site. In addition to optimizing your website, you can also add a holiday theme to your logo or add a snow-effect animation to the page.

You can easily find free templates, banners, animated banners, graphics, and other such decorative additions online.

3. Plan Holiday Content Well in Advance

Image Source - phillipllewellyn.com

Holiday content will help you become more visible on search engines. You can incorporate holiday-specific keywords into the content and start crawling up the ranks. It is a good idea to plan holiday content in advance because it takes some time to become visible on the first page of SERPs.

Content planning and execution don't require too much time and effort. You can make the content in advance and schedule it to become available to everyone during the holiday season. Here are some tips that can help:

~ Create some articles and blog posts that will help your prospective customers with their holiday shopping.

~ Research holiday keywords carefully to make sure you include the most effective ones in your content.

~ Utilize the power of User Generated Content by creating contests or reposting content by users that feature your brand.

~ Invest in different types of formats like infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. A great content strategy should always include different formats. They offer much better returns than regular content. For example, the video provides 66% more leads to marketers who use it.

When you have a good content marketing strategy in place, you can focus on other aspects of your business and let the existing campaign work its magic.

4. Start a Retargeting Campaign

The best way to run a successful ad campaign is to target people who already know you. Retargeting provides much better results compared to regular paid ads. These ads are shown to people who have already visited your website or have bought things from you in the past.

A good retargeting campaign will remind prospective customers or your presence. It will encourage them to visit your website again. Such campaigns benefit from special discount offers and sale announcements.

Customers will be tempted if a familiar brand offers a great discount. It is easy to set up this advertising strategy as all you need to do is add a retargeting pixel to your website. That will track visitors and help with the targeting process.

These tips can help you improve customer experience and become more visible. It is a good idea to implement some of these changes a few months before the holiday season is set to begin.

For example, you can optimize your website during the summer and plan for content before winter sets in. Advance planning will give you an edge over your competitors.

Author Bio: Derek Luise is working as a Jr. content writer and blogger with Ethane Technologies. He can be seen blogging about digital marketing, web design, SEO, SMO, PPC, etc.