We are less than 60 days away from this upcoming holiday season in being in full swing. Heck, Hobby Lobby had Christmas decor out in July. So, what does this actually mean for your small business with a drastically smaller marketing budget, website, and team? One of the best investments you can make is optimizing your website for holiday season 2017 now versus two days before Black Friday. Waiting until the last minute will not yield you the results you want for your pageviews, sales, and customer acquisition plans.
Loading Time
How fast does your current website load when a visitor lands on it?I Is it less than 60 seconds because if not, people are frustrated and clicking x. I am speaking from personal experience right here. There have been numerous times, I discovered a new shop or blog, but never got to really check it out because the load time was super slow. You can test your website speed on sites such as; Pingdom that runs a complete analysis for you. Imperfect Concepts load time is 5.15 seconds which is really good, but there are other areas that I need to fix. Take the time to make sure your website is not only loading in a timely fashion.
Visual Imagery
Hitting you with another question because it’s one of those types of blog post. Have you already done your holiday lookbook, call to action banners, graphics and more? Or you’re thinking “omg Tasha girl that completely slipped my mind, until this very moment.” Trust me; we all have been there with our long to do list and forget one thing. Personally, I hate micromanaging other people, but I do micromanage myself all the time. I am addicted to utilizing Trello App to organize my life. There is a board for almost everything I am working on with section such as; to do list, ongoing task, sales funnel, marketing roadmap and other things of that nature. First, know you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars just to shoot visuals for the holiday season. Next week, I am going to walk you through partnering with others to achieve your desired goals. However, right now, these are the visuals you need to start thinking about:
- Website Call To Action Banners
- Newsletter Call To Action Banners
- Social Media Images – prompts, promotions, & sales
- Next Purchase or First Purchase Cards
Start thinking about the message you want to send this holiday season when it comes to your small business. The size of your images are important when it comes to your companies load time too.
SEO
Keywords are beyond relevant when it comes to your reach online. One of my favorite tools for clients is teaching them the importance of using SEO to their advantage especially during this time of year. A plethora of online stores will now be at farmers markets, pop-ups and vending across the cities they live in. Even if 80% of the year you’re an online store your website needs to be using “Chicago online lifestyle boutique” “Hyde park statement jewelry” and phrase of that nature. It will help increase your ranking. The users who visit your website will notice things such as; your about page mentioning you’re a business owner in the greater Chicago area or they will see your address on the contact page.
Frequently Asked Questions
It’s that time of year where you need to update your shipping and return policies to reflect the agencies you’re using for shipping. Specifically, add a section that states “holiday shipping policy” or “holiday return policy” those headliners will allow customers to know exactly what is going on. Any other thing that personally changes for your business this time please make sure you make note of it for your shoppers.
Contact Page
Your contact page can make or break you during the holiday season for so many reasons. You can do an overall website update on your website and the plugins no longer working together. Now that contact form you have in place is broken without you even knowing it. This is why it is important to have an actual email or phone on your website. Personally, I suggest to clients that they get a Google number that clients can reach them
About Pages
Once a year or more you should update your about page. One of my favorite places to visit on a new website is the about page and contact page. I want to know more about the person I am shopping with or reading their blog. Update your headshot, location, facts and other information you want your target audience to know. If you have received some press, features or some cool things happen for the company make sure to add that information to the business about section.
Links
So many times I have been on websites and clicked links to social media, about page, site map and other things of that nature and they are broken. Take the time to go through all your pages to make sure they work. If you changed your company name make sure the social media links now reflect that. These seem like small things but they have a huge impact on your business.
These seven tips will help you optimize your online store for this upcoming holiday season. Even if you’re not a storefront but a service business you can do the same thing.
