The holidays are a time when people start making travel plans and start shopping for friends and family. This is the time of year when retailers want to get the most out of their websites in the hopes of increasing business throughout the year. As the holidays get heated up, there are plenty of things you can do to make your website ready for the influx of new traffic.
Get A Site Map
A site map is not only valuable to visitors using your website for the first time, but it can also quickly improve your standings in the search engine results page. Instead of burying the link to your site map along the bottom of your front page, put it somewhere prominent where it will be easy to find and use.
Clean Up Your Site
If you do enough marketing before the holidays, then your website will more than likely get more traffic during the holidays than at any other time of the year. The holidays are your chance to win repeat business and grow your revenue base. But if your links do not work or your website wording is misspelled and hard to read, then you have wasted an opportunity. Take the time to go through your entire website and make sure it is the kind of website your customers will want to visit again.
Don’t Forget The Mailing List
During the holidays, your website traffic expects to see sign up forms on your website for your mailing list and newsletter. Instead of disappointing them, make sure that your mailing list sign-up form is on every page of your website. You might get people occasionally opting out of marketing emails throughout the year, but you will never have a better time to get people to join your mailing list and have a larger audience for your website information.
Have Incentives
During the holidays, your website will get lost in the rush of competitor websites that are all clamoring for the same customer base that you are. Instead of getting buried by the noise, have your website stand out from the rest by offering incentives to your traffic. You can run daily competitions that all of your traffic can enter, or you can give discounts on orders placed during the holidays. You should get creative and find incentives that will help your website to stand above the rest and get more attention.
Be Sure You Are Remarketing
Remarketing is the process of reaching out to traffic that visited your website for only a short period of time, made no purchase, or made a purchase they did not complete. Your digital marketing expert can set you up with a remarketing program that will grab this valuable traffic and try to turn it into another revenue stream.
The holidays are the one time of the year when people who do not normally shop online take to the Internet to get great deals. Your website will never have another chance all year and this kind of great exposure, so it is important that you take advantage of it and turn your holiday traffic into year round business.