With the holidays fast approaching, most retailers will be busy with Black Friday and other holiday sales until the season is over.  One of the biggest online retail days of the year is Cyber Monday – the Black Friday for online retailers, making the weekend after Thanksgiving a shopping holiday in itself.  So, keeping that in mind, is your website ready for the holiday season? Is all of the SEO in place and content up to date so new and repeat customers can find what they are looking for or know that you have new and updated stock? Here are some pointers to keep in mind when you are doing an audit of your site:

Product Description.  Are all of your product descriptions shining bright?  An incorrect or out-of-date product description may cause your customers to pass it up and not even know that you offer it or that it’s on sale!  Google’s “rich snippets” will usually be taken from a product’s description, so write it well for the new semantic search.  If you’re running a database or have a database admin, have them do a once-over on all of your major products and services and see if they are up to date.  Also, check with your vendors to be sure that they are offering the latest of your products and services; the last thing that you need is to be selling an outdated product or service when product competition is at its peak.

Updated and double check promotions that are being ran.  Nothing ruins e-commences more than if your promotions are not up to date.  Always make sure that your promotions are current and with the correct fine print.  A holiday horror story took place 13 years ago when a local electronics store was running a promotion for a video game console, and they had mistakenly printed the price for the system as $19.99 rather than $199.99.  The store was rushed with people waiting outside for the mistaken price, and for the first 20 customers, the store had to honor the price!   

Updated Social Media Pages.  Believe it or not, 85% of your current and new customers will visit your social media pages before your website.  Even if you’re not selling on your social media presence, it’s critical that it feature your promotions and a clear navigational call to action leading to your site.  Why have a updated website and an outdated social media page?  With an up-to-date social media presence you can double the exposure of your products and services, making your social media presence a veritable road sign to guide people to your site.  As the old adage goes, you only have once to make the best first impression – so why let low hanging fruit sit and rot without representing your brand?  Most business owners still do not take into consideration about how powerful social media is today and how to better to use it to promote your business.  So go out there and update those pages!  Remember that online reviews sites now allow you to post current promotions and sales also.  It’s more exposure and great for SEO.

I could go on and on about the things that you can do to better your business for the busy season, but these first steps will help you get onto a good path to help you during the holiday season to a great start. Fearing that you won’t be able to do these feats alone?  Then feel free to contract me for my marketing services by clicking here.