The following tips will help you create an online shopping experience that’s conducive to increasing sales for the holiday season. So if you haven’t already applied all of the following recommendations, there is still time to start taking advantage of them.

Dress Up Your Online Store for the Holidays
Adding holiday themed banners and ads to your site can help increase holiday sales since they convey to your shoppers that your site is up-to-date and ready for the holiday season. Dressing your site up for the holidays also naturally encourages your site visitors to think about shopping for friends and family on their shopping list.

Enticing Holiday Promotion Offers
Actively promote your holiday promotions by email and with on-site ads that reinforce your offers. Make sure that the products you promote are popular items that will convert into sales and that they include strong offers such as free shipping or percentage off discounts, since these types of offers convert at higher rates. Also, make sure your holiday promotions have strong calls to action and that they direct shoppers to landing pages where they can immediately take action and make the purchase. Keep in mind that many holiday shoppers turn to the internet for both simplicity and savings. Make sure you’re giving them a great reason to buy from you now and make it as easy as possible!

Promote Suggested Gift Ideas
Develop a department on your site that’s focused on gift suggestions and promote it throughout your site. The reason for this is twofold. First, many of your visitors will come to your site to shop for themselves and by seeing the suggestion of gift ideas they may be further influenced to make gift purchases for their friends and family as well. Second, many visitors will land on your site who are actively gift shopping and the easier you make it for them to find gift ideas quickly, the more likely they will be to buy.

Product Images & Content that Sells
Review your product images to ensure they showcase the perceived value of your products. Consider adding additional product images as applicable that offer alternate views of the product. Lifestyle shots can also help increase your online sales. People naturally relate to products they see other people using and enjoying. Also, make sure your product descriptions are well written and address the questions your site visitors are most likely to be concerned about before making a purchase.

Up Sells & Cross Sells
Suggestive selling is a powerful marketing tool that can increase your online sales immediately. Up selling and cross selling should be applied year-round and further refined for the holidays. For example, if you offer a product and related up sell products are available, make sure to offer the up sell items as suggested items. Also, if you have products that have add-on accessories available, make sure you’re offering the add-on products as cross sells. Don’t leave these valuable sales opportunities on the table.

Work Your Social Networks
Let your social networks, such as your Facebook friends and Twitter followers see that you’re in the holiday spirit. Add holiday related content to your wall posts and tweets. Consider updating your profile pictures and backgrounds (where applicable) to incorporate holiday themes. You may be pleasantly surprised by how many people will end up connecting with your site due to creating this top of mind awareness that you’re there for them for the holidays. Also, don’t be afraid to occasionally promote offers through your social networks such as special coupon codes for your Facebook friends or Twitter followers. You might be surprised at how many of them will appreciate this and share these with others.

Dressing up your website for the holidays and providing enticing holiday promotions will generate more interest in your site during the holiday season and ultimately more sales. Make sure you’re maximizing your selling opportunities by suggesting great gift ideas, refining your product content, applying effective cross sells and up sells, and actively cultivating your social networks. Creating an effective holiday presence requires some extra planning and work, but the potential rewards are well worth it. And if you’re doing it right, it can be a lot of fun for both you and your customers.

Happy Holidays!

1. Determine your audience and make sure you are speaking directly to them. For example, if your site sells home décor products that are popular with adults between the ages of 40 and 60, you would want to use a different writing style than you would if your site sold skateboards to a primarily teenage boy audience.
2. Write in terms of features, advantages, and benefits. Surprisingly most eCommerce websites don’t do this, which can quickly put you ahead of your competition if you do. Remember, your customers want to know why they should buy the product from you and not a competing website. So make sure you tell your visitors what they want to know and what’s in it for them.
3. Keep your product descriptions clear and easy to understand. Avoid industry jargon unless it is relevant and important for your customers to use in making a decision to purchase the product. You want to make sure you are informative, but at the same time not confusing or boring your site visitors in the process. When in doubt, keep it simple and straightforward.
4. Do not copy and paste product descriptions provided by manufacturers. It is common for most eCommerce sites to sell products that are made by manufacturers that also sell to competing online retailers. Even though it is tempting to simply copy and paste the product descriptions provided by manufacturers – don’t do this. In order for your product descriptions to be effective, you need to rewrite manufacturer descriptions to ensure they contain all of the information you think they should and reflect the unique voice of your site. This can also benefit your search engine rankings due to having unique content in comparison with your competitors who simply copy and paste the same exact boilerplate product descriptions provided by their manufacturers.
5. Include a strong call-to-action. Just like professional salespeople, great product descriptions always ask for the sale. Make sure your calls-to-action are clear, enticing, and tell your customers what action to take.

If the above steps sound like too much work, think again… Well written product descriptions can increase online conversion rates by 100% or more. After all, if you visit a website and their product information doesn’t answer your questions you will click your mouse and look somewhere else – and so will your visitors. Make sure you’re not giving your visitors a reason to go to another site for information due to your product descriptions not answering their questions and asking for the order with strong calls-to-action.

When writing SEO page titles, it is important to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords for the page you’re optimizing, while at the same time writing them in a way that will entice searchers to click through to your site from the search results.

Your SEO page title will ultimately determine whether or not a searcher will be enticed to click on the search result for your site. After all, when you do a search on Google, you scan the search results and click on the ones that make the most sense in relation to what you’re searching for. With this said, you need to put extra thought into writing SEO page titles that will rank high in the search engines for your most important keywords and that will convert from searches to clicks.

Keep in mind that your SEO page title acts as the synopsis of your web page to both search engines and potential visitors. Therefore, your SEO page title must be clearly focused on the topic of your web page. As easy as this sounds – most people have a hard time writing effective SEO page titles because they over think the process.

Let’s say you have a product page on your ecommerce site which offers a contemporary black leather sofa made by Natuzzi. When people are asked to write an SEO page title for a page such as this, it is common to see SEO page titles such as ‘Discount Living Room Furniture & Sofa Sets’, ‘Leather Furniture, Sofas, Chairs & Ottomans’, ‘Leather Living Room Furniture & Home Décor’, etc. If any of these examples have made you raise an eyebrow you’re doing good, since none of them will be effective for the keyword searches for ‘Contemporary Leather Sofa’, ‘Black Leather Sofa’, ‘Natuzzi Leather Sofa’, or other combinations directly related to the specific offering.

An effective SEO page title for the example of a contemporary black leather sofa by Natuzzi would simply be, ‘Leather Sofa, Contemporary Black Leather Sofa by Natuzzi’. This would be the choice for the following reasons.

1. More people search for ‘Leather Sofa’ than they do for ‘Contemporary Sofa’, ‘Black Sofa’ or ‘Natuzzi Sofa’, which is why the first words are ‘Leather Sofa’ to reinforce this most important keyword phrase.

2. The rest of the SEO page title of ‘Contemporary Black Leather Sofa by Natuzzi’ is chosen to achieve two goals. First to create an SEO page title that is meaningful to searchers so they know what the content of the page is about before clicking on the search result (which also increases conversion). And second, to tell the search engines the most important information related to the product being offered, which in this case are style, color, material, type of product and manufacturer.

SEO page titles for other topics may not be as obvious to write as in our example. However, in most cases they will be just as easy if you simply look at the core topic of the page you’re optimizing and write an SEO page title that clearly describes what the page is about. For example, if you have a web page about Napa Valley wine tours your SEO page title should include the phrase of ‘Napa Valley Wine Tours’. A web page about golf lessons at a Seattle area golf course should include the phrase of ‘Golf Lessons in Seattle’. As simple as this appears, many people get hung up on trying to brainstorm what they should be writing for their SEO page titles, when the answer is literally right in front of them on the page they are optimizing.

Keep in mind that as with our example of the contemporary black leather sofa by Natuzzi, the most important keywords of ‘Contemporary’ ‘Black’ ‘Leather’ ‘Sofa’ and ‘Natuzzi’ must also be included in the meta tags and within the text content of the web page. By writing keyword rich SEO page titles that directly relate to the topic of the web page you’re optimizing, you will be able to increase your search engine rankings and click-through rates to your site (provided that the rest of your SEO elements are properly optimized).

When was the last time your reviewed your SEO page titles in comparison with the content of your web pages?

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