All of us must be familiar with the fact that what an SEO strategy is and how it should be prepared and worked upon in order to get the best results. However, with this, it is also very important to understand that sales are quite high especially during the holiday season. Thus, holidays and sales can be talked about together in one go.
With Christmas, New Year, and Black Friday just around the corner, it is surely the perfect time to think about the post sales. All one needs to know is what is every business organization going to do with the landing pages that they have created over the past year? Is it all just simply going to be removed or can it be used in any sense?
The simple answer to all this is NO. Nothing is going to be a waste for the company who has put in all the efforts. No sales SEO Strategy is ever a waste. For instance, let us take an example of a very famous company Black Friday. This year, it saw a 20% average increase in organic traffic and a 40% increase in the organic revenue and surely, this growth is something that no company would ever like to lose. So instead of discontinuing all the efforts, it is better to put the SEO holiday plan to a stop until next year and start it again once the holiday time is back.
SEO Strategy for Sales
Sales SEO strategy is an e-commerce SEO approach for website pages that are purely date or season related like Christmas, New Year, and Black Friday. The main purpose of this strategy is to build and maintain SEO efforts and ranking year after year without creating redirection and starting off from zero each year.
Nevertheless, before starting with any SEO plan the important question that comes to mind is ‘What are the things that are needed to start off with this SEO Strategy?’ Every organization can start with a non-year specific landing page. This page can be a content page or a category page. This one page should be your main page that can be used for all your related sales pages. Any current pages that are date specific can be redirected to this main landing page.
Outline of a Sales SEO Strategy
With the help of these e-commerce SEO strategies, every business will be working on your main page and subpages in a year. Through this strategy, the businesses can address the sale itself, its preparation and talk about the idle time between closure and announcement. Through this, you can also plan, prepare, and promote the discount and sales, where one can monitor and track the Return on Investment.
For example, when a business runs an annual new year’s sale on the first week of the year, then the organization starts preparing for this sale by October or November and start promoting it in December and have the sales put on until the first week of January. But if the sales strategy is for Black Friday, then it would be on a much larger scale as this is one of the biggest sales of the year.
Proper Announcements and Promotions
Whether it is a large sale or a smaller one, it needs to be promoted well and announced to your audience and customers before the sale’s date. The larger the sale it, the earlier the announcements should be made. Retailers usually prepare by announcing their sales with social postings and advertisements.
Sales Day
This is the final day for which months of preparation and marketing has been done. All one needs to do is to sit and keep an eye on your website and make sure that nothing gets disturbed so that customers can go through the full sales process in a simple and convenient manner. Every company can post a few things on the social media sites and send out an email or two informing customers about their sales offers. All the companies run these campaigns with the intention to drive traffic and sales to their site.
Closing of Sales
Once the sales end, the important thing that is to be done is to review the status of the sales and look into the year over year performance of the business. Along with this, it would also be beneficial to review your own performance compared to the industry benchmark and with the overall public stats.
The 2016 Black Friday’s stats saw that around 55% of the traffic was from mobile devices, counting for 40% of the sales. It was seen that the online sales reached about $3.34 billion with a year over year growth of 21.6%.
Landing Page
Make sure your landing page is genuine and has some quality content in it. If it is not appropriate, then make sure to create one that can be used for years to come. Make sure the landing page has all the standard SEO elements such as proper keywords, Meta tags, on-page content, ALT tags, images and one of the most important elements is to have a unique URL. Any old on-site links should point to the new page where possible. The landing page should have a social media open graph and Twitter markups, as this page will be shared via social media. Make sure this page is the only Holiday offer page listed within the sitemap with none of the previous year’s URL.
One the sales are over you can still continue with the strategy and let the page run, but hold it for a while. During the first month, make sure to close the sales that have just ended and calculated your ROI. Also, make sure to specify that the sale has come to an end and will come back once again the next year. Businesses can give in some sign-up links to ensure that users give in their email ids and they can be informed about the regular activities of the company and next year’s promotions and sales. During the next few months, try using various marketing techniques to turn your sales shoppers into regular customers. Finally, when your sales are around the corner, a few months before make sure to change the images, content and add on the dates and offers of the sale. Finally, 2-3 months before your sale, add on some backlinks to make it a success. Finally, work on your backend to ensure that your site is able to handle some extra traffic. No one wants his or her site to crash. Review your site’s performance, bandwidth, and RAM to ensure that there are no errors. In addition to this, also make sure to test your site before making it live.
On a concluding note, it can be seen that a Sales SEO Strategy is just like any SEO work that is long term. Even though the sale is only for a short while, but the preparations for it is all running slowly and steadily throughout the year.