How To Prepare For Holiday Sales Online

As the holiday season approaches, you need to make sure your E-commerce site is ready for the onslaught of new customers. However, many businesses don’t understand the inner workings of holiday SEO, so they wind up falling behind and playing catch up during the busiest shopping season of the year.

So, to avoid catastrophe and ensure your business can handle the increased traffic, it’s time to develop a holiday E-commerce strategy. One of the best ways to stay on top of everything during the season is to create a “war room,” where you can set up real-time monitoring and focus on data-driven decision-making. But how does all of this work? Let’s break it down.

How to Prepare Your E-Commerce Site for the Holidays

Ideally, you should start planning for holiday SEO during the spring and summer. The sooner you create a comprehensive strategy, the easier it will be to implement and manage it. A general timeline can look like this:

• May and June – Look at your current E-commerce setup, including internal teams and vendor relationships. Identify crucial weak points and start brainstorming ideas to streamline operations.
• July and August – Discuss these plans with your teams and vendors and get feedback. By August, you should have already begun implementing any changes.
• September – Finalize all updates and test everything to ensure each component is running smoothly. If there are any errors, you still have some time to fix them before the season ramps up.

Smaller e-commerce brands have it a bit easier, especially if they only sell a handful of products. However, that’s no reason to get complacent. Site problems can still occur, so you must have an action plan in place to account for any potential disasters, such as:

• Slow site speed
• Broken links or pages
• Inaccurate inventory counts
• Payment processing issues

One way to develop your holiday E-commerce strategy is to come up with various worst-case scenarios and figure out ready-to-go solutions. This way, if or when something happens, you know exactly what to do to minimize disruptions to your bottom line.

E-Com War Room: What to Track and Manage

As the saying goes, “The best-laid plans often go awry.” Even if you’re confident you’ve anticipated every potential scenario, something will likely fall through the cracks. That’s why you need a holiday SEO war room to monitor your KPIs and adjust strategies on the fly. Without this kind of system in place, problems could compound and worsen before you even have a chance to fix them.

But how can you keep track of everything in real-time and manage your E-commerce operations? Here are some pro tips and tricks:

• Set Up Automatic Alerts – Most tracking and analysis programs can deliver customized alerts and notifications when something happens, such as slower loading times for holiday landing pages, specific sales numbers, etc. Proactive alerts will allow you to focus your attention where it’s needed most.
• Understand Which KPIs Matter Most – During the holiday season, the goal should be increased sales, not necessarily brand awareness or promotion. Let your products or services do the heavy lifting for your marketing team as customers buy them. Focus on traffic to high-conversion landing pages, A/B testing, and conversion rates.
• Anticipate and Monitor Trends – You should be monitoring your site traffic and where it originates. Also, keep in mind that traffic may fluctuate and change throughout the season. For example, one month, you may get the most customers from holiday SEO, while the next month, social ads may deliver the most leads. If you can anticipate these changes, you can invest more time and money into the right campaigns that will give your sales an even bigger boost.

Emergency Fixes: Keeping Your Site Up During the Holidays

An E-commerce war room is not just designed to help you maximize sales and profits. It should also be set up to identify and fix problems as they arise. Here are some quick tips on how to keep your site running as smoothly as possible during peak holiday shopping.

• Create Backup Pages and Links – If a page goes down because of server issues, lagging load times, or something else, you should have a backup page you can insert in its place. This way, traffic can get redirected until the original page is back up and running.
• Don’t Be Afraid of Code Freezes – A code freeze is when the code of your website (or particular pages) is frozen for a specific period (i.e., during Black Friday sales). The goal of a code freeze is to prevent unintended errors or delays from code updates and changes. Typically, these updates are designed to make a page or site run faster or be more secure, but you don’t want to do that when traffic is at its peak.
• Invest in Higher Bandwidth – If you don’t already have maximum bandwidth for your website, the holiday season is the perfect time to invest in a higher load capacity. You don’t want your site host to throttle your traffic on peak shopping days.

E-Commerce Success During the Holidays

The holiday season can be overwhelmingly stressful for e-commerce businesses. If you’re running operations, you may not have the time, energy, or resources to handle a war room during the season. Instead, it’s often better to outsource this process to the SEO experts at CSP. We know how to implement a holiday E-commerce strategy that minimizes disruptions and boosts your sales. Contact us today and make this holiday season your most profitable one yet! We handle everything from A/B testing to B2B lead gen so you can focus on customer satisfaction.