Optimizing Your eCommerce Website for Holiday Sales

Holiday season is in full swing with Thanksgiving right around the corner, and we all know what that means.

Before you can properly put away your turkey dinner leftovers, it’s time to shop the sales so you can get the jump on your Christmas to-do list!

But what if you’re not an overachieving shopper bent on hunting down the best deals, but a business owner with your own wares to sell this holiday season? Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar store battening down in preparation for the Black Friday rush, or a web-centric brand looking forward to Cyber Monday sales, it’s imperative that you optimize your website and product pages in advance. Check out a few of these tips from Sage Island’s marketing team to help get you started!

A picture is worth a thousand words

If one image can lend a thousand words (give or take) to your product listings, imagine what you can do with several pictures per page! More often than not, consumers who shop online browse by sight before they ever read any of the fantastic copy you’ve put together to give them the details on each product. So if you want to catch their eyes before someone else has the chance, you’ll want to bolster your product pages with the best photos for showing off your wares.

But this gives you the perfect opportunity to diversify the imagery on your website as well; by mixing in typical product photos and lifestyle imagery, your consumers can get the basics about your items as well as what they’re like in action out in the real world. When a customer is able to visualize him or herself actually using and enjoying a product, the sale is a lot more likely to go through.

Short, sweet, and to the point

Bulleted lists are ideal for giving quick, punchy product descriptions that the average consumer can scroll through and recall while they hop from site to site looking for the best deal at premium values. They’re also useful in helping you isolate what makes your product special without burying the information in a short paragraph, which your customers are less likely to read thoroughly when they’re searching for the perfect gift.

To create the most optimal bulleted lists for your product pages, first identify all of the most important aspects of your items for sale. Think about what you would want to know if you were browsing online for this particular product:

  • Sizes
  • Colors and designs
  • Materials
  • Strengths
  • Price

When you’ve done that, go ahead and arrange these details in order from most to least important, or what your customers will care about most, to the more trivial facts about your product. When you couple this with those great photos we mentioned before, you’ll have a product page that’s visually appealing, and informative enough that your customers will have no problem making the right choice when it comes time to buy.

It’s all in the data

By that, we mean that you should definitely take a look at your website’s metadata in order to get it holiday shopping-ready. But what does metadata have to do with making a sale? This is the information in your website’s code that search engines, like Google, use to understand what your website is all about and how internet searchers might be able to use the page content. When these search engines understand your website, they can circulate it more to organic searches, and your consumers will find what they’re looking for on your eCommerce website!

If you’re not sure how to go through and identify the best page titles, alt tags, meta descriptions, and more, it helps to have a trusted digital marketing agency and web design team to fill in the gaps and show you what you could be missing.

If you’re ready to implement some fresh new ideas and generate some record-breaking holiday sales for your business this season, it all starts with optimizing your eCommerce website! Contact Sage Island for additional insight and another pair of eyes, and together we can make your website one that your customers will come back to year after year.

Let's Make Waves!