You’ve read all the articles and thoughts on how this holiday season will be different than any other and how you need to prepare earlier than normal, but determining a place to begin can be overwhelming. In an effort to bring sanity to the chaos, we have compiled a list of projects for you to move your SEO and eCommerce teams forward to boost pre-holiday preparations.
SEO:
- Perform a keyword gap analysis and fill holes with category pages.
- Optimize every piece of every page and campaign
- Focus first on most relevant areas of business, then move out towards areas that need a boost.
- If a page is performing well with only a keyword or two, now is the time to investigate more, especially longtail!
- Update Schema.org mark up for all available SERP features
- Rating, price, stock availability, etc. The more information a user can see from the SERPs, the better.
- New! Schema.org mark up for retailer shipping data
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/09/new-schemaorg-support-for-retailer.html
- Focus first on most relevant areas of business, then move out towards areas that need a boost.
- TEST your Schema.org markup for issues
Tools to test structured data:- Google Search Console’s Structured Data Testing Tool: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/
- Schema.org alternative tool (since Google is sunsetting their Structured Data Testing Tool): https://test.schema.dev/
- More alternative testing tools: https://www.schemaapp.com/tools/say-goodbye-to-googles-structured-data-testing-tool-and-hello-to-the-alternatives/
- Create Black Friday/Cyber Monday URLs ahead of time and put them live early with place holder content. Information should include when sales will begin, what to expect and how your company is dealing with COVID both in stores and online.
- Reuse as many URLs from previous years as possible and keep them live/recycle them every year. This builds equity and trust with search engines and is helpful to return customers.
- Utilize search queries for new custom landing pages.
- Check into internal linking. Is equity able to flow from important pages to related pages that may need a boost?
- Perform a quick audit of your navigation to find and (immediately) correct any non-canonical or broken links.
Cross Departmental
- Find interesting ways to include email capture or discount codes that encourage people to leave feedback. This will show you what users are wanting now and how to make their lives easier (and increase your revenue). Once holiday is over you can begin making these changes and reaping the results.
- Pagination: instead of offering next/arrow buttons, use a daisy chain of all page numbers allowing equity flow to through paginated pages better. This also avoids the dreaded lag of infinite scroll when you have a bad WiFi connection (plus infinite scroll is simply annoying for users).
- Suggest your Dev team take a look at the backend to ensure the site can handle the holiday rush-any mediocre patches should be fixed now.
- Make the collection process of ‘click and collect’ an experience. If COVID restrictions tighten up again, collecting merchandise from stores could be one of the few ‘out of the house’ holiday shopping experiences families get this year. If your physical store offers click and collect, do something memorable for customers that show up to make sure they know how much they are appreciated. Making your customers feel special this season will go a very long way.
Sources:
- Altezza Holiday eBook: https://altezza.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Altezza-Holiday-eBook.pdf
- DeepCrawl Webinar with Luke Carthy: Conquering the FAQs of eCommerce SEO: https://www.deepcrawl.com/blog/webinars/conquering-the-faqs-of-ecommerce-seo/
- Outbrain Cyber Weekend Webinar & guide: https://lp.outbrain.com/cyber-weekend-guide/