Start Optimizing for the Holidays- Before it’s too late!

Once the year starts winding down and the months begin to get closer to the holiday season, there’s one thing lurking in the back of everyone’s mind (whether they like it or not), and that one thing is, you guessed it, shopping for the holidays. The feeling of the season-of-giving creeping up might give you a warm tingly feeling inside, or on the other hand completely stress you out. But in the end, the bitter realization is, that when this time comes around people will be spending money, and lots of it (no matter the state of the economy).  The big difference these days is (with the economy in its current state), consumers are going to use every resource possible to find the best deal out there.

Although lots of people still do their shopping in stores, there is one resource that almost everyone utilizes. Yep, you said it, the Internet! I know this is a big surprise to everyone, but the important thing to focus on isn’t the fact that people use the Internet to do their shopping, but HOW they use it to shop.

There are a cornucopia of different resources (blogs, social networks, email services, rewards & directories, cross-shopping) that can be used to find information about products/deals, but one resource that single-handedly dominates all of them is, search engines. Take a peak at this graph from Hitwise -

Need I say more? Optimizing your website for SEO and utilizing SEM techniques are essential if you want to show up on the first page (49% of people don’t go past the first page) of any of the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). With that said, you could hypothetically add 2x the amount of prospective customers you already have just by optimizing your website. There is a catch though (isn’t there always?). Although, SEO can happen fairly quickly, building a high page rank for a site doesn’t happen over night, it takes time, and the better optimized your site is over a longer period of time, will ultimately control how high your page is ranked on the search engines.

So my advice is, get your website optimized as soon as possible! Here’s a Tip – check out Google Insights, and see what terms people use that are relevant to your product during the holidays. So when the  season comes around and consumers are ready to shell out the big-bucks for their loved ones, you’re the company in the forefront where they spend that holiday cash, not the unnoticed business standing in the shadows of the well optimized websites on the first page of the search engines.