Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 tookapic / Pixabay As we approach Halloween, the beginning of the holiday season, it is time to tune up your e-commerce stores in preparation for your biggest sales season. The sooner you can begin optimizing your e-commerce store for more search engine traffic this holiday season, the better. Below are 5 of the best SEO tips you can implement right now to increase your store’s traffic and sales this holiday season. 1 – Publish Gift Guides for the Holidays Holiday shoppers love gift guides because they contain a nice variety of products they may be searching for or likely to share on social for their friends and family to see. From an SEO strategy standpoint, it allows you to target new keywords in addition to specific product searches. Now you can target keywords like, “best holiday gifts for boys” or “popular tech gifts”. Here are a couple technical SEO tips and guides you should keep in mind to help your holiday gift guides bring in more search engine traffic: Perform in-depth keyword research to find the most relevant keywords with a reasonable competition level and search volume. Do not publish the gift guide content on a subdomain, ie: giftguide.ecommercestore.com Make sure you publish it on your main domain, ie: ecommercestore.com/giftguide. If you follow the above tips when creating quality content for your holiday gift guides, you will see a boost in quality traffic for your targeted keywords. 2 – Test and Optimize your Page Load Times Pagespeed is a known ranking factor in Google’s algorithm for all websites. But for e-commerce, page load speeds are extremely important for more than just SEO. Slow page loads increase your bounce rate and decrease your conversion rate, significantly. Just a 1-second delay decreases conversion rates by 7% and customer satisfaction rates by 16%. So, prior to your biggest sales season during the holidays, it is wise to invest some time and resources into testing and optimizing your page load speeds for more SEO traffic and more sales. Below is a list of the best page speed testing and optimizing tools for you to use to help you test and optimize your page load speeds. Google PageSpeed Insights Tool WebPageTest.org tools.pingdom.com GT Metrix PageSpeed Tool + Optimization Guide CSS Minifier JS Compress Here is more info on using the above tools that will show you how to efficiently and effectively improve your page load speeds. 3 – Setup Google Shopping Taking the time to get your products listed in Google Shopping will ensure more visibility by consumers and increase your customer loyalty. Additionally, Google shopping totes a higher conversion rate than Google’s PPC campaigns as well as a lower cost per click. Below are the 5 steps you will need to take to get Google Shopping setup for your products: Optimize Product Images Setup Your Google Merchant account Optimize Your Google Data Feed Submit Your Data Feed Create Your Shopping Campaigns Here is a detailed guide to implementing the above 5 steps. 4 – Mobile Design Testing & Optimization In 2016 28% of retail holiday sales were impacted by mobile searches around shopping related terms. This trend is expected to continue and grow in 2017. Additionally, Google uses mobile design as a ranking factor. So, the better your mobile design the more search engine traffic you are going to receive. So, testing and optimizing your mobile design is more important than ever this holiday season. Here are the best mobile testing and optimization tools for you to use: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tester Varvy’s Mobile Tester Responsinator 5 – Foreshadow Your Holiday Products and Promotions Not only is it important to be out in front of the Holidays with you holiday content, creating preview pages that foreshadow what is to come provides additional benefits. You don’t have to be 100% done with your online holiday product merchandising to post some shareable products and promotions as “sneak-peaks”. This content tends to drive lots of social media traffic that you can convert on your email list and bring back for sales when the times comes. These preview pages are highly shareable and can often generate backlinks. Both social signals and backlinks are important ranking factors to help increase your rankings and search traffic. So, you can improve your SEO while getting your customers excited about your upcoming offerings subscribing to your mailing list. A win, win. If that isn’t enough, these preview pages can be updated continually through the holiday season. Google loves content updates and will continue to improve your ranking as you make the updates. Time to Get Started The last piece of advice I can give you is simple, don’t procrastinate. You should have started on the above list of SEO tips for your e-commerce store, yesterday. Seriously though, the sooner you get started implementing the above tips the sooner you will see traffic and sales increases. And you will also gain more of an edge over your competition by starting on these tips before them. As the saying goes, the early bird catches the worm. So, with that being said, best of luck this holiday season increasing your e-commerce sales. Now, go get started optimizing your store! Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Keller Tiemann.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Keller Tiemann Follow @leadsurance I am a marketing technology expert and founder with 12+ years experience developing high performance web applications and digital experiences. I helped raise $20 Million for OutboundEngine and now I'm currently focused on my #InsureTech marketing automation startup for insurance agents, Leadsurance.… View full profile ›More by this author:3 Essential Strategies to Scale Your SEO Efforts5 Ways to Improve Your Website’s PageSpeed & SEO Efficiently & EffectivelyCan WHOis Info Impact SEO?