Anyone who runs an e-commerce site knows that year-round sales are important for a thriving and consistently well-received search engine optimization presence. While this may be true, the holidays bring unprecedented opportunities each year for businesses to rack up billions of dollars in cumulative sales. Many businesses earn as much as half of their annual revenues in the last quarter of the year, so it comes as no surprise that many e-retailers spend ample amounts of time preparing for the holidays. If your e-commerce site has not already begun making preparations for the holidays, then you could be missing out on valuable sales come the end of the year. Below, we will discuss some strategies that you should use to begin preparing your site for the holidays before they arrive.

Prepare Content for Peak Sales Times

Most large-scale e-commerce sites already have their content prepared for events such as Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas weeks or months in advance. This allows them to work more on optimization and marketing, rather than having to create content at the last minute and scramble for attention. The reality is that shoppers tend to visit e-commerce websites on specific days (Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the most popular), and search for gifts that coordinate with holidays (“Christmas gifts for mom”). The sooner that you deploy this content and optimize it for search engines, then sooner that you will be pinging search engines and customers’ screens with your deals.

Research Holiday Keywords

As the holidays approach, any webmaster of an e-commerce site should be conducting proper research into what keywords specific audiences are searching for in their quest to find the perfect gifts. You can get a head-start by reviewing the most popular keywords from the last holiday season and project off of that, as well as any in-demand search terms that resulted in higher conversion rates on your own site from the previous year. Whether you wish to build a gift guide or target a particularly popular product, there are plenty of keywords out there that are already being targeted: it’s time to get to work.

Publish Your Pages Early

Like any form of content, it will take some time for your pages to propagate through search results (especially if your site is new or small). There is also other data to consider: nearly one-third of all shoppers begin their holiday shopping routines in October. If you want to be sure not to miss out on large amounts of potential business, then you need to be pinging search engines with your content months in advance. While you may not gain much benefit from it at first, the approaching holidays will lead to more people visiting your landing pages and helping drive the conversions and business that you require to be successful.

Conclusion

E-commerce models must prepare for the holidays months in advance. This once per year explosion in business is no doubt a boon for those in the market of retail, but competitors will begin making moves to gain that business months before the holidays arrive. If you want to be competitive and reach your audiences, then you need to begin targeting keywords, creating content and publishing pages many weeks before the big sales truly begin.