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Christmas is near! As the holidays are first approaching it’s time to ensure your holiday search campaigns are ready to go.
Think Holistically About SEO
Consumers touch multiple channels during the holiday shopping season, and part of what makes a world-class consumer experience is consistency across each of these touch points.
It would be valuable to sync with your peer across other channels such as affiliates, social, display or email; then set up time on the calendar as soon as possible so that you can create a cross-channel promotional calendar. The more holistic your approach is, the easier it will be for your products or services to get through to the target audience along their purchase journeys.
Check Your Mobile Presence
An increasing number of searches are conducted on mobile devices, over the Christmas period this will keep on increasing. Already mobile has surpassed desktop search and as users increasingly turn to simplicity and convenience, desktop use is set to reduce further.
Shoppers research their purchases ahead of time and start shopping early. Make sure you have a strong mobile search strategy. To do so, update your mobile bid modifiers to make sure your brand is visible on mobile devices, use mobile URLs to send mobile shoppers to the right mobile landing page, with your mobile URL create a custom tracking code so that you can create a mobile device re-marketing audience. This includes re-marketing into social apps such as Facebook.
Create Cross-Channel Re-marketing Audiences
Once you’ve met with your cross-channel partners, it’s time to put your newfound knowledge to use within search. Use the information you’ve learned from their promotional calendar and URL tagging to create re-marketing audiences based on cross-channel consumers.
Some audiences to curate and develop are:
- Email Campaigns: loyal shoppers, cart abandoners
- Pinterest and Social Shoppers
- Affiliate Discount Shoppers
As you work on your re-marketing campaigns, look at your cross-channel calendar and adjust the ad copy to include the right promotions and adjust your site-links based on where the consumer might be within the purchase cycle.
Show Discounts and Offers on Shopping Campaigns
Free shipping along with sales and price discounts are the top factors that will lead shoppers to opt between a retailer or other. It is important that you optimize your Shopping campaigns so that they are mobile-optimized and: show price discounts on Shopping Ads, incorporate offers such as Expedited Shipping or Free and check your feed for data feed errors.
Schedule and Plan Before the Holiday Mayhem Starts
Once the shopping season begins you’ll have little time left to build new campaigns, upload promotions and so forth. You’ll spend the days working on reports or optimizing your accounts. That said, it is important to prepare everything you can in advance and know your key dates.
- Build your campaigns well in advance and schedule them with their start and finish dates.
- Know your cut-off dates and look at the year-over-year differences in cut-off dates to determine how they may impact your overall campaigns.
- Look at the trends from last year and put the context behind them. If you know your dates now you won’t have to dig for them or jog your memory while you are in the heat of the holiday season.
POLARIS are a B2B SEO agency, for any queries or for further explanation contact info@polarisagency.co.uk
