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Top Ways Merchants Can Succeed During the Holidays in 2020

COVID-19 changed so much for millions of people, but retailers were among the hardest hit. Now that the holidays are upon us, retailers must act smart and fast. What happens in the last quarter of 2020 could make or break your business.

So how can you succeed during the holidays? Check out our hottest tips.

Have an Online Presence

Every business, even small brick-and-mortar stores need an online presence. Millions of consumers will shop online this year and skip in-person shopping altogether. Not having an online presence could be the difference between staying in business or not.

If you already had a website now is a great time revamp, update, or otherwise make it better.

Make Sure your Website is Fast and User Friendly

Your website must be able to handle a lot of traffic and your staff able to handle the influx of shipments, deliveries, and returns, all while providing great customer service. If shoppers are frustrated at your website speed, they may move onto a competitor.

Aside from speed, think of user-friendliness. How easy is it to use the website? Can all customers (including new customers) find what they need quickly? Is it easy to spot where and how they can contact customer service?

Offer Valuable Services

Today, consumers want to know what you’ll do for them that goes above and beyond the norm. Sure, they can order online, but what else do you offer?

Here are a few ideas:

  • Curbside pickup for contactless service
  • Real-time inventory updates for better service
  • Offer more payment options including ‘buy now pay later’
  • Staff accordingly so you can answer customer questions, provide timely curbside pickup times, and offer any other necessary support

Market your Business

Don’t forget in the madness of the holiday rush, all the changes, and observing COVID-19 regulations, to market your business.

All businesses will be operating online and hoping for the same target audience. Find a way to stand out from the crowd. What do you have to offer that others don’t? Focus on that when you market your business.

Don’t forget to get on social media – all platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and even Tik Tok if you have a young audience. Offer specials and give other reasons to get your company ahead of the market.

Get Ahead of the Market

This year will look different than any others. Black Friday may not bring in the same numbers in-store, but you can do the same thing online. Appeal to your audience who feels more comfortable staying home and prepare yourself now.

Most customers are shopping early this year – don’t miss the opportunity to grab the sales now, earlier than ever, and build trust in your customers. Don’t use this as a time of trial and error, but rather a time to find a solution to the problem that all businesses will face today – satisfying both the in-person and online customer to the same level.

Merchant Website SEO [2023 Update]

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Practicing Good Merchant Website SEO

Most business owners know by know that the Internet isn’t going away, and if you want to succeed in business you need to have an online presence. Having a website is only the start, however. Without good merchant website SEO, chances are that the business website will never rank high enough in the search engines to make it worthwhile. Good search engine optimization practices can help stack the deck so even small business owners will have the ability to have their sites compete with the big boys.

Formatting for ideal on page SEO

The way an article or web page is formatted on the site can make a big difference when it comes to ranking in the search engines. One of the worst kept secrets is that Google has hired human quality readers, and formatting a webpage to be well organized and easy to read makes a big difference now when it comes to ranking well for keywords.

This means several things for how a website owner needs to design how their page looks. Informational pages need to include plenty of subheadings, bullet points, lists, and short paragraphs. Think “reader friendly.” Pages should be easy to scan and never appear as block paragraphs.

When looking at a retail page that’s mostly products, merchant website SEO work can be a little bit more challenging. It’s a good idea to stay away from iframes, which lead to outgoing link saturation and also isn’t the best way to present a large number of products. All products should have varied descriptions to add in as much relevant and original text as possible.

Carefully using keywords

Keywords remain a very important aspect of SEO for any website. The key is to walk that fine line between making sure to use enough keywords and a good variety of related keywords versus not using too many. While the numbers vary from one expert to another, it’s generally agreed that it’s not good to go above 2% of text on any page being one keyword.

The other important way that keywords on a page of text can help increase rankings is where they appear. The main keyword the site owner wants to rank for should be located in the title of the page or article. In the text itself that means a well optimized page will have the keyword in the first paragraph, often in the very first sentence. One or two variations of that keyword phrase should be used in the middle of the text and then once again in the last paragraph.

Do backlinks still matter?

One of the strongest ways to boost website rankings is still to get backlinks from related websites. Good merchant site SEO means finding specialty blogs or related sites that might naturally link to the site. There is some controversy with the practice of backlinking because intentionally manipulating backlinks can result in the website actually losing rank.

The best way to boost SEO with backlinks is to offer a good guest blog post to a related site. Give them some quality writing, and link back just using your URL or the actual name of the website. Doing this keeps it legitimate, gives an SEO boost to the merchant site, and helps avoid any search engine ranking penalties.