Let’s admit it, while the holidays are a fun filled time of the year, they often times tend to be far from relaxing. From the hustle and bustle of the malls and all of the holiday shopping, to hosting friends and family, the festivities tend to take a toll on you. This isn’t even factoring in how stressful it may be for business owners across the world who rely on November and December sales to account for much of the year’s revenue.

As seen in the graph below, from Cyber Monday to Early/Mid December, consumer spending and shopping online grows significantly. Just from 2009 to 2010, Black Friday shopping increased from 35% to 41% and the biggest jump percentage wise came on Cyber Monday when 7% more consumers shopped online in 2010 compared to 2009.

So what’s a business owner to do, how does one increase online sales? Here are 5 practical tips that any business operating online can begin implementing today. And the best part? Most of these will only cost you your time.

1) Freshness Matters

No, not how hip you are as a company, but more along the lines of how fresh (or updated) your website’s content is. In a statement released by Google earlier this month, they state “As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.” This update in turn applies to certain queries for recurring events such as sports scores, political issues, etc. which are now weighted differently by Google’s algorithms. Let’s say you type in “Packers Score.” The webpages that now appear are much more recent and relevant to this and last week’s game than compared to a historical webpage that may have an archive of all of the Packers scores over the years.

Now you might be saying this doesn’t apply to my business, but it does. And here’s why. If you’re selling products that other vendors are also, for example a Nintendo Wii, or Nikon DSLR, or Lenovo laptop, queries for such items and variations of these queries (e.g. Nikon review, Nintendo Wii review, laptop review, etc.) are likely to be affected. Google wants to give weight to more recently updated pages and those with reviews of current models of the product, not older versions.

Suggestion: It’s now time to make an update to those high traffic pages on your web site. Refresh it and help signal to the search engines that your content is fresh. SEO & Rankings and more important than ever. If you’ve done that, dive in into analytics. My recommendation would be to set your analytics range to this time last year (November 22 – January 22) and review your top performing pages. Make sure that the content on those pages is updated and accurate, and take it from there!

2) Participate in Free Shipping Day.

Free shipping day takes place this year on Friday, December 16th. If you can’t offer free shipping on every single product, think of a line of products or something else you could offer free shipping on. Make sure to publicize it with your email list, tweet it, share it, Facebook post it, and list your site here too: http://www.freeshippingday.com/

The added bonus is that this is almost a guaranteed way to get some free links and traffic to your web site.

3) Push Social.

Get some tweets out and engage with fans. Let’s be honest…if your company setup a Twitter account and you haven’t updated it in months, it’s more likely hurting you than helping you. To the deadline conscious consumer shopping this holiday season, an inactive public company account starts raising doubts in his or her mind about how quick or reliable you are to shipping the order. Start updating your profiles now and engaging with your fans. If not every day, then at least twice week. Update your company’s Facebook page, Twitter Profile, and Google+ company page (you did setup a Google+ Company page already right?).

4) Get Mobile.

According to Google, 70% of smartphone owners use their phones in-store while holiday shopping. But at the same time, did you know only 33% of advertisers have a mobile optimized website? (Source: Google/Ipsos/TNS, 2011)

Jump on mobile now. If you have brick and mortar locations, people are likely searching for your store hours or directions as they drive around. Make sure at minimum your Yelp data is updated and that you have full control of your business profile. Need another reason to go mobile? Google lets you build a FREE mobile version of your web site.

5) Speed Up Your Website

Run some website speed tests to make sure your site is running quickly.
Need some stats for encouragement?
Studies show that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. In addition, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. And the kicker, a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions (Source: Akamai & Gomez.com).

Here are three free web site speed tests to get you started. Most importantly, make sure you make website modifications during off hours when web site traffic peaking in order to minimize any downtime.

1) Google’s Official Page Speed Online Test

https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

2) BrowserMob

https://browsermob.com/free-website-performance-test

3) Which Loads Faster

http://whichloadsfaster.com/
This speed test won’t provide you with as many great takeaways as the previous two, but it can definitely get your engineers and bosses rilead up. Show them how quickly your web site is loading compared to your most hated competitors, and watch how quickly they act.

About Us: Buzzsmith Media is an interactive marketing agency located in Los Angeles, CA. Buzzsmith Media specializes in online marketing (social media, search engine optimization, and PR) campaigns for businesses looking to grow their online presence and sales.