Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a great opportunity for online retailers and e-commerce businesses to drastically increase their sales with discounts and sales. 

Have you prepared your Magento store  the millions of shoppers, amped up to spend money for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? We have some tips that may help you and your store prepare!

Promote Promote Promote!

People can’t find you if you don’t tell them.  Send out dedicated newsletters to your subscribers by creating coupon codes and send them to customers in newsletters. Try conversion rate optimization software to track your customers conversions and promote specials via pop up ads or banners on your site! We love Picreel as they use the ReelOverlay feature where you can capture a new lead, gain a sale, or simply keep a visitor on your website longer with a pop-up that is customized according to your needs.

Add social media buttons to your product pages to encourage visitors to share your offers or post on blogs, community forums etc. Don’t be shy!

Give Your Store a Makeover

If you want your products to jump off the shelves during the campaign, you need to change the look of your website. Turn headers into banners to promote discounts. You can use several tools to do so. Check out our User Experience Extensions to help with things like search engines, product sorting, frequently viewed items and more!

Optimize Your Site

A holiday campaign performs best with seasonal landing pages. You can SEO-optimize  pages by using Black Friday- and Cyber Monday-related keywords. Use captivating images, write great content to allure shoppers. Try Image Optimization for faster load speed on images or Minify Js/Css/HTML to reduce page size, bandwidth and server load. 

You can also add temporarily SEO keywords to existing product pages to enhance your chances of getting new customers who utilize search engines to find discounts on the Internet.

Having an SSL certificate is also essential: shoppers may abandon the shopping cart if they see that the connection is not secure and they may be at risk of losing credit card data.

Make Sure Your Shopping Cart is Prepared

One of the most frustrating things for customers can be the checkout process. How many times have you seen your potential buyers just leave everything in the cart and bail? Its not a fun feeling. Abandoned Cart Modules have been extremely popular, allowing the system to inform your runaway customers that they have some good stuff waiting to be purchased! Check out Abandoned Cart Reminder or Follow Up Email for more info!

Give Your Customers a Reward or Discount

Everyone loves a good deal, and thats the main idea behind Cyber Monday and Black Friday. The great thing is, being an E-Commerce store, your customers can avoid the hassle of getting dressed and perhaps trampled by the deal seekers! Try Shopping Cart Price Rules to enable custom discounts for the Holidays or Free Gift to spread some love to those good customers you want to thank or introduce to your products. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the best time of the year for ecommerce businesses to take sales to the next level. Some businesses miss the opportunity by failing to prepare their Magento store for the holidays. Stand out from the competition and see how Extendware Extensions can help you get on track. We offer 7 day free trials and 30 day money back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose!

SEO can be confusing but it doesn’t have to be. The basics of SEO are actually pretty easy to understand and if you give yourself to learn search engine optimization you’ll be able to sort fact from fiction and you’ll have the tools to delve into more advanced SEO concepts.

How to Approach SEO 

Search engine optimization is a subset of marketing. It can fit into your overall marketing plan and not be your marketing plan.

You can do everything wrong when it comes to SEO, never receive a single visitor from a search engine, and still have a very successful and profitable site.

If you take a step back and market yourself well some of the more difficult parts of SEO will take care of themselves. That’s not to
say you should ignore SEO, but most of us don’t need to obsess over every little detail. There are ton of factors that determine where a page will rank in search results. Obsessing over one of those factors doesn’t make sense. Try to see the big picture rather than stewing over one detail.

SEO is not a set it and forget proposition. It’s an iterative process. You do what you can, measure the results, and continue to improve. You can’t SEO a site in a day or month. As with marketing in general, SEO is never ending. It also changes daily and what works for one site may not work for another.

SEO can be generally categorized into 5 different areas:

• Keyword research
• Search engine friendly site development
• Analytics
• Link Building
• On-page SEO

Each of the above is important and they all work together. The whole s greater than the sum of the parts. Let’s talk about each of the above in more detail.

Keyword Research

Everyone would like their pages to rank #1. So…what is it to rank #1?  Not all keywords and keyword phrases are created equal. Some are typed into a search engine more often and some are more likely to lead to a sale. You don’t need to optimize for every possible keyword or phrase.

Say you sell real estate in Charleston, SC. You might think it important to rank well for the phrase “real estate,” but is it? Someone looking to buy property in Chicago or Los Angeles isn’t going to be interested in the homes you sell in Charleston. It is pointless to spend time and money trying to get those people to your site. You’d do much better to target phrases that include South Carolina and even better Charleston.

There are 3 types of queries someone might type into a search engine

Transactional queries – searching with an intent to purchase

Informational queries – searching for information from general to specific

Navigational queries – searching for a specific site or page

All three types of queries are important and each of them could ultimately lead to a sale. Someone finding helpful information on your site at one point may come back later and buy something. It is important to understand that what a person types into a search engine reveals something about their intent. Based on the searcher’s intent you may want different pages of your site ranking for different queries.

Developing a List of Keywords to Target

Brainstorming is the first step in developing good keywords. Write down as many words and phrases (50-100) as you can think of that relate to your site and understand that this is simply the start of your research.

As you brainstorm ask yourself: Do you only offer web design or do you also offer web development? You might specialize in
ecommerce design or small business web design. Maybe you also offer web hosting. Each of these will likely become a keyword theme around which you can build a more detailed list. The next step is to expand your list with some keyword tools.

Here are a few great tools:

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• SEO Book Keyword Tool
• WordTracker
• Keyword Discovery

There are also a variety of more advanced keyword research tools should you desire them.

Don’t worry about the absolute numbers with keyword tools. The numbers are estimates. Consider the numbers more in relative terms in comparison to each other. If all of the above tools show that more people search for web design than website design, it’s probably true.

A few tips about building keyword lists:

Find the words and phrases your customers use instead of industry jargon.

Look for synonyms – Similar to the above seek the words potential clients will use. You call it e-commerce. They might type ecommerce. Is it web design or website design?

Add qualifiers – Our Charleston SC real estate agent might add Charleston, South Carolina, or both to most every phrase. As a web designer your services might be affordable or professional. Optimizing for “professional web design services” also optimizes for “web design services”

Qualify your qualifiers – You might be tempted to add a qualifier like “free” since so many people use the word. However, someone searching for free anything isn’t looking to buy.

Look to your analytics package to see what phrases are currently bringing people to your site.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO, while capable of providing a valuable source of traffic, is still only one way to attract potential clients and customers to your site. Think of SEO as part of your marketing strategy instead of your whole marketing strategy

SEO is a process that can begin anywhere. Most of the time it will begin with keyword research, especially if you’ve yet to build your site or create the initial content. Keywords help you define who your market is and what that market is looking for. They’ll also lead the way when it comes to how you develop your site, what content you choose to create, and how that content is written.

Check out: The Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce SEO Pt 1