The busiest time of the year for most retailers is at Christmas, where the nation descends into a buying frenzy, spending more money on loved ones than at any other time of the year.

Most credible online retailers will have an SEO programme in place and should, by now, be planning how to attack the Christmas period. With most SEO campaigns taking 5-6 months to become properly established, not implementing a credible strategy now will be detrimental to your overall sales.

Internetretailing.net reported that in 2011 UK shoppers spent more than £7,75 billion online during the five weeks of December, starting from November 28th. This was an increase of nearly £1 billion on the previous year, with 24% of the month’s purchases being made in the weeks of November the 29th and December the 6th. Impressively the Guardian.co.uk also reports that UK consumers spent about £186m online on Christmas Day!

With budgets for most households in the UK becoming tighter and tighter, the trend is to leave the shopping to the last minute, once families know what expendable income they have available for the month of December and the general Christmas festivities. If we were to assume that Christmas 2012 will also see the same increase in spending as previous years, that would mean UK consumers will be spending close to £258 million a day online over the same five week period.

Most SEO teams know that you generally expect 15% of the traffic for a particular search term if you achieve position 1 in the search results and roughly 8% for position 2. These figures drastically reduce once you are outside of the top three results and, in some cases, traffic is non-existent once you reach page 2. Roughly 75% of all your traffic should be coming from long tail searches, which will increase your chances of conversions or sales.

Being unable to achieve those top three positions, or failing to have a good understanding of what long tail phrases to target, will not only be holding your site back in terms of sales, but will ultimately mean you will not enjoy the Christmas rush!

For a free website health check and evaluation contact Blueclaw before it’s too late!

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eCommerce, Search Engine Optimisation