6 Ways From Semalt On How To Prepare Your Website For The Coming Holidays



This year has been one that we would stay in our minds and hearts for a long time. However, the festive season is right around the corner. It presents us with a unique opportunity to catch up on all the fun activities we've missed all through the year. Meet friends and reconnect. Exchange gifts, as well as smiles.  

In this article, Semalt will be showing you how you can implement some tips that protect your site, your domain name, and prevent any problems that come with the busy demands of the holiday season. We are entering that time of the year with the most orders. Don't worry; it isn't too late to undertake new and major pages to your website and rank on search engines. After all, you do not want to leave those slight errors and mistakes to ruin your chances of ranking on SERP. If you allow such non-optimizing features to stay, the chances are that they will continue hurting your site, it's ranking, and traffic.  

One best way to prepare for the festive seasons is first to do a website SEO audit. This helps you find out if you need to change certain content, work on your site structure, add new content, and many more. Many websites fail to understand that the earlier you do this in your off-season, the better for you.

Many times, waiting for the festivities to begin and then modifying your website isn't the best strategy. This time of the year still falls under the "safe" time frame in our calendar. That is because it gives enough room before the busy holiday seasons begin. 

To help you make changes, cope with these changes, and explore how long it will take to implement such changes and why it's safe for you to execute. It would help if you kept in mind that your primary aim is to gain traffic, not lose it. You do not want to lose your search engine ranking, visibility, or the protection that comes with it. 

There is no particular sequence to these tasks. In general, there are four broad categories you will be observing / modifying:

  1. Identify and fix errors / issues
  2. Recovering your lost traffic and links 
  3. Improving email deliverability 
  4. Fortifying the security of your website and domain name 

Identifying and fixing website errors and issues

With the hope that your website will be experiencing a surge in the number of activities, you want to be sure that your website has no issues or errors. A good and safe thing to do while preparing for the holiday is to work on fixing the errors or other issues that exist on your website. 

Generally speaking, you should want to begin by looking into the crawl of your website. Website crawlers are a great way to run this analysis. Some amazing crawlers are OnCrawl, Siteliner, Deep Crawler, Screaming Frog SEO spider, to name a few.  

Using one or some of these tools will help you identify certain types of issues that exist on your website, and you can know what to fix. Think of it this way: these tools help you perform general site maintenance. Your website should be able to provide smooth and flawless experiences to your audience. Having a website full of errors, typos, or broken links and images would be terrible for your business. It wouldn't just lead to bad user experiences, but it can also hurt your website ranking.  

How to identify and fix errors

1. Look for errors

Some of the common website errors include: 
  • 404 errors
  • Incorrect redirects 
  • Duplicate contents 
  • Grammatical mistakes 
Performing this task is no difficult endeavor, and you do not risk damaging your website any further. You're simply improving the user experience on the website. By using web crawlers, you can easily find common errors on your website. 

For example, some errors that you can find are: 
  • The same title tags on multiple pages
  • Multiple H1 tags on pages 
  • Too long title tags
These are common errors and site maintenance like the one we're asking you to perform well because they help you locate such minor mistakes. By changing or correcting these mistakes, you do not risk losing any traffic, so you are only improving your site, nothing else.  

2. Look for errors in Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools. 

This task is not very difficult; however, it requires a level of knowledge to execute successfully. When your search engine points out some errors, it is safe that you fix them. You can review various items in the Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tool to fix the errors that have been pointed out. Lately, we've noticed an increasing number of structured data, and these are errors that aren't easily fixed. If your structured data issue involves a lot of pages or if data is pulled from a database. For such errors, you will need a web developer; if the problem is that you've copied and pasted code from structured data, it is easier to fix.  

Paying attention to the errors search engines point out is important. Once identified, you can fix them because it can only improve your website. If you run an e-commerce site, you should be more proactive in fixing your structured data issues, as this can affect the visibility of your content and your ranking on SERP.  

If you find these errors and fix them, it will only help your website do better and improve your sales conversions.

3. Improving your email deliverability 

Email marketing is an effective way to let your audience know your back. For websites that stopped functioning all through the lockdowns, it presents you with an excellent opportunity to inform your subscribers that you're back and showcase the new products you have on display.

Email deliverability is essential, especially when sent from your domain name and successfully delivered to the recipient that finds it useful. Once you send an email to a potential customer, you want to make sure they receive the email. If it never gets into their inbox, you can't claim to have done your part in email marketing. This is why it is important that you ensure your emails get delivered. 

To ensure that your email marketing strategy is working as it should, there are settings you can check right now to ensure that everything is working properly. Because of the contents of your email, it is still considered a form of content promotion for your website. 

Here are some tips for ensuring everything is as they should be: 
  • First, you should make sure you have DMARC set up on your domain name. With so many scammers and scoopers looking to get email lists from quality domains - it is important that you have DMARC monitoring your domain.  
  • If you have an email list, then you should continue sending out an email at least once a week to your subscribers. By doing this, you can filter out your poor quality subscribers. 

4. Ensure that your domain names email settings are done properly

With this, you are simply improving the deliverability of emails. There are particular setting we like to call domain settings which make up your DNS (Domain Name Setting).
 
The DNS settings have certain entries called records that give instructions to internet traffic. For example, when there's a request to load, the DNS tells the traffic to go to the IP address and fetch the information needed to load the website.

With emails, there is a separate IP address or location. There is also a security type of records such as DMARC record, DKIM, and SPF records that needs to be added.

5. Recover lost traffic and links

One of the most significant challenges websites will have o-face is battling for lost traffic in the last quarter of the year. This is an opportunity where you can make changes to your website that would improve the inflow of your traffic, and this would have no negative effect on your website.  

6. Review your old pages and fix any issues 

Your ranking on SERP is affected if you have bad links pointing to pages on your site. You want to find pages that previously brought traffic or pages that are 404s and still have links. As an e-commerce website, you want to remove old webpages of Black Friday or Cyber Monday from previous years. The chances are that these pages are no longer live and only serve as extra weight.  

Conclusion 

We understand that making changes on your website this close to the holidays can be worrying. However, holidays provide a unique opportunity to convert ordinary visitors to long-lasting customers. This is why it's so important you secure your website right before it becomes open season. It would help if you protected your domain name so that you do not lose your website and improve its performance so that you get to win big during this season. 

Make sure you put in place recovery measures if unforeseen events affect your website to stop your website from losing traffic or going down.

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