What does this mean to retailers:

• Make sure your website has been optimized specifically for Mother’s Day.
• If you’re an eCommerce website, start thinking about how to drive more people to your site around Mother’s Day to purchase from you rather than a competitor.
• If you are a local business with a store, ensure you have a string online presence to drive foot traffic into your location.

Make sure your website has been optimized specifically for Mother’s day

At the core of all digital marketing efforts is your website. Before trying to increase traffic to your site, you must ensure that your site is effective and provides a great user experience to those already on your site looking for Mother’s Day gifts.

• Optimize your website for mobile. This is critical now as in 2014, 60% of online traffic came from mobile devices.
• Put your most important content at the top of the page with relevant, Mother’s Day related keywords front-loaded. Make sure the key information is easy to find.
• Tailor your value proposition to Mother’s Day – use gift finders, wish lists, and guided selling. Incorporate this type of messaging into your site, and make it prominent.
• Product badging – Help customers identify new items, sale items, great gift ideas (“Great for Mom!”), popular items, free shipping items, and top rated items by using product badging.
• Include time-based messaging so that customers know when the cut-off date is for shipping and when specific deals or promos expire.
• Add Mother’s Day messaging to your meta data – This can help you stand out in search results and potentially rank better for Mother’s Day-related search terms.
• Promote “Desire Paths” - Help people find what they want easily by using promotional areas devoted to Mother’s Day features (such as the home page banner) and/or develop a special Mother’s Day navigation menu. The example below shows InterFlora’s home page with several areas featuring Mother’s Day flowers to catch people’s attention, plus when you click on this section, you are taken to a more in-depth Mother’s Day gift section.

Drive more people to your site to purchase from you before Mother’s Day rather than a competitor

For retail and eCommerce websites, the key to online digital success lies in thinking like your customers and responding to how they behave online. It’s not enough to simply build a website and hope customers will come and purchase. Some people are seeking out information about the products you sell online. You need to be visible and prominent on search engines. If searchers can’t find your website, they can’t buy from you.

• Create conversational, unique and fresh content that people will use and share. Use relevant keywords and don’t duplicate content.
• Each category and product must have its own page, with unique, semantically relevant content to increase the likelihood of that page ranking in search.
• Have a strong social presence and make it easy for your users to share your content via social media.
• Promote user reviews and ratings.
• Don’t chase the algorithm but focus on creating a quality website with quality content.
• It’s not always about getting to the #1 spot in Google. The best position for your business will vary depending on the intent of the searcher.

To learn more about how to drive more traffic to your website, download Mediative’s free guide “How to Drive More Sales Online”. The guide provides best practices, hints and tips to online retailers by covering the following aspects of a digital strategy:

• Website User Experience
• Search: SEO and SEM
• Nurturing: Retargeting and Social Media
• Digital Media Advertising

Drive more foot traffic to your offline locations

A solid local SEO strategy is based on three main pillars:

• On-site optimization: Make sure the information on your website is optimized for local search.
  
  • Ensure your store finder is up to date and optimized for search engines, with unique pages for each of your locations.
  • Ensure the information on each store page is accurate and consistent across all web properties (name, address, phone, opening hours, etc.)
  • Build unique product/service pages by location for your website.
  • Optimize titles and meta data for local search. State the city, province, business name and postal code within the content of the local pages, as well as in the pages’ meta data.
• Off-site optimization: Be sure to have a strong presence on sites other than yours (i.e. local directories, review sites, etc.).
  
  • Have a presence on local directories and review sites (e.g. Yellow Pages, Yelp, Google Local, etc.).
  • Ensure the information is consistent and clean across all your pages – i.e. same name, address and phone number everywhere your locations are listed.
  • Create and claim all store locations on Google Local. Optimize each page with proper category choices and descriptions.
• Social Media: Integrate social media into your local strategy mix.
  
  • Create pages for all brick-and-mortar locations on the main social channels (Facebook, Google , Foursquare).
  • Make sure all the social pages link back to the location pages on your website.
  • Ensure the information (name, address and phone number) is consistent across all social pages and your website location pages.
  • Run contests or offer discounts to people who check-in, and keep your followers aware of special events

For more tips and tactics, download Mediative’s eBook “How to Drive More In-Store Traffic”

When it comes to Mother’s Day, competition between retailers (both online and offline) for your money will be fierce. Get a solid, early lead on your slower competitors by adopting some, if not all of these tactics in the next few weeks, before it’s too late to be effective in time for Mother’s Day.

About the Author
Rebecca Maynes is Mediative’ Marketing Communication Specialist, focusing on Demand Generation Communications. Using her expertise in creating and compiling engaging content, she captures and nurtures existing and new leads through the marketing funnel. Rebecca is responsible for the creation of Mediative’s monthly eNewsletter, case studies, and cheat sheets, and she also plays an integral role in whitepaper and eBook production. Rebecca began her career with Yell.com in England, and, after emigrating to Canada in 2005, she has gone full circle, joining Mediative, a Yellow Pages Group Company, in April 2009. Prior positions include Marketing for a B2B Software company. Rebecca graduated from Cardiff University in Wales, UK, with a First Class Honours BSc in Business Administration.