How SEO and PPC Helps Small Business Thrive During the Holidays

With gasoline prices hovering near all-time highs, consumers are expected to flock to online shops to get their holiday shopping done this year. Shopping online has a number of important benefits for holiday shoppers, including better selection, great prices and of course lower gasoline costs.

The millions of consumers who regularly shop online, and the millions more who head online for the holidays, can represent an enormous boon for your small business. Many small businesses make up to 75 percent of their sales during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Those businesses rely on those holiday sales to see them through the rest of the year, and that means they need to make sure their customers can find them in the weeks leading up to those visits by Santa Claus.

That is why programs like search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) can be so valuable to your small business. The Internet provides an enormous opportunity to small businesses, allowing them to have an even playing field with their larger competitors. The problem is that the sheer size of the online world makes it easy for those small businesses to get lost in the shuffle. The Internet is a vast place, and it is getting larger every single day. Every day thousands of new websites and businesses come online, and that growth makes it that much more difficult for customers to find you during the hectic holiday season.

Marketing techniques like SEO and PPC can help your business stand out, and help your customers find you when they type a search term into their favorite search engine. Since the vast majority of web traffic comes from search engines, any strategy that improves search results can be a real boon to your business.

Companies can use simple but very effective search engine optimization techniques to drive traffic through your virtual doors and help those willing shoppers find exactly what they need. Adding useful content to your site is one of the most effective ways to make sure your customers know that you have what they are looking for. That web content should give your customers valuable information about the products they are searching for, while helping your small business score high in those all-important Google rankings.

Many small businesses find that a combination of SEO and PPC strategies works best as the holiday season draws near. The advantages of a high search engine ranking is exacerbated during the holiday season, as more and more shoppers go online in search of the perfect gift. Small business owners who are able to position themselves near the top of the search engine rankings for the hottest product and the most popular search terms can see their sales skyrocket. Those high holiday sales can in turn fuel organic growth and repeat business that will last well into the new year.