What You Can Learn from Cyber Monday

Did you join in all the excitement of Cyber Monday on 2 December? More importantly as an Australian SEO, did you clients report record sales? If they did, they weren’t alone.

According to figures released by Abobe Digital Index, online sales for the day were up 16% year on year with Amazon, Walmart and EBay all reporting record numbers. Researchers ComScore revealed that Internet retail sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving rose to almost $2 billion.

Meanwhile, the Adobe report also revealed some trends that are of great interest to all of us involved in SEO here in Sydney. Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting.

Customers Moving Online

One basic trend was that customers are increasingly making their purchases online. Moreover, a recent survey by the accountancy firm Deloitte showed that for the first time, online shopping is set to become the main option for American shoppers this holiday season.

Booming Mobile Sales

The number of customers making purchases with mobile devices was up around 80% over the previous year with smartphones and tablet users racking up online sales worth $419 million. Not surprisingly considering its popularity, the iPad accounted for just over 10% of all sales.

Social Referral

Traffic from social media sites reportedly accounted for $148 million in sales with Twitter’s share moving up by 24%.. Pinterest also witnessed strong growth with an increase of 17% year on year. The big daddy as expected was Facebook whose traffic accounted for over 60% of all social media related sales.

cyber monday

Action Steps

If your clients sales were flat this last Cyber Monday, it’s time to get ready for next year. Even if you’re not an online retailer, you can benefit from applying these strategies.

The first key take away from the data is the importance of making sure your clients’ websites are mobile ready. Australian smart phone use is already high with over 70% of us using them. The volume of purchases made with these devices is set to expand so make sure you’re ready.

Next, make sure your client’s site is setup for social media. Make it easy for users to pass on information about any special promotions through twitter and Facebook. And don’t forget Google + which is becoming increasingly important SEO-wise in many ways.

Finally, be sure the sites are optimised for long tailed keywords. This strategy can pull in a niche audience that knows exactly what it’s looking for. Plus, be sure to include plenty of transactional or ‘buyer’ keyphrases. Then when searchers enter queries such as ‘best deals on Sydney baby gifts’, you’ll be ranking well.

Cyber Monday may be a quintessentially American phenomenon but we are talking the World Wide Web, after all. The point is for Australian SEOs that if you get your clients’ sites setup properly and every day can be a bumper sales day for them.

About Nathanael Vanderkolk

Nathanael Vanderkolk is the Director of the Smart SEO Company, a SEO Agency in Sydney, Australia. Smart SEO Sydney has a keen awareness of the latest approaches to online marketing. Follow him on , Facebook and Twitter.
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