Post-Pandemic Shopping and SEO Projected as Drivers of 2021 Holiday Sales

If you're in e-commerce, Holiday 2021 looks promising...if you heed this advice.
SIA Team
July 21, 2021

You can probably guess that, for holiday 2020, e-commerce sales saw astounding growth. In fact, Digital Commerce 360 says sales grew 45% year-over-year.

That said, it’s a bit hard to predict that this staggering growth will continue into this holiday season. For one, the phenomenal sales growth that ecommerce saw last year was, in large part, due to the pandemic.

However, this year, the pandemic doesn’t seem to have as strong a hold on people, and restrictions are seemingly being lifted.

But, even if year-over-year online sales growth aren’t as strong in 2021 as they were for 2020, we do know that what we saw last year solidified people’s willingness to shop online, and that is certainly going to continue well into the future.

And, when people are looking to shop online, where do they sometimes begin their shopping?

Online, with search.

That’s why search trends, such as Google Trends, are good indicators of goods, products, and services are on people’s minds.

Our Advice for Setting Yourself Up for Holiday 2021 Success

  1. Use Google Trends to try to gauge the demand of people in your market.

Google Trends is like the Google you know, with the exception that you can enter a search query and find trend information for that query.

You can find seasonal demand for a given query, and see if there’s been an annual growth in the demand for that query.

  1. If you want free traffic, but your site’s pages don’t load quickly on mobile devices, get that fixed!

You may not be aware of this, but it can give you a bit on an advantage over your competitors: we’re in a Mobile-First era.

In short, that means that Google weighs the Page Speed of your site’s pages on mobile devices. In other words, how well your pages load on a mobile device will help determine where you rank in the search engines.

You can run most of your main pages through Page Speed Insights and see where they score. You ideally want to be as close to 100% as possible.

  1. Be sure your site is well-optimized for search.

There’s a lot that goes into a site’s search engine optimization (SEO).

It’s a big topic, but basically, you want to have a robust, fast-loading site that’s better than anything else out there. You want a site that provides more valuable information than any of your competitors.

At least, that should be your aim.

You can also register your site in Google Search Console and gain some search insights through that platform.

Source: MediaPost