Is your website prepared for the holiday season? If not you could be losing out on some big money.

After Black Friday -- the first shopping day after Thanksgiving in the US -- comes Cyber Monday, the official start of the online Christmas shopping season. It's a very high traffic/sales period for online retail stores that continues until about a week before Christmas!

Studies have proven that Mondays are a very high sales day in the online retail market. More and more as you can see from the graph below, shoppers are forgetting about the crowds and the parking nightmare at the mall and shopping from the comfort of their own living rooms. The days of waiting in line at the post office for hours are gone too, when you can just order the gift online and have it mailed right to the gift recipient already wrapped and ready to go.

It may not be too late to do some keyword research to ramp up your web pages and your PPC campaign. Use a tool like http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/ which will give you some Wordtracker data and hook you right up with Google Trends to see how popular this keyword has been in the past so can make the right choice.

Also try the https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal for some quick searches and good history.

Set up a special optimized holiday section and take advantage of some instant pay-per-click traffic. If your site is frequented by the search engine spiders on a regular basis you may be able to squeeze in some rankings but don't depend on it.

Offer gift certificates on your website.

Utilize your email list to send a special holiday promotion.

Swap ads with a complementary website for even more traffic.

See if there is anywhere else you could purchase advertising that is related to your niche market.

Try using Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist to generate more holiday sales.

Send out press releases to get out the word and create a buzz -- another strategy we have covered in detail in the Search Marketing Lab. Are you carrying one of this year's hot items? Does what you sell fit into a big trend? Can you make a top-ten list of great gifts (that you sell, of course) for your typical customer? Write a press release and distribute it via one of these services: Marketwire, PR Web, PrimeNewswire, or PR Newswire.

What about checking out http://www.auctiontips.com to get some great tips on how to successfully sell your products on eBay.

Use incentives your website: free shipping or gift wrapping, card etc. Give visitors a strong reason to purchase from you today!

Last month we covered local search strategies in the Search Marketing Lab Newsletter. This is a perfect time to make sure you have all these points in place if you have a brick-and -mortar retail store. This time of year people will be doing a high number of searches and looking for locations near them to buy their presents.

Whether you're online, offline, or a bit of both, act now!

Wishing you and your family the best of the season,

Nicole Ephgrave