The holiday shopping season has always been the most profitable time of the year for online retailers. It’s when sales are at their peak.  Here are several easy SEM strategies you can implement right now during the holidays run-up to maximize your potential revenue.

1. Prepare & schedule your campaigns - now.

   It’s no surprise that many online marketers have already started to put their seasonal strategies into action. The time for planning your holiday campaign is now. Decide on your objectives by thinking about what you want to achieve with your holiday campaign. Look back at last year’s performance to see what worked and what didn’t. Plan your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords for this year and start setting things up.

2. Plan your budgets carefully.

   As everything gets more competitive and bids tend to increase over the holidays, make sure your budgets are large enough to keep your campaigns live. Segment your bids as much as possible and watch your conversion costs. Bid up profitable seasonal products and hot items and expand their related keyword phrases.

3. Promotions.

   People expect offers on holidays and creative promotions will attract customers. Retailers that don’t serve competitive offers will often lose online sales to those that do. Consider offers such as free shipping, overnight delivery and discounts over orders of certain sizes. Highlight your offers with creative text in your ads to attract buyers to click on your ads.

4. Develop a mobile strategy.

   Consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones to perform searches. So optimize your website across mobile devices and utilize features such as Product Listing Ads and location extensions.

Keep the above tips in mind as you implement your holiday strategy and remember that with some good planning and knowledge of the business you should be able improve online campaign performance and increase your conversions. (Also, if you want to learn about Google's local product listing ads, click here.)