Merry Christmas to one and all! It’s a busy period for businesses and SEO agencies alike especially if you operate in the consumer market; I personally love the festivities not just because it’s an opportunity to eat lots of mince pies and watch re-runs of Only Fools and Horses, but because as an online marketer it provides plenty of opportunities to engage audiences in interesting ways.
Lots of businesses have high season periods but Christmas can be a make or break time. In fact some businesses rely on this period to turn a profit for the entire year. This often means more aggressive advertising. Search engine optimisation utilises a wide variety of tactics and techniques that need to be planned and implemented with time to spare. What works for the rest of the year may need to be modified to be more effective at Christmas.
Using various forms of advertising requires greater integration across the board. An entire campaign works much better when it is executed seamlessly from a time, placement and messaging point of view. As with any plan the execution often determines how successful it is going to be. Integration is key so get your web designers, media planners and buyers and SEO consultants talking so they can work together on how to deliver a better Christmas campaign.
A big push at Christmas will require some tweaks to your website. A specific Christmas deals section can work wonders with free delivery can work wonders and better still you can collect vital visitor and sales data. You can even employ tracking tags and tracked phone numbers so you can identify how well your advertising is performing. Knowing how many sales your SEO, PPC, Banner advertising and email marketing are delivering and at what rate can help with optimisation and future campaign spend.
From an SEO point of view I find that if you properly devise a strategy you can actually gain quite a good advantage over competitors. Depending on the product or service there are plenty of long-tail opportunities that are relatively easy to rank highly for in a short amount of time. Articles and PR releases work wonders if they are Christmas themed. Of course they have to be interesting and relevant, but I have found they get picked up far more providing some easy wins.
For a well thought out SEO campaign sit down with your SEO company a good 4-5 months before. Look at what you can do with your site for the festive period and what products and services sell well. Don’t forget to look at your closest competitors work out what they do and try and match or beat them like for like. Devise a content theme and make sure the campaign is integrated with everything else you want to do. Let your SEO agency go away have a think and come back to you with some ideas, search volumes etc. Long-tail works well around this time but it’s good to calculate some rough required sale volumes and cost per sales for measurement purposes. Lastly look at how you can track your efforts not only for SEO but separately for everything else too.
I found some interesting stats around Black Friday and shopping using mobile devices. So depending on your business it really is the time to look at how you can take advantage of mobile shopping before your competitors do.
- 15% of all searches made on Black Friday came from mobile devices
- Mobile device shopping has increased by 150% since last year
- 42% of mobile shoppers plan to use their mobile devices to shop or research sales on Cyber Monday
(Stats from Infomob)
- bdrlondon's blog
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