For any of your upcoming seasonally related promotions in
search engine marketing this is a reminder to think well ahead
of the season when preparing. If you are thinking about doing
some new Halloween related promotions for instance, the time
to be working on them would be as early as July (rather than
starting in late September.) I have a client with a costume
store and the first time I optimized it I started in July and
by September the traffic was already spiking up to 50 to 60%
each week. And of course the big month for costumes is always
October. For the month of October that year, the client had
nearly 70,000 user sessions and several million page views
just for those 4 weeks. Okay, so if I had of waited until
September to start the optimization for the Halloween season,
we would have missed some huge opportunities.
However,
let's think on ahead now for an example towards Christmas seasonal
promotions if your Web site is well suited for it.
September/October is the perfect time to start getting your
high performance pages into shape. So let’s give you a few
quick tips of where you might begin, depending on what type of
product you are selling.
One
of the smartest places to start, is right within Wordtracker
for your research. Not just for keywords, but also to
determine which important keywords that a search engine
“thinks” are related to the season (or to your product.)
Remember, that while it’s important to research what you
think might be important to your “buying audience,” there
can also be benefit in exploring what terms are related to
each other based on what a “search engine knows.
So
how can we find out what keywords for example, might be
related to a term like “Christmas?”
Remember, the information we are after is not always just
based on human logic, but it is based on what a search engine
may "understand" through artificial
intelligence.
Go
into the Wordtracker Member area with an open mind.
If you are not yet a member, no problem.
Check Out Wordtracker's Free Keyword Tool Now
Example:
- Go
into the Members area of Wordtracker and click to perform
a search using Google data.
- Wordtracker’s
instructions say “Simply enter one generic term that
describes your business or service.”
However, what we are going to do is enter a
“season” as a single word, for example…Christmas.
Then the click Proceed Button.
- RESULT:
You get a long list of words related to “Christmas”
based on what a search engine knows.
Here
are a few obvious results:
-
christmas
-
Christmas
-
xmas
-
cards
-
songs
-
carols
-
recipes
-
trees
-
ornaments
-
stories
-
santa
Okay, but then explore the list a little further.
Would you have thought that a search engine could possibly
"know" that “Christmas” relates to words such as
these?
- traditions
- greetings
- festivals
- wrapping
paper
- Charles
Dickens
- Angels
- E-cards
- Tiny
Tim
- Jacob
Marley
- As
well many, many other terms.
The
thing to understand is that all of these topics can further
explored and drilled into for niche phrases that you might
never ever consider as being important to searchers at
Christmas.
They also represent opportunities for you to create some new
original content that your searchers are looking for but are
not too competitive and easy to grab good placement for. Of
course you have to stay focused on what’s best for your Web
site, but you should find this very powerful to assist you
with idea generation.
But
then you can take any of these words and drill down deeper by
just ticking the little box beside each word that you wish to
investigate. Then scroll to the bottom and perform a
“competition search” for even greater detail.
So
what did I come away with in this short example?
If
I wanted to sell a "christmas rope light" in
my ornament store, I might do fairly well with it.
The KEI value is 211.4 and it’s been searched for 360 times
in the last 60 days (and it’s not even that close to
Christmas yet.) Only 613 compete count for that exact phrase
so it would not be hard to grab top placement for.
But
what if you don’t sell this product? You could still partner
with someone who does sell the product and set up an affiliate
sales relationship with a supplier at Commission
Junction. You make the sale and the supplier ships the
product and commission junction tracks each sale and sends you
a monthly commission.
The
biggest tip of all though, is to give yourself some time to
get your content researched and put together and visited by
the search engine robots even at least a month before the
season arrives. You’ll be ahead of the crowd and by the time
heavier seasonal activity kicks in, you’ll have no regrets.
Best
regards
John Alexander
john@searchengineworkshops.com
http://www.searchengineworkshops.com
Check Out Wordtracker's Free Keyword Tool Now
Listen to some free Wordtracker
Magic audio tips?
Read more Wordtracker
related articles here.
About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with partner
Robin Nobles as well as online search engine marketing courses
through Online Web
Training. John is author of an
e-book called Wordtracker
Magic and co-author of
the Totally Non-Technical
Guide for A Successful Web Site. John
and Robin also host an event called the Ultra
Advanced Symposium on a quarterly basis.
