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Start Your Holiday Web Marketing Campaign NowThursday, July 7, 2005 Start Your Holiday Web Marketing Campaign NowBy: Rocky Lewis VP and Co-founder, SageRock.com This is a call to all retailers that want to make a killing this Holiday season. You need to have your Holiday web marketing plan created and finalized in July so that you can get started in August. For SEO This may sound very obvious to the seasoned retailer, but we get a lot of panicked calls in the middle of October about getting placement in organic search to cash in on skyrocketing free traffic. Usually, the potential client has a paid search account they are managing and, when the traffic spikes in October, they start spending wildly over budget to get as many sales as possible. This prompts the boss to ask, “Why aren’t we in these free listings? We should be there, and then we wouldn’t have to spend all this money!” And then we get that call, and unfortunately have to give the bad news that they are pursuing SEO too late and should have called in July. The other scenario is the company that assumed they had everything in order and forgot to make sure last year’s listings were still on the engines. When they see a less dramatic spike in traffic from the previous year, they also call panicked in mid October. We have to give them the bad news too – that old search listings must have vanished when engines changed algorithms or more likely when the company did that redesign, switched servers, or rewrote content. This July deadline is an absolute must if you plan to use SEO promotion for the Holidays. You cannot wait another moment. Optimization for free listing search takes at least 2-4 months to saturate an index, and that’s if the site is already doing fairly well online. Maybe you need to come up on a few new phrases, maybe your site’s old positions are starting to sag, or maybe you need to fill in some major listing gaps to cash in on neglected markets. But regardless of the scope of the project, you must start organizing your team and requesting proposals now. If you’re giving the site a design facelift for the holidays, build your SEO in right from the start. This will save time, money, and help you get good listings in time for the holiday rush. Waiting until a site design is complete could mean missing your SEO marketing window for this season. For Paid Search If your Holiday marketing plan only involves turning on that old PPC campaign, then you may have a little extra time, but you still want to be proactive and make sure you dust off that account before re-launching. Overture and Google are offering all kinds of new budgeting and management options, and you’ll want to make sure you have the latest version of your management software installed before crunch time. In order to maximize your ROI, it makes sense to look at last year’s conversion data and start refining the campaign ads, bid strategies, and landing pages now. You may also need to increase your budget this year just to keep the traffic numbers steady compared to last season. Paid search is hotter than ever, and they’ll be lots of new players driving up prices, even on those sweet, unspotted, high-conversion words you found last year. New Opportunities So what new things can you do this year to catch even more of that delicious Holiday traffic? Consider some of these ideas: A Holiday Blog – Not right for every retailer, certainly, but you’d be surprised what kind of creative content can be written about your industry. Blogs are hot in search right now and blogging with targeted, phrase-related content could land you a great position on a normally impossible-to-get Holiday phrase. Google Image Ads – In an attempt to revive the content network, Google now offers image ads on that network with pay-per-click pricing. That means not paying CPM rates, but click rates for banner ads! So, if you’ve considered trying out banners ads for the Holidays, this is a really safe way to get started. Monthly or Weekly E-zine Sends – Time to breathe life into that current and potential client email list. Read up on your CAN-SPAM laws and get sending. Start in September and stay in the forefront of their minds all the way through December. Create Paid Search Landing Pages – You have all the log data from last year. You know what phrases converted and which ones didn’t. Why not try and boost low and mid-level converting phrases with specific landing pages created especially for that phrase’s audience? The audience typing each phrase in your paid search account comes from a unique buying perspective (where are they in the buying cycle?) and is typically looking for a very specific type of product. Why not write content and design a web page with them specifically in mind? Holiday Link Campaign – It’ll be a Christmas miracle if incoming, Holiday-related links populate the internet without any effort on your part. You can construct and work a link campaign tailored to Holiday offerings. Be sure and choose one or two targeted holiday phrases to use as the actual text link on partner sites. We don’t endorse farms, so this strategy will take lots of time and should be started right away. But in a pinch it makes sense to buy Holiday links from link brokers online. If you liked this article, consider signing up for our information newsletter. All of our articles come directly from our newsletter we send out every other week on Tuesday. Consider signing up. It's free and easy. 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