Countdown for the Christmas season – SEO and SEM for your online-shop
Christmas is only 90 days away and this usually means a lot of work for online merchants. The number of Chistmas presents bought on the internet is increasing which is not surprising given the fact that most of the people don’t really enjoy christmas-shopping in overcrowded Department Stores. Here lies a great potential for online shops which means Chrtistmas is not “business as usual”.
To profit from this trend you should take the following steps to optimize your online store for Christmas.
Step 1: Focus on Top-products
As an online merchant you probably have noticed that there is a certain products sell well during the christmas season. So now that you have identified the top sellers you can create a SEM-campaign according to that.
To achieve the best results one should put the top christmas products on the Start page and special SEM-Adverts should be placed for them.
Especially the combination of the two things implies a great potential. A landing page that was created for a certain product or a product range that is linked to the advert and gives decision guidance such as – which colour of socks is fit for which customer’s age, or special categories like “Presents for Grandmas”, “Presents for granddads” etc. but should also contain important cutomer information like: free delivery, guaranteed delivery until Christmas,…)
A shop that incorporates these kind of categories in a very good way is “The Present Finder of Sherborne”
Step 2: Special Demand for certain keywords.
A closer look at Google trends shows a great amount of searches containing certain Christmas related keywords.
To make shure you’re found when people enter these keywords, we have the following recommendations:
SEO:
There should be landing pages for the relevant keywords like for example a present finder that offers ideas for presents for a certain target group. Generally there will be a very strong competition for these search terms which will make it quite difficult for small shops to compete in getting good search results for these keywords. But creating landingpages like this still makes a lot of sense because they can be used to create internal links and can help the customer in the shopping process.
SEM:
Online merchants should incorporate the relevant keywords into their SEM campaigns. Especially shops that have a physical store should invest into local marketing. A wellness club in Hamburg for example could place an ad that appears only when somebody enters “wellness coupon” and is located in a range of 25 kilometers from Hamburg.
Here you can also notice the difference between SEO und SEM. Where as SEO is more strategic because it takes a longer time to build up links so you’re site will be found and have reasonable ranking.
When you use SEM, these problems don’t exist because campaigns can be started and also stopped wthin a second.
Step 3: Content optimisation of your SEM campaign
Your SEM campaign should also be optimized from the content side. Practically this means that the right selling arguments should be used. OK a header of 25 characters and and textbox with 2X35 characters text in a Google AdWords ad is not alot of space but still it is neccessary to include all important information like:
- Guaranteed delivery until Christmas
- All Gifts can be delivered in Christmas gift wrapping
- All gifts are returnable
If and how these elements work can be found out by A/B testing. The best thing is to place different Google AdWords ads and then analyse the resulting click rates. This way you can find which of the marketing messages works best.
Step 4: Chancel your SEM campaign in time!
Even if the focus of online merchants around christmas time is to deliver all his orders, one should not forget to cancel the Christmas SEM campaign in time and go back to not Christmas related advertising.
In the case that the product can not be delivered until Christmas, a clever Online merchant could send a well designed “coming soon” PDF that can be placed under the Christmas tree as a temporary substitute for the real present.
Setp 5: Adjust your Bids
Just before Christmas there’s always an increase in the prices of SEM-bids. Online merchants should regularly check an adjust their bids. But remember: Higher click prices normally also result in a higher CPA (cost per aquisition).
Step 6: Content is king!
When you’re looking at SEO you’ll realize soon that it doesn’t take longs for content on blogs to get into the Google index and often get very good rankings, too. So if you have a well linked blog, start using it to sell your products.
An online merchant that is selling toys could write and article like “The latest learnig toys for children” to be found in searches like “learning toys children”.
Step 7: Learn from your experience
The beautiful thing about christmas is, that it comes again every year. Online merchants should learn from their past mistakes and use their experience to improve their shop from year to year. Which products sell well? Which marketing channel has worked well at what time?
So as the dust has settled you should write down everything you’ve learned from the past christmas business. But the main thing is, to support all the results by web-analytics figures.
Conclusion
The time until next christmas is short, but the optimisation for search engines and SEM-campaigns surely pays off. But the 7 steps should be implemented incorporating the online merchants experience and type of customers. But finally these efforts will hopefully result in a higher customer satisfaction and lower costs.
The german version of this article by bloofusion can be found here.
