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Christmas Time for Search Marketing
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, and Bill Stroll, Sales and Marketing Manager,
StepForth Placement Inc.
June 29, 2005
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Christmas is coming. Six months from today, retailers and E-Tailers relying
on a strong holiday season will be assessing the bounties of the season.
The winter holiday season is the most important segment of the year for
North American retail businesses, often accounting for more than half
of annual revenues. For many businesses, the period between October and
mid-January makes or breaks the bottom line. For online businesses, the
early months of summer are the right time to be thinking about the end
of the year. Conventional wisdom states it takes about three to four months
to achieve Top10 placements with an already established website. It can
take even longer with new sites.
Seasonal advertising is almost always based on what are called saturation
campaigns. For instance, North American consumers will be swamped with images
of Santa and sugar plums. Songs by Bing Crosby and David Bowie will ring
nostalgically through our minds. Streets, shopping malls and schools will
be festooned with tinsel, holiday decorations and ornamentation designed
to get one and all into the season of getting and giving. Increasingly the
Internet has taken the holiday spirit, or at least the shopping part of
it, away from the mall and onto the monitor.
Savvy retailers are taking advantage of the ever expanding online audience
afforded via search marketing and Internet advertising. Retailers who once
had a localized marketplace are now competing with retailers from around
the world for customers. Regardless of the fact that nobody’s real-world
store is starting to look a lot like Christmas yet, the race for strong
search engine placements for Christmas related items begins this month.
Is your website positioned to achieve the visibility it needs to give you
the Christmas season you want for your business?
Time is of the essence. While it might be the most wonderful time of the
year, Christmas, from a search marketing perspective, is just around the
corner. This is an opportune time to begin the process of planning for success.
Choosing strong keyword phrases to market towards is extremely important.
Lycos has studied keywords used by search users for years, compiling the
weekly list, the Lycos 50. Appearing for the first time this week as the
eighteenth most searched word is, “Christmas”.
That conforms to StepForth’s weekly tracking of holiday related keyword
terms which shows a steady rise in the use of Christmas related keyword
phrases starting right about now. In May 2004, 73,276 people entered the
word “Christmas” at Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing). In
July 2004, that number jumped to 90,215. In August 2004, there were 111,261
Overture searches for Christmas. By October 2004 there were nearly 415,000
searchers for the word Christmas. In November, the floodgates open with
2,426,425 searches, a number that more than doubled in December with 5,383,254
searches conducted for Christmas. A common thread in the study shared by
all holiday related phrases shows interest starts to increase radically
90 – 120 days before the calendar date of the holiday.
You might first want to figure out exactly how you wish to be visible on
the major search engines as we move towards the holiday buying season. There
are two basic types of search engine advertising characterized as Organic
or Paid. Organic ads are the general free listings that come up in orders
of 1 – 10 under related keywords or keyword phrases. Paid ads tend
to be found above or to the right hand side of organic search results and
are also distributed across networks of millions of other websites. Knowing
the most advantageous ways of using both common forms of search advertising
builds a strong foundation and forms a good starting point.
Both types of ad drive traffic though recent studies have shown that traffic
driven by organic listings outpaces traffic driven by paid-advertising by
a margin of almost 80%.
When most search engine users think about search, they visualize the free,
organic listings. Achieving a Top10 organic placement is essential for online
retailers who want to be noticed against the millions of other Christmas
or holiday related listings that will begin to appear in the coming months.
A recent Eye-tracking study of search engine users by Kelowna based SEM
Gord Hotchkiss reveals, “There seems to be a “F” shaped
scan pattern, where the eye tends to travel vertically along the far left
side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc)
and then scanning to the right if something caught the participant’s
attention.” In other words, because they occupy the best real estate
on the screen, organic placements are seen by a greater number of eyeballs
than their paid-advertising counterparts over to the right.
That’s not to say that paid search advertising is a waste of money.
It most certainly is not. It pays to pay for paid-search advertising for
a number of reasons. Paid search advertising offers distribution opportunities
that organic listings do not. Through their networks of partnered websites
and publications, ads placed with both Google and Yahoo, (along with second
and third tier competitors) tend to appear on literally hundreds of millions
of other web properties, based on similarities between text on those properties
and text appearing in the ad-copy. Known as contextual distribution, the
networks of websites displaying paid advertising from one of the major search
engines continues to grow as more independent webmasters sign up as distribution
partners.
Another good reason to plan for a paid search advertising campaign is the
instant gratification of instantly appearing on the first page of search
results under the keyword phrases you have chosen to bid on. Seconds after
entering your ad-copy and placing your click-through bids, your advertisement
will start to appear on search results. PPC is often used as a temporary
measure by search engine optimizers until organic listings begin to appear
in order to ensure their client’s service or product receives attention
as quickly as possible.
Most search marketers agree that a coordinated search engine marketing
strategy is important for advertisers in competitive categories and during
highly competitive seasons such as Christmas. Understanding the common behaviours
of search engine users helps to define the parameters of a smart search
marketing campaign. A groundbreaking study by iProspect CEO Fredrick
Marckini shows that 92% of all sales generated by search engine marketing actually
occur offline. In other words, search engine users tend to research products
before purchasing them from a local source or ordering them via traditional
mail. This makes search marketing, both in paid and organic forms, an important
branding tool. High placement in organic listings, accompanied by a paid-ad
which is distributed on other sites relating to the product advertised,
brings credibility, customer awareness, and ultimately, converted sales.
Christmas sales have increased every year for the past five years as have
searches for holiday related keywords. Just as the seasons follow predictable
patterns, search engine users tend to choose seasonally predictable phrases.
Given the fact major interest in Christmas related words begins to climb
in October, July is the right time to start your organic search engine optimization
work. It is also a smart time to begin planning your paid-search advertising
campaign and discussing strategy with your search engine marketers. Knowing
the trends and how to harness the power of search engine marketing is only
part of the battle. Making effective use of that knowledge is the other.
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