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The Search Marketing Calendar is Driven by Sales, not Spiders
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
December 5 2005
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It is twenty days shy of Christmas and Bill Stroll, our sales and marketing
manager just spent ten minutes on the phone talking about Valentines
Day. It’s not really a strange subject to come up in conversation
at this time of the year. Valentines Day is the next major commercial
marketing event. The nature of search marketing leads us to plan months
into
the
future as seasonal and event specific content needs to be developed,
posted, spidered in order to achieve eventual top10 placements.
As recently as three years ago, we would caution clients to expect a three
to sixteen week turn-around time between posting optimized content and positive
results. For some, that would mean the development of commercial content
for Valentines Day might begin in late October and early November in order
to have it ready for a post-Christmas shift in target audience. Now, content
posted to established (long-term) websites on a Monday could appear in the
Top10 before the following Friday, sometimes hours after it was posted.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that content creators and webmasters
targeting a mid-February audience should wait until the end of January or
early February to begin to develop Valentine’s related content though.
As the years have gone on, a lot more information gets added to the web
and much of that information is more professional, better written and far
better optimized for search placement. For smaller businesses, this can
mean long hours of writing, researching and designing in order to have a
series of seasonal pages ready for posting in order to compete with larger
websites.
Successful marketing is a process of long-term planning and execution of
those plans in an ordered campaign. When designing a sales-orientated website,
planning for annual special events is a good way to capture interest and
increase sales. Search engine users are fairly predictable. Being the general
public, they are interested in whatever is interesting at any given time.
As search marketers, we know when search traffic will spike for specific
holidays and events with a far greater degree of accuracy than the television
and print media can offer.
Search marketers also know that seasonally topical information can be posted
at any time of the year. Think of the search engines as a reference guide
to a massive filing cabinet. There might be files about any number of subjects
amongst the vast amount of information stored in that cabinet but its specific
items are only accessed when needed. A Top10 placement can be achieved for
products or services relating to Valentine’s Day in September and
remain in place months after February 14th, provided the page is actively
updated and not left static and stagnant.
Long term content is often much easier to get placements for than new content
is. Documents that exist for longer periods of time tend to have more incoming
links and are viewed as more “trusted” by search engines. As
mentioned above, that content should change from time to time as a static
page is not seen as favorably as an active one.
In previous years, search engines tended to put more emphasis on the Home,
or index page of a website. That would necessitate seasonally topical content
being inserted on the first page of the site six to twelve weeks before
placements were expected, or the development of seasonal sub-domains. Now
that search engines tend to treat all documents within a domain as equals,
event or seasonal information can be an ongoing part of a much larger website.
This again allows search marketers to view the web as a filing cabinet.
It is a good thing to have information easily accessible at any time of
the year and it is always a good time to promote seasonally topical information,
even if the season or event is six months away.
There is a natural rush towards the date of the seasonal holiday or event
that should be accounted for in search marketing planning. During the 2004
US elections, real estate in Maryland and Virginia was reaching a peak that
tends to follow US election cycles. In the weeks leading up to the election,
a massive rush from Maryland and Virginia based realtors flooded many SEO
shops, even those of us a continent away on the west coast. Realtors who
first approached SEO or SEM shops naturally tended to fare better than those
who waited until mid-rush. (Many SEO and SEM shops offer exclusivity on
keyword targets to clients and tend to not represent more than one client
per keyword or keyword phrase).
A point Bill made in our discussion stood out. We should be telling our
clients to try to envision their websites months or even a year in advance
and asking questions about long-term marketing planning. What are our clients
doing at various points in the year? Is there information on their websites
that would be searched for with greater frequency one month over another?
Are there products or services that have a seasonal tie-in?
In previous years, spiders drove the search marketing sales cycle. To get
a strong Valentines Day placement, we would be working on optimizing content
starting this week. Today, the search marketing sales cycle is much more
similar to that of the brick-and-mortar world. For smaller clients and those
with new websites, today is the time to starting to plan for next year’s
Halloween to Christmas season, along with the dozen or so other consumer
events of the calendar year.
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