As the tail end of the year comes around, many Internet retailers gear up for what will hopefully be the busiest part of their year. Of course, this is also one of the most nerve-racking times of the year as well, especially for those who have a disproportionate amount of their business relying on the success of only a few months of the year.
As you gear up for the holiday season, SEO blends more than ever into all of your other marketing efforts. Here are a few tips to help you on your merry way.
Audit Time
If you haven't already, now is the time to do a quick audit of your site. For many, a code freeze is or will soon be in place, so there won't be any changes to the site, but this is hopefully an opportunity to fix anything that isn't working right. Especially if you just underwent any major changes in the last few months, this is a critical time to find anything that slipped through the cracks. And if you aren't under a regimented code freeze, it may not be a bad idea to implement a self-imposed one as this can be a dangerous time to make major changes to your site.
- Double check your contact form, live chat or other mechanisms that are in place for customer contact.
- Review the last couple months of log files or your site analytics, looking for any 404 errors for missing files... moved or removed pages, broken links on your site, or missing graphics.
- Make note of your most active pages. While you probably won't be making any major changes to these pages, they might be good targets for including links to other key site pages to route holiday traffic.
Reach Out to Friends
An existing customer is much more likely to be receptive and to buy than a brand new customer. If you have an existing customer list and permission to contact them, now is a great time to kick off the season with a pre-holiday email or two. If you have a list but don't have a delivery mechanism in place, look to solutions such as ExactTarget or GravityMail to do the heavy lifting for you.
Map Your Blog
Hopefully you've already implemented a blog on your site. If not, then you've already found your New Year's resolution. (What a relief to have that out of the way, eh!) The future of Internet retailing is about being more than just a retailer. Today, anyone can setup shop online. The retailers that will thrive will be those who connect with and deliver more than a shopping cart experience.
For those who do have blogs in place, map out your blogging for the season just like you map out your sales and advertising calendar. Plan posts now and start working on them for publishing later so that you can keep on top of them during the busy holiday season. But make sure that your blog isn't just another sales pitch. Your blog should be about connecting and communicating with your readers. Share some holiday stories, maybe your favorite recipes, or offer helpful packing and shipping tips. Any product mentions should be done carefully and subtly and in moderation.
Go Social
If you've been waiting for your film debut, here's your chance. A light-hearted video on YouTube could be just the thing for a little extra traffic boost. Or if you have products that require complicated assembly, some short and helpful videos might be unexpected holiday hits.
Connecting Offline and Online
If you live and breathe SEO or web marketing, offline may be the furthest thing from your mind. Of course, there are other angles to the offline world. Hopefully you have the basic fundamentals covered, like making sure that your web address appears in all your mailings, advertisements, and anywhere else you may be marketing offline. If you have brick-and-mortar locations, it doesn't hurt to remind people that you also have a website.
Don't forget that many of the traditional offline entities now have online presences themselves. TV news, radio stations, and newspaper reporters are often looking for interesting holiday stories, from the "most unusual" gift ideas to how to entertain for the holidays. Come up with an interesting story idea and you may not only get valuable airtime or print mention, but a link from their site to yours.
Be smart, get creative and this holiday season could be your most successful yet.
Whether you have multiple locations or just one, local is fast becoming an important market online. Traditionally, the local marketing battlefield consisted of phone directory listings, billboards, newspapers, TV, radio, and anywhere else that made sense to get your name seen. The web and search engines have opened up a new local battlefield, and smart businesses are moving quickly to gain a foothold.
Surprisingly though, many businesses have failed to tap into one of the more powerful tools available for reaching the local market. If that's surprising, then what makes this amazing is that this tool is free and will become even more important as local search information continues to be blended into regular search results.
The major search engines saw the growth and importance in local search years ago and started putting tools in place to not only help searchers, but also businesses. What the search engines may have discovered was that many searchers weren't aware of these local search tools, like local.google.com and local.yahoo.com. Instead, people just searched for local things where they searched for everything else, which further helps to explain things like universal search.
What was really exciting though was that the search engines also provided businesses with a way to get listed. Yet many businesses have yet to tap into this opportunity. If this sounds like you, then there is no time to waste, and better yet, getting listed takes no time at all. The process varies by engine, but is often as simple as having a postcard sent to your business address, receiving an automated phone call at your business location, or filling out a form or email.
Go to local.google.com and click on the "Add or Edit your business: Learn more" link along the left side. If you don't have a Google Account yet, you'll need to create one. Once you've done that, you'll get access to the Local Business Center, where you can add or edit your business listing.
Yahoo
At listings.local.yahoo.com, you'll see that Yahoo provides different listing levels, including a basic free listing. The Basic listing is done in 4 easy steps, while the paid versions have an extra step or two.
MSN Live Search
Not as direct, you'll need to click on the Help link in the upper right corner at local.live.com, and then select the first FAQ item, "How do I add my business listing to Live Search Maps?" From there you'll get a link to an infoUSA.com form for adding or updating your information as need be.
Ask
Even Ask wants to list your local business. Even less intuitive than the others, you'll need to follow the Help link in the upper right corner at city.ask.com, then toward the bottom of the FAQs is one labeled, "I'm not finding my business in AskCity. How can I get it added?" With Ask, you'll need to send off an email with some information to Ask's Customer Service.
What do you get when you mix social media and local search? Well the team at Yahoo Local would like you to think they have the answer. They may not be too far from wrong.
Social media sites have become all the rage as they bring human connection and interaction to an electronic world. We can share photos with not only friends and family, but the entire world, tell others what we think of a particular product, upload movies of the crazy stuff we do in our spare time, or chat with anyone who happens to find their way to our little space on the web.
On the search front, local and mobile searches are the new frontier as users determine that finding the nearest Greek restaurant in their little corner of the world is more useful than finding restaurants in Greece... unless their corner of the world lists Greece as the mailing address.
Social and local are two highly competitive areas that many are working hard to capture, and what better way than through combining the two. Yahoo Local just announced new features to further their position within this arena. They are tightening up the integration of user reviews with social aspects, like the ability to comment on other users' reviews. Social interaction takes on a whole different element with local search. Reviews from your neighbors about the restaurants and businesses in your own city are hard to top.
The implications for local businesses are huge, perhaps one of the biggest influencers in decades. Whether you are a small mom-and-pop or a corporation with stores in every major city, tapping into your local web presence has never been more important. Encouraging your customers to review your business could be some of the most important advertising you engage in this year. But whatever you do, fight the urge to falsely "self-propagate" your online reputation... the negative reviews that will come out when that is discovered could be some of the most damaging advertising.
Hat tip to my colleague Chris Smith for pointing out that Google has rolled out ads within Google Maps Japan.
It looks like the ads were just contextual based on the location, rather than being from a restaurant-specific search (although I don't read Japanese so I can't tell what the query was).
To me this looks very busy. And I'd imagine the ad density clutter will only get worse over time.
Perhaps Google feels that Japanese users of Google Maps will be more tolerant of the ads and the busier interface? Or perhaps this is the shape of things to come for all us Google Maps users.
Personally I hope it's not the latter. I would not be happy having to wade through a sea of franchise logos whenever I use Google Maps. Honestly I could care less where all the local McDonald's, 7Elevens, AM/PMs, etc. all are.
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