Brought to you by Richard Zwicky
The holiday shopping season is upon us, but the real rush begins the day after Thanksgiving with Black Friday, when many shoppers hit the web. Although successful SEO strategies should be practiced year-round, there are things you can do today which will dramatically affect your bottom line for this holiday season. There's no black magic involved, and you can report real results quickly.
How do I know? From experience; I've run many highly successful SEO campaigns for businesses, both big and small. More than once, I've worked on websites with less than 25,000 daily organic search referrals and transformed them into sites with more than 750,000 unique daily search referrals within days, not weeks, all via white-hat SEO.
Many retailers can do the same and should optimize their websites for seasonal sales. Following the 10 tips below will make a difference in your site's performance and overall marketing ROI.
1. Define your goals
This is basic business 101, but it's a step most companies skip in their SEO planning. Do you know which items your purchasing department has, and in what quantities, as well as the latest weekly sales forecast and current inventory position? You may not want to spend too much time on the hot-selling item that you're already kicking out the door, but focus instead on products that are either slower-selling or have year-round appeal.
2. Quantify potential demand
It's a tough job, but you absolutely need to forecast how many people will search for any given product by type and category. Thankfully, technology has been developed to complete this task easily, but you can still do it by hand too. Remember: you need to quantify not just how many people search for the root term of a given product (e.g., "stocking," "sweater," "blender"), but also all the varied and long-tail terms they use to search for the identical product (e.g., "mixer," "mix-master," "countertop appliances," etc.).
3. Identify long-tail opportunities
There will be hundreds, often thousands, of long-tail terms that searchers will use to find what they're looking for. Determining which ones to target for your SEO campaign is one of the most critical decisions in the entire process and also one of the most difficult. It's not always the terms with the greatest number of referrals, but the quality of the traffic each term drives to your website. Which terms have low bounce rates? Which referrals result in more page views or more time spent on the site? These metrics inform which terms are most effective in attracting qualified traffic that leads to more transactions, all while minimizing acquisition cost.
With the holiday season specifically, try using various holiday terms (i.e., Christmas, New Year's, etc.,) in the phrases and replace for other holidays.
4. Do the math
Your long-tail analysis identified promising candidate terms for the campaign. Now, analyze those terms, their related conversion rates, average order value, and gross margins to determine which ones will matter to your company's bottom line. This is your SEO prioritized "hit list." Show the numbers to your CMO, COO, and CFO and I guarantee you'll open some eyes and get their buy-in to the SEO initiative. It's amazing how cooperative everyone else in the organization then becomes when it comes to implementing the SEO program.
5. Test with novices
Ask people you know and who are also unsophisticated internet users to buy product from your site. A less-than-outstanding user interface will negatively affect sales, but if the usability or navigation is confusing to a human being, imagine what it's like for a search engine bot that has no intuition? If it's broke, fix it.
6. Run an SEO audit
An audit will identify issues and barriers with your website that prevent it from being properly indexed and listed. Things you should look for include: malformed sitemaps, navigation elements, URLs and page naming, duplicate content, tags, and other structural issues. If your website is image heavy, you'll need to explore every opportunity to insert meaningful copy and content into the site.
7. Build a prioritized list
Review all the findings and opportunities for improvements that you've discovered, and build a prioritized list of SEO activities to undertake. Run it by your VP of marketing to get a reality check if any of the goals are off target.
8. Write up the plan
Write up all of the proposed changes to your sitemap, title tags, content, and navigational links. (Hint: These should be in your top 10 list of things that need addressing -- step 7 above.) Also, have a targeted list of other sites you'd like to link to your site, and get some introductory emails out to their webmasters.
9. Make the changes
Bite the bullet and make the changes to your site. If IT controls your website operation, demand that they prioritize and implement the changes you need to succeed. Don't be a shrinking violet. Tackle the background changes first. You might get enough pop from those that everyone becomes more cooperative for the next steps.
10. Monitor, measure, and manage
Monitor the changes you've made, measure how the search engines respond, and then make more changes as needed. SEO is an iterative and continuous process, not a one-off project. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or misleading. Search engine algorithms change constantly, and you need to make sure your site stays up to date to rank highly on the keywords that matter.
Were you hoping for a magical top 10 list of specific changes for your website? Each site has unique challenges and opportunities, but getting the right SEO analysis and workflow process in place is a universal first step to success. This process, coupled with the skills to implement the changes, will drive your business into the top 10. That's what we all want, isn't it?
Plan to get the most out of this holiday season, and set the groundwork for a stellar 2010.
Richard Zwicky is founder and CEO of Enquisite, Inc.
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