Q4 SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Pointers

Fourth quarter search engine optimization to prep your marketing efforts for holiday shoppers.

By Vanessa Salvia

You may not think your ecommerce business is seasonal if you sell things that people want to buy all year long, but in a way, it is. The last quarter of the year, the three months of October, November and December, are important months in which to ramp up for the holiday shopping season. A past article called SEO for the Holiday Shopping Season takes a look at some concrete steps you can take to optimize your site for shoppers looking for gifts and holiday bargains.

You should begin making changes in anticipation of the holiday shopping season earlier than you might think-optimally, you would begin enhancing your text and home page, keywords for PPC, and refining deals such as free or reduced shipping as early as September. Remember, there is a time lag between when you make changes to your site and when a search engines crawls your site and adjusts for the changes.

But as we are already heading into November, what can you do at this point?

There are some basic and important ways to ensure that your PPC and CSE (comparison shopping engine) marketing efforts are fully optimized to attract all those buyers that are surfing the Internet looking for deals and unique items.

Free shipping

For shoppers accustomed to buying online, a deal on shipping is welcome anytime, but especially during the harried holidays. People are spending more money than they usually do, buying more things than they usually do, and shipping more packages than they usually do, so savings of any amount is welcome. If you don't offer free shipping on a regular basis, Q4 is a good time to offer it. Getting free or reduced shipping is one thing that can really help the shopper feel like they're getting a "great deal."

Make sure you include some message about free shipping on your home page, in any email blasts you send out, in your PPC ad copy, and in your CSE promo copy area.

Adjust your keywords

In your PPC marketing efforts, use keywords such as "purchase," "buy," and related keywords. During the holiday season, there are large numbers of shoppers who may not have ever shopped online before, or only do so during Q4. Using "purchase" or "buy" keywords can sometimes bring in shoppers performing searches such as "buy widget ABC" or "purchase ABC widgets online."

It might be tempting to include "gift" related keywords. However, in our experience these words are not good performers, especially for small businesses. These types of keywords ("gifts for men," "widget gifts") are frequently searched for phrases, but, this also often makes them very expensive and they don't convert well enough to offset that cost.

CSE Optimization

When composing text for the comparison shopping engine feeds you use, use all available fields to describe your product. Write the copy yourself using compelling descriptions. It is best to avoid the jargon-filled and dry text written by the manufacturers. Keyword research is very valuable in this case, and can help your item stand out from the crowd.

Though you cannot increase bidding on a specific keyword for CSE feeds, consider testing the increase of your category bids by 2 to 3 cents. It may sound like a small amount but a few pennies will actually increase rank considerably.

If you have not been running full feeds, now is the time to do this, with people looking for a wider variety of gift items. Also, if you have not tested other engines, the increased number of shoppers in the near future makes now an ideal time to do this.

If you are sending feeds to all tier 1 engines, try one of the more popular tier 2 engines, such as Become.com or Smarter.com. Gifts.com is another good idea. With this engine, you send them your feed and they take the items they want to include (which could be none). Most of the engines will give you a status report on your items; telling you which may need attention. Often these are easy changes, so if you've been putting these changes off, now is the time to re-look at those.

Test the use of your logo. Logo placement is often only 2 to 3 cents more per click, but now is the best time to implement this for immediate and long-term branding with new customers.

Landing pages

Link your PPC ads to landing pages specifically optimized for the keyword phrase and product they searched for to get there. This takes the customer directly to what they were searching for: "black leather billfolds," for instance, without taking them through the pages offering belts, ties, and socks first. A holiday themed landing page can be a festive way to increase interest in shoppers looking for gifts.

Be consistent on and off the page

Link all of your ad efforts, which is smart to do all year-round, but especially at the year-end time of increased spending on gifts, when new shoppers may be finding you for the first time. Make sure your paid marketing efforts online mesh with what you may be doing offline.

Evaluate your Calls To Action

Evaluate the ease of shopping and checkout on your site. Critically look at the calls to action on your site to make sure they are doing what they are intended to do: move your customers to action. Make sure the flow is toward purchase and checkout, free trial, download, sign-up, or whatever goal you intend the customer to reach.

Be social

There's a lot of noise during the holiday season, with other retailers jumping in to the advertising mix. If you already integrate social media marketing into your efforts, good for you! Refined, well-timed, Facebook or Twitter messages to your social groups can help keep you on their mind. Don't be aggressive about it though, with too-frequent posts about nothing but sales, as that can be overwhelming and a turn-off.

If social media marketing is not part of your bag of tricks, it's time to consider it. Read our helpful articles on Marketing Yourself on Social Networks, Leveraging Social Networking Sites and Getting Started With Social Media Bookmarking.

Use your data

Now is the time for strategic use of the analytics data that you have accumulated all year long. The use of organic search and sales data is more important now than at any other time of the year. This will help you target the right buyers with your ad campaigns. And if you have been paying attention to the data throughout the year, you already know which advertising efforts drive the most traffic to your site, and you can concentrate on those when you want to ramp up at times like this.

Monitor your competition

Q4 is a good time to be aware of your competition. Your competitors are also ramping up what they are doing to reach potential customers, so keep them on your radar. If your paid campaigns are not watched closely, it's likely that one of two things will happen: average Cost Per Click will climb higher than you'd like, or your position will drop fast in the index.

In summary, your site needs your attention to detail all year long, but during Q4, it especially important. Tweak, adjust, enhance, and extend a little further, and you'll be ready when shoppers come calling.