Give yourself a beautiful Christmas gift...good search engine positioning

Early November. It starts to get colder and Hallowe’en has been and gone. It’s the time of year that many people love, and some hate. As consumers start to think about Christmas presents, several marketing managers ask themselves if their campaigns are ready for the holiday season. Some of them have once again decided to disregard the Internet this year; others are trying it out for the first time while a minority grants it the significance it deserves.

While the most recent data teaches us that 81% of Canadians do their window shopping on line and that 56% have bought online this year, Internet marketing investments are still at the low rate of 7% if total advertising expenditure in Canada. There’s still a lot of room for improvement and, consequently, countless opportunities for forward-thinking companies.

Are you one of these companies that wish to sell more this Christmas and don’t know how to do it? Here are some tips to optimize your search engine positioning for the holiday season. Why search engines? Recent statistics confirm that 79% of Canadians bought a product after using a search engine [1]. Your site’s positioning is therefore key.

1. Natural positioning?

It is not enough to evaluate positioning on your ranking for words you believe are important...you have to evaluate the words used by Internet users to search for your products or services. Our experience revealed that in the vast majority of cases, keywords suggested by the client are rarely the best to optimize your website.

If your site has very bad natural positioning at the time you’re reading this article, it is probably too late to do anything for the holiday season. In fact, Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) takes a certain amount of time to set up and there is a strong chance that the optimizations coming from it will not have the desired results in time for the Christmas period. So be wary of companies who tell you that they can place your site in the first results in the next few months…they probably use tactics that will cause you problems in the long term.

If your site’s positioning is good or excellent, the coming weeks could prove to be crucial. In fact, many competitors will optimise their website for the holiday period and could outdo you. Your site’s optimization could give you the necessary push to gain or keep those very important few positions.

2. Pay…to ensure results

Several companies systematically neglect Pay-per-click campaign from fear that the costs will be too high and the results will be left wanting. However, depending on your products, this approach could give you a very good return on investment and more useful information for your natural referencing. How? Today’s tools make it possible to easily find which words are the most profitable and those which generate the most conversions during keyword purchasing campaigns. The result: in the New Year you’ll be able to select the best words to naturally optimize your site.

Furthermore, these campaigns are not very expensive to set up and can be stopped at any time. You can thus see if you get the desired results and stop the campaign if you don’t.

Finally, if you wish to know more before making a move, you can download our Search Engine Marketing Strategical and Practical Guide that could help you to better understand the challenges of search engine positioning.

[1] Global Market Insite 2005