SEO Can Make Your Online Store a Powerhouse for the Holidays
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This is the first of several holiday-focused SEO articles which will use real-life examples of different website business models. They will be shown as road maps for implementing successful SEO techniques. Implementing a holiday-related SEO strategy as early as August can set your website up for real success during the upcoming 2005 holiday season.
For this article, I’m going to focus on the most obvious type of website that can benefit from ramping up their holiday SEO efforts in mid summer: retail sites. I had the pleasure of interviewing Nick Lindauer, owner of a website that sells specialty hot sauces and related products (www.sweatnspice.com), about what he recommends retail site owners do to get better visibility in the organic search results. Nick is an experienced search engine marketer, online media planner and colleague of mine. His SEO expertise has propelled his site to the top of Google results for “hot sauce” and a number of his other related keywords.
Why it’s good to start thinking about Christmas in August
It is particularly valuable for existing websites to implement holiday-related SEO strategies in August because once you are already listed in Google (and other engines), new changes in the form of added content or revised copy tend to get indexed fairly quickly. These changes are then reflected in the search results. For example, Nick added a page about Black Mamba Hot Sauce to www.sweatnspice.com on July 5, 2005 and within ten days that page ranked #1 for “black mamba hot sauce” in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
Nick recommends that small businesses begin preparing for the upcoming holiday season by evaluating key products and services, and coming up with unique product combinations. You can then create pages to highlight these new product offerings which can be optimized for different keyword combinations.
For example, you can target some different holiday-related keyword groupings by creating “gift sets” for the holidays. Sweatnspice.com offers a gift set which includes a mix of different brands of habanero hot sauces categorized under the title of “Habanero Heaven Hot Sauce Gift Set.” Although Sweatnspice.com already ranks well for most of the various product manufacturers and/or types of hot sauce (e.g., the site is #7 in Google for “habanero hot sauce”), this product grouping enables Nick to target the product specifically for gift seekers who reach his website via one of the many keywords he’s well ranked for, but who may not know what they want beyond a gift for someone who likes hot sauce. It is also a way for him to specifically target a variety of keyword groupings, e.g., “habanero heaven” and “habanero gift set” in the search engines.
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