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Christmas is coming, the site logs are getting fat.

Posted by Chris Dugdale November 21st, 2007

Christmas is a time of wanton spending, and spending is increasingly moving on-line. Everyone wants a piece of the action but there are only so many places on the first page of search results.

Christmas spending is immense but the portion of that spend that is consumed online is growing fast. If you sell something on your website, the odds are there are other sites selling the same, or similar things. Competition grows by the year and with the online retail behemoths, like Amazon, seeming to sell nearly everything on the planet, it is getting hard to get your annual slice of the festive pie.

Add to this the apparently unending sea of affiliate sites that simply point you in the direction of people selling what you want, then the outlook for ranking for even the rarest of search phrases starts to look bleak. You have a perfectly optimised and architected site, but you are still nowhere for the competitive terms of your choice. What can you do to make your Christmas bonus a big one? Well, here are a few tips that might help.

1) Loss leaders. Sell your intended seasonal best-seller at cost for a month in the run-up to the seasonal peak and promote the offer like a madman. You need lots of stock and robust site, but people will link to you in droves. As you start to float to the top of the rankings, drop the offer and reap the rewards from riding the seasonal peak. This is very difficult to do and might not pay off, but it is worth considering.

2) Identify the weird long-tail searches that might not be so long at peak season. Granny wants to buy little Jimmy and iPod, but isn’t down wiv da yoof enough to know what they are called. What does she search for? Think outside the box (or rather think like a granny who is slightly hard of hearing). The search phrases "music pod" and "ipop", while dwarfed by the monstrous popularity of a phrase like "ipod", are surprisingly popular and have the same seasonal peaks. As well as being relatively easy to rank for in the organic listings, they have the added advantage of being easy targets for PPC.

3) Do something zany; everyone has heard of viral marketing but few get it spot-on. Blendtec made those fantastic videos that I hope everyone has seen: Will it Blend? The iPhone in a blender is an inspiration to all and should be mandatory viewing for all online marketing managers. Get viral marketing right and you will be bestowed with links in volumes that outstrip your wildest dreams; just make sure you host it on your own site and have a server that can cope with the load.

4) Know your seasonal trends. All the great plans in the world are worthless without timing. The Christmas build-up starts in September and really starts to fly at the start of November; nowhere is this clearer than the seasonal trend for the search phrase "Christmas Gifts".

5) Do research. The press in the run up to Christmas is full of little bits of research about how financially taxing or mentally stressful the season is. These bits of research aren’t overly expensive to undertake and there are a host of agencies willing to take your cash for doing the work. All you need to do then is write some conclusions around the results and push it to the press. Links to your site from online news outlets are very powerful things and the brand awareness that these generate shouldn’t be underestimated either.

Ultimately, implementing all the best architectural practices and the most razor-sharp optimised content in the world will only get you so far, and there are only so many places on the front page of results. The competition isn’t going to go away and while the spammy sites at the top are getting fewer and fewer, there are a host of good-quality sites waiting to replace them. You need to make noise about your brand; links will grow naturally, but people don’t link to you if they don’t know you exist.

Tags: Christmas, long tail, marketing, trends

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