For any of your upcoming seasonally related promotions in search engine marketing this is a
reminder to think well ahead of the season when preparing. If you are thinking about doing some new
Halloween related promotions for instance, the time to be working on them would be as early as July
rather than starting in late September.
However, let's think on ahead for an example towards Christmas seasonal promotions if your Web site
is well suited for it. September/October is the perfect time to start getting your high performance
pages into shape.
So let’s give you a few quick tips of where you might begin, depending on what type of
product you are selling.
Remember, that while it’s important to research what you think might be important to your
“buying audience,” there can also be benefit in exploring what terms are related to each
other based on what a “search engine knows.” Yes, I am referring to a measure of
artificial intelligence and the potential influences of Latent Semantic Indexing.
So how can we find out what keywords for example, might be related to a term like
“Christmas?” Remember, the information we are after is not always just based on human
logic, but it is based on what a search engine may "understand" through artificial intelligence.
Try using the Wordtracker function called “Full Search” on the main Menu.
Example:
1. Go into the Members area of Wordtracker and click to perform a “full search.”
2. Wordtracker’s instructions say “Simply enter one generic term that describes your
business or service.” However, what we are going to do is enter a “season” as a
single word, for example…Christmas. Then the click Proceed Button.
3. RESULT: You get a long list of words related to “Christmas” based on what a search
engine knows.
Here are a few obvious results:
* Christmas
* xmas
* cards
* songs
* carols
* recipes
* trees
* ornaments
* stories
* santa
Okay, but then explore the list a little further.
Would you have thought that a search engine could possibly "know" that “Christmas”
relates to words such as these?
* traditions
* greetings
* festivals
* wrapping paper
* Charles Dickens
* Angels
* E-cards
* Tiny Tim
* Jacob Marley
* As well many, many other terms.
The thing to understand is that all of these topics can further explored and drilled into for niche
phrases that you might never ever consider as being important to searchers at Christmas.
They also represent opportunities for you to create some new original content that your searchers
are looking for but are not too competitive and easy to grab good placement for. Of course you have
to stay focused on what’s best for your Web site, but you should find this very powerful to
assist you with idea generation.
But then you can take any of these words and drill down deeper by just ticking the little box beside
each word that you wish to investigate. Then scroll to the bottom and perform a “competition
search” for even greater detail.
So what did I come away with in this short example?
If I wanted to sell a "christmas rope light" in my ornament store, I might do fairly well with
it.
The KEI value is 211.4 and it’s been searched for 360 times in the last 60 days (and
it’s not even that close to Christmas yet.) Only 613 compete count for that exact phrase so it
would not be hard to grab top placement for.
But what if you don’t sell this product? You could still partner with someone who does sell
the product and set up an affiliate sales relationship with a supplier at Commission Junction. You
make the sale and the supplier ships the product and commission junction tracks each sale and sends
you a monthly commission.
The biggest tip of all though, is to give yourself some time to get your content researched and put
together and visited by the search engine robots even at least a month before the season arrives.
You’ll be ahead of the crowd and by the time heavier seasonal activity kicks in, you’ll
have no regrets.
