How to use search engines to lure holiday shoppers
Online shopping is no longer a novelty you can afford to ignore. Shopping online has moved mainstream. During the holiday buying season, the customers you want are doing much, if not most, of their shopping with their fingers.
Internet retail sales totaled $114 billion in 2003, according to Forrester. By 2008, online sales will top $230 billion and account for a hefty 10% of all U.S. retail sales. Also, millions of consumers now research online before buying at offline stores.
To maximize sales during the all-important holiday season, you need to be marketing to online buyers just as much as brick-and-mortar shoppers. How do you best reach online buyers? By using search engine marketing. Here's how.
Start the engines
Few gift buyers click directly onto any e-tail site, of course. Most head straight for a search engine such as MSN to input keywords. What they get is a results page that sends them on their way. When done right, search engine marketing places your site on the results page of such shopper searches.
Your marketing mission is to figure out which keywords or phrases attract visitors, who will click all the way from the results page to your shopping cart. For example, if you sell "roses by the dozen," then "flowers" is way too broad a keyword. Too many visitors looking for other blooms will click on and click right off. You have only seconds to command attention. Fast-loading pages and relevant content help, too. (For more tips on making search engines work for you, see this article.)
Driving the right customer traffic
Volume is not your goal. "Driving lots of people to the Web site doesn't mean your search engine marketing is working," says Eric Lituchy of DelightfulDeliveries.com, an online gift-basket business based in Syosset, N.Y. "The question is, can you convert those people into buyers." Five customers are much better than 500 browsers.
Whether you rely on free (called "organic") search listings or paid placements with pay-per-click keywords, you're not just trying to create the right submissions to the engines or to achieve top rankings. You're trying to improve the odds of having the audience you want quickly find you. In addition, keyword popularity and rankings, free or paid, shift constantly, particularly during the holidays. Your search engine marketing efforts must be ongoing. (For more on paid placements, see this article.)
Sophisticated services and online applications can automate the process for you, making it affordable and convenient. For instance, Microsoft's Submit It! manages the complete search engine marketing cycle. Submit It! helps you choose keywords, submits keywords to engines, optimizes your site and monitors search rankings for a rather low fee. Such continual, behind-the-scenes work plus pay-per-click keywords tend to drive real customer traffic instead of simply delivering browsers.
(For deeper support, there are inexpensive monthly packages like Microsoft's Traffic Builder suite that offer tools to help boost traffic, find qualified subscribers for e-mail marketing and manage banner ads across hundreds of Web sites.)
Rev up slowly
To make the most of the holiday rush, start early. "Small-business owners should take the time to prepare search engine marketing just as they would inventory management and logistics," says Melissa Small, spokesperson for PixelMEDIA, an Internet marketing company based in Portsmouth, N.H. Many search engines take several weeks to include listings. Check how far in advance you need to submit keywords.
Then, clearly define your target customers, narrow your focus and test and retest. Web traffic analysis software such as FastCounter Pro can analyze user navigation patterns. That way, before the holiday surge, you can understand what draws shoppers versus surfers. You can also identify which products are popular this season.
"The main thing is to track where your customers are coming from," says DelightfulDeliveries.com's Lituchy. He buys "a ton of keywords based on holiday gifts," spending about $500,000 a year on search engine marketing. His company, which he founded in 1998, grosses about $5 million in sales, with a staff of four. "After 100 clicks, you can make a pretty good judgment about whether the words are working, whether people are buying," he says.
Armed with such detailed information, you can re-jigger the site to highlight bestsellers, surface your best wares and satisfy holiday shoppers, fast.
8 tips to fuel the engine
While search engine marketing can definitely level the playing field between big and small businesses, it's a complicated balancing act. Every search engine marketing campaign needs consistent attention to be effective.
Here are eight timely tips to leverage search engine marketing for the holidays.
1. Slice and dice your markets. "Purchase highly targeted keywords for each of your products or services, then bring the searcher to the exact page describing it, not just to your home page," says Richard Hagerty, chief executive of IMPAQT, a search marketer based in Bridgeville, Pa.
2. Promote regional specialties. If your products or offline shop rely on geography or a local customer base, signal that in your keywords.
3. Stretch your marketing budget. During the holidays, common keywords turn increasingly competitive. So buy those keywords during the hours that you know your customers are shopping online — for instance, evening hours for consumers or weekdays for business customers.
4. Get up-to-speed. Many customers — let's start with teenagers — have changeable tastes and slang that moves with the times. Make sure you choose keywords that are on your target customers' lips and minds.
5. Market every channel. More and more retailers are offering seamless services. Customers buy online and pick up at the store or vice versa. To remain competitive, set up cross-channel services between your online and offline operations, especially during the holidays.
6. Analyze and analyze your holiday traffic. "A searcher's intention may change over the holidays, even if they use the same keywords," says Lindsey Walsh, search engine marketing consultant at Globat.com, a Los Angeles Web hosting company. For instance, "party" in December is entirely different than "party" in May. "Businesses must evaluate whether the keyword has the same value to them over the holidays as other parts of the year," she says. "They should try to make the most out of this different traffic by changing the page the click lands on so it features holiday-related items."
7. Check links. Before the holidays kick in, make sure every link works and every product and transaction page properly loads. The last thing you want is to spend time and money on marketing only to lose customers because of site glitches.
8. Budget wisely. Finally, don't forget to budget for the holidays. While you should be using search engine marketing year-round, costs tend to rise in the fourth quarter of the year as keywords spike and competitors hustle. Make the most of your holiday opportunities, as Lituchy puts it, "by spending money where you make your money."