A cool mass of air is breezing across southern Vancouver Island this morning, blanketing the warm city in a light layer of fog. The hue of light is as ominous as it is beautiful. I know this breeze all too well. It marks the end of our early autumn resurgence of summer and the beginning of the end of the year. Winter is almost upon us again.
Fortunately, we have found a bunch of reasons to celebrate the transitions from summer to autumn to winter, several of which involve the purchase and distribution of vast quantities of food, gifts and gratuity. Between now and the new year, there are three major periods of cultural celebration, each of which compels consumers to buy stuff, and lots of it. For retailers both on and off-line the last three months on the calendar tend to be the most important in their fiscal cycle.
In Canada, the holiday buying/spending season sort of starts in ten days with Thanksgiving being marked on October 9th. In the US, the season kicks off about a week later in a frenzy of last minute preparations for Halloween. If you have a business dependant on holiday season sales, this would be a good time to start mentioning those holidays on your website or in your product descriptions.
From an online marketing perspective, the situation is improving. Two years ago, I would have written this column in mid July and the advice offered would have been somewhat different. Last year’s “Christmas column†was written in August.
This year is different for many reasons. It should be stronger season for online sales with traffic streaming to retail sites from several new directions. There are a greater variety of search tools and more ways to inform them than in previous years.
Optimizing for holiday sales will be easier this year due to improvements at the search engines in updates and query/context relevancy. Search engines are updating their databases much more rapidly; allowing webmasters to see new information reflected in the search results in days (sometimes in hours) as opposed to weeks.
Internet users have a greater variety of information options and are finding new ways of finding information. Search engine users are becoming more adept at finding products and using a wider array of tools to search for them. Alongside traditional search engine rankings, here are a few easily accessed venues savvy online retailers are using to attract traffic and make sales.
Google Base
As I wrote here a few days ago, Google Base listings will soon be easier to access as Google moves to integrate them into the general SERPs.
Yahoo Shopping
Yahoo has come up with a number of innovative ways to present products in their shopping search engine, often based on the compilation and sharing of user-generated lists. Merchants can sign up at the Yahoo! Search Marketing Product Submit page.
MSN Shopping
Reaching 7,141,000 users daily, MSN tends to offer highly qualified holiday shopping leads. Targeting an older and predominantly female demographic, MSN Shopping listings can be expensive but highly effective.
eBay.Com
Though it costs to set up a merchant account on eBay, the traffic it can drive is substantial.
There are also a number of vertical search engines such as Become.com, Shopzilla.com and Shopping.com online merchants might want to consider moving into the heart of the holiday season. (Look for a column on vertical and shopping search sometime next week)
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