No Love For Valentines SEO?

No love for SEO this "valentines day"

Officially recognised holiday’s and days of celebration, as we all know, are a major event for commercial marketers aiming to position their product/service/experience as THE ideal gift for the given holiday. However, as I noted in December, the big (largely currently struggling for enough sales) retail companies seem to shun undertaking any targeted online search promotion for these events. And at this time of year, it’s Valentine’s Day’s turn to be snubbed.

Keyword search results on Google for Valentines Day related terms

A quick look at Google’s AdWords keyword tool (keeping it Google since it’s the SE I’m looking at), suggests there were 40,500 searches in the UK for the term “valentines day” alone and that AdWords competition for the term is “full green bar”, so somewhat competitive then! However, a look at the top 10 results for “valentines day” in Google brings up a set of organic search results notably devoid of any major retailers.

With online sales having increased dramatically (in the UK) in the last 2 months, and online advertising spend now over £2billion (only 2-3% behind television and print advertising spend and growing), it is somewhat surprising that the big retailers would neglect to target holiday terms such as this in order to cash in on this growth.

As with my last post about “christmas presents”, it was clear that, while organic search was neglected, PPC for these terms was being conducted by a few of the big retailers (M&S, Apple, Earnest Jones),  and again, a few are in on it with “valentines day”. M&S (Mark’s and Spencer’s) have once again opted for PPC along with interflora, Aldi (supermarket) and easyjet. While some people mentioned in the comments for my last post that these retailers probably opted for PPC due to the fact that in order to achieve high rankings for a seasonal term such as “valentines day” or “christmas presents”, you would have to maintain a page on your site for these offerings, even outwith the seasonal timeframe.

This is a valid point, however, given the cost per click for these terms (highly competitive remember), Rand’s own analysis of the success of PPC vs SEO, and the relative frequency of “Special Offers” pages, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to simply maintain seasonal holiday pages under this main heading and reap the search rewards?

There are a number of companies in particular that would probably significantly benefit from this approach, in particular, businesses involved in the typical gift sectors such as flowers (interflora, flowers direct), chocolates (Thorntons, Green & Blacks), lingerie (Agent Provocature, Ann Summers), jewellery (Earnest Jones, H.S. Samuel) etc.

A number of these sites already have Valentines Day specific pages on them, yet none rank in the top 20 for the highly searched term “valentines day”, despite the fact that this is probably one of the biggest “celebration days” for these businesses in terms of sales.

Even with the average valentines day gift spend predicted to decline due to the current economic climate (reports I have seen suggest an average spend of £72, down from £92), there is still likely to be a large amount of money being left on the online table.

So is this a missed opportunity for retailers, particularly during difficult times?

Online Sales Increase

Online sales for the festive period were up almost 15 per cent on 2007’s figures for the same period according to the press today. British shoppers spent more than £4.6 billion online last month which works out to be the equivalent of £76.67 for every person in Britain according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. Following the release of these figures, economic experts are predicting that online spending will continue to increase, playing a significant role in mainstream spending throughout the current economic downturn.

Online Advertising Growth

Hardly any surprise then that the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK) report that all formats of online advertising (Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation, Rich Media Creation etc) have experienced better than average growth despite the tough trading conditions of late, taking total online advertising spend to over £2 billion last year. The successful growth of online advertising has been attributed to both the increase in online audience in Britain (31.6 million people online) and to the fact that the return on investment for online advertising is significantly more measurable than any other format of advertising due to analysis packages such as Google Analytics.

With mobile wireless “dongles” and 3G phones no longer considered luxury items, and the continual fall in price of laptops and broadband services, the number of people browsing online, and the amount of time they spend doing so, is only likely to increase further. Therefore adding to the importance of a focused online presence.

Improve Your Online Presence

If you would like to find out more about how Web Wise Business could help your business take advantage of this growth in online sales, why not give us a call on 01786 498 079, or drop us an email.

Google Searchwiki, Digg and Why the Popularity of Humour Isn’t Always Helpful

Today I was going through some searches I conduct regularly in Google and organising the links I regularly click as a result of these searches using Google’s “Searchwiki”. While conducting this fairly monotonous task I began considering whether Searchwiki had been introduced as an early precursor to “voted” SERPs – search engine rankings positions determined by the popularity of the links for a given search.

Google Searchwiki - DNN Developers

However, rankings for search terms determined by voted popularity opens up a whole new can of worms as far as Search Engine Optimisation is concerned. A can where negative voting for competitors and “vote encouragement” techniques become the new black hat. It all sounds like a Presidential election but it would be the likely reality of such a system. The other downfall comes from the fact that “one man’s garbage is another man’s gold”, not everyone has the same tastes which means that while I like my Nike “sports equipment”, you might prefer Adidas. This predicament would mean that top SERP positions could potentially be changing more frequently than Britney Spears’ hair, therefore making anything like accurate ROI on websites and in particular, optimisation efforts, as difficult and unreliable to predict as voting polls.

Other difficulties arise when you consider relevancy of results too. 

Political "Promotion", who says Republicans don't listen to what they're saying!

Themes such as humour and sex are well known selling and marketing factors, though these are not always relevant, appropriate or applicable to a lot of websites or important and useful articles. Yet dig deep enough for most searches and you can usually find a link or two that, while not really useful in anyway, contains one of these themes. Sometimes it’s easy (search for “Rachel Riley“, Carol Vorderman’s replacement on UK daytime TV’s “Countdown” and the Google image results will provide a laugh! – note, you need to have unfiltered searches to get this), some on the other-hand, involve looking a little deeper (such as “Navy Carrier Squadron” version of “Pump it” for the term “air pump”). If the success of articles on Digg’s homepage is taken as an example, these are likely the types of results that could end up at the top of the SERP’s with such a ranking system.

"Randomly provided vowels and consonants on a board, what could possibly go wrong!"

Sure, a “voting” system wouldn’t be the sole determining factor for rankings but even then, the prevalence of humourous or sex related links already in the SERP’s for seemingly unrelated searches would suggest that this type of content already does quite well from the number of back-links it tends to generate, thereby indicating that any addition of a ”voting” system for determining rankings would be counter-productive in achieving the search engines’ aims of “relevant search results for a given term”.

Food for thought.

Twittering up a Buzz, or Potential Uses for Twitter

Never one to have been an early adopter of social media, I have only just recently gotten around to signing up with the latest craze – Twitter.

Basically, Twitter allows it’s users to create a profile and post short messages, either through the site or by mobile phone, which are then sent to the page, and or phone, of anyone “following” the user in order to allow your friends/colleagues etc to know exactly what your doing.

Now, I’ll admit, I didn’t immediately get what the point of this, or the use would be. I don’t feel the need to let everyone know exactly when I’ve just sneezed or realised I’ve been walking about with my fly undone, and I’m pretty sure not even my closest friends and family would really care! But after a little more thought and a quick scout through some user’s profiles, I began to realise that it actually has alot of potential beyond simply keeping in touch with friends.

Even celebrities get caught "flying low"...

One of the better and more creative uses for Twitter that I have seen is London Tower Bridge’s profile. Some clever clog has written a piece of code that works with Twitter in order to automatically provide information on when the bridge will be opening (and why) and when it will be closing. This is clearly handy for anyone living in London, and regularly crossing the Thames at this point, to be updated with via their mobile.

Another method, employed by Objective Associates‘ very own Mr Software Scotland himself, is to mini-blog on events as they happen. Unfortunately, understanding this mini-blogging takes a bit of thought, sometimes more than my brain is capable of!

Understanding mini-blogging on Twitter can, at times, require more than moderate intelligence...

In SEO circles, Twitter has received alot of press as a useful method of driving referral traffic to your (or your clients’) website. However, gaining referral traffic only really works if you have interesting content that will appeal to a reasonable number of people. I’m not sure many people are going to link to our Web Wise Business website on twitter to tell their friends about “web design scotland” as it’s just not really one of those topics people tend to talk about. Or maybe we’re just not prompting them enough…

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Keyword Questions Tool or What language do Scotland people speak…

I recently came across this neat little keyword tool from the people behind Wordtracker. The tool allows you to view results for questions people have entered as queries in search engines relating to a given keyword.

Some interesting results are produced for the keyword “Scotland”…

What language do Scotland people speak...

Obviously the tool has practical applications for SEO purposes, notably in determining phrases to target where your business/organisation might provide a suitable answer.

The tool also has practical uses in determining negative keywords when managing a Pay Per Click campaign, effectively allowing you to identify terms which might drive non-targeted traffic through your advertisements, leading to wasted clicks from visitors with no interest in your offering.

It also provides some laughs as you gaze with mocking contempt at the searches of the linguistically and geographically challenged!