Ho, Ho, Ho, it's Christmas SEO

In the first of a new series of expert blogs from the QueryClick team, our business development exec, Ewan O'Donnell, gives his take on the importance of Christmas SEO strategies...

It’s no surprise that a certain store on Oxford street has already made the headlines by boldly rolling out the tinsel and fairy lights despite shorts and sunglasses still being on the agenda.

While the bargain hunters and extremely organised amongst us will no doubt be rubbing their hands together with anticipatory festive glee, there’s another group of people who should be doing all they can to embrace the lure of St Nick - the virtual high street.

When it comes to e-commerce and online retail, Christmas couldn’t come any sooner, so - putting those traditional tuts from the grinches aside - now’s the time to start rolling out the backlinks, bringing in the traffic and sprinkling some conversion rate sparkle onto your campaign.

In terms of SEO, the seasonal campaign starts now too. With the crescendo of e-retail reaching its peak mid December, now is the time to start building traffic momentum and climbing the ranks. Sales on 14th Dec 09 recorded a £33 million peak, exceeding £1.4 million in one minute alone. This is an increase of 21% on the year before, and with the industry expecting much of the same this year, getting your foot in the door early can pay dividends when it comes to calculating your Q4 earnings. SEO provides a viral backbone to any traditional printed campaigns as well as beefing up your digital footprint; something that continues well after the 12 days of Christmas.

To help your traffic snowball, it’s worthwhile focusing the SEO elements of your campaign around link building and keyword targeting of specific phrases that are relevant to your vertical during the festive season.

Once you’ve got a handle on which products or services are going to be the next Furby or Buzz Lightyear, you could even go one step further to develop a well structured PPC campaign that injects extra traffic around terms relevant to your business. While link building should ideally begin around 6 months in advance, PPC works especially well for seasonal or time sensitive terms which lend themselves perfectly to Christmas trends or buzz words that capture the attention of consumers for a short yet intensified length of time. By establishing the desired keywords months in advance, you could end up paying less per click as opposed to a last minute splurge on the top keyphrases.

Finally, there’s no point capturing the traffic if you can’t convert it into sales. A solid conversion rate optimisation campaign will ensure your bounce rates drop and turn your visitors into buyers. 20% of new visitors will click directly off your site… turn those visits into figures, and how could adding that 20% affect your quarterly forecast? Likened to a virtual form of visual merchandising there’s nothing to stop you taking a leaf out of Selfridges book in terms of kicking the window dressing into overdrive and making your site unavoidably welcoming, the purchase process ridiculously easy and the site as a whole the nectar of any Christmas shopper.

It’s no surprise that this year’s online sales are expected to exceed the festive footfall of the high street shops. While horrific weather, car parking and the endless warbling of Slade reminding us “It's Christmas!" is enough to put anyone off, consumers no longer need to be savvy shoppers to fire up the PC and hit the high street via the internet instead.

Now’s the time to un-box the tree, dust down the decorations and write your elves a wish list for everything SEO, PPC and conversion rate optimised - the results might be as believable as Santa but we guarantee they’re real!