Every year…right around this time…I feel the need to remind my clients (especially the Ecommerce ones) that the holiday season is just around the corner. The notion that anyone would need a reminder might seem silly; however, this is a HUGE opportunity to capitalize on the potential up-tick in site traffic. We want to turn these visitors into shoppers and ultimately buyers; make that repeat buyers.  Now that we have identified the goal, how do we make it happen? Is there a secret recipe? Not really, although there are a variety of proven tactics that should be taken into serious consideration:

• Support the demand for your product or service. You can achieve this by increasing your budgets (daily/weekly/monthly). Traffic will no doubt spike during the holidays and you will want to cover your bases by ensuring that your ads remain active.
• Plan ahead with inventory. Pay close attention to your online orders; be prepared to restock whenever necessary. Utilize an analytics tool to determine which keywords are leading to the most sales.
• Be smart with pricing. Price has always been a factor, but even more so with today’s economy. Take the time to do some comparison shopping and analysis of what your competition is offering. You do not have to “give away the farm”, but you ought to be competitive.
• Offer Free Shipping. This is a critical piece of the puzzle. I strongly encourage retailers to take advantage of this incentive to boost sales. According to ComScore, “The percentage of online sales transactions that included free shipping increased to 42 percent in the third quarter of 2009 from 31 percent in the first quarter of 2008”.
• Utilize the most compelling Landing Pages. Send your traffic to an offer driven page that is relevant to the keywords that have been searched on. All your buyers should need to think about is entering in their credit card information.
• Offer Gift Wrap. This is especially attractive for shoppers who are shipping gifts to another state. This is a surefire way to provide that extra convenience.

Happy Holidays!

For any advertiser who has participated in search engine marketing, part of the difficultly is saying what you want to say within the allotted characters.  The major search engines; Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) each allow 70 characters for the description lines (including punctuation and spacing).  What makes Yahoo’s situation unique from Google and MSN is that Yahoo automatically places a period at the end of the ad description; which technically allows 69 characters.  As many search engine marketers know, one character can make a big difference and as a result you will need to completely rewrite ads.

Only recently, Yahoo broke the mold of limiting the amount of characters from 70 to 71.  This one extra character makes a big difference.  In the past many advertisers have had the last letter cut off the end of the ads, which caused the ads to not make sense.  In the case of advertisers who used automated platforms to push campaigns to various search engines, many did not even know that the last letter had been removed and replaced with a period.

One character may not seem like a lot, however in the world of search engine marketing, a little goes a long way.  This may be the perfect opportunity to revamp your Yahoo ads or to start running on Yahoo, if you are not already doing so.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and always has been a core competency of MoreVisibility. We have been advising companies’ for ten years how to make their sites more SEO friendly. That being said, it is also imperative not to forget the importance of ensuring that your site is User Friendly.

When was the last time you looked at your site from a visitor’s perspective? We all get busy with day to day nuances and before you know it, a year has passed since you completed a thorough review from the standpoint of a user. I encourage you to take the time to visit your site and go through it page by page. Really read through your content; does it read the way you want it to or should it be updated? Are there new offerings that should be included? Perhaps different or updated calls to action would be appropriate?

Important items to take note of:

Make sure your pages load quickly and without errors.  Did you know that Google will penalize you if your pages have slow load times? In other words, if an advertiser’s landing page loads slowly once an ad is clicked on, the ad position and minimum bid for keywords will be affected, as will your Quality Score.

Is your site easy to navigate? Think like a customer; make it seamless for your visitors to maneuver through your site and find exactly what they are looking for. For example, if they click on “Newsletter Signup”, you will want to ensure this brings them to a simple and user friendly form to complete.

Does your site have clear calls to action? What is it that you want your visitors to do? Here are some examples of calls to action that are clear and to the point: Call Now, Act Now, Click Here, Enter Coupon Code for Discount, Enter Your Email Address, etc.
Remember, your website is a representation of you. Make sure it says exactly what you want it to say.