Holiday Search Marketing Campaigns

We are going into the holidays and if you are anything like me you know that you will need to buy cards and gifts for friends, associates and family. Those of us that work in the SEO field know that this is also a time where traffic for holiday-related search terms goes through the roof.

Google trends shows just a few of the trending holiday search terms that show up in November and December.

One of my favorite seasonal topics is recipe related search terms. The Google trends data shows how the spikes for recipe terms take off during the holidays.

This trending data really comes home when we look at our modern society, especially for those of us in the North America, is faced with the pressure of gift giving. It is even true when there is not enough in the family budget to give a gift to everyone on the list. Not surprisingly, this pressure works to the advantage of numerous retail businesses. Modern retailers use this pressure to help market the latest releases of everything from games to shoes.

A retailer can use keyword trending data to optimize ads and webpages to improve the performance of paid and organic search campaigns. The brand BestBuy is a great example since they are a leading marketer of consumer technology products. If BestBuy wants to develop a marketing campaign around TVs they can use the Google Adword tool to inform them about the keywords that performed the best over the last 12 months.

The “broad match” keyword data shows the volume for these keywords is enormous and is highly competitive. The local trending data which is the nice graphic to the far right of the table is simply showing how the search demand (search traffic) for each keyword has changed over the last 12 months.  The trending data over the last 12 months helps the SEM (search engine marketing) professional to see what keywords have the most traffic and the highest CPC (cost per click).

The keywords with the highest demand and are most competitive are the generic “flat screen TV” and the brand term “Samsung TV”. The keyword that shows promise from this research is “42 inch TV” since it has good demand and begins to inform a more focused search. The search marketer could take this data and build a holiday campaign around the products and content relating to 42 inch TVs.

The search marketer armed with knowledge can build a campaign that combines the creation of a webpage optimized for a 42-inch TV product offering along with a PPC (pay per click) campaign using 42-inch TV search terms leading to a landing page offering to send product review information or the ability to make a purchase.

This is just one example of how to use trending keywords to build a search campaign. The focus of each campaign along with the tools used will vary depending on the product and target market. Every marketer needs to stay on top of the results and be able to react with changes to the campaign. This especially pertains to paid campaigns where minutes wasted on a poorly targeted campaign turn into major dollars wasted very quickly. The organic or SEO part of the campaign is less time sensitive but can have a large positive impact on the bottom line when executed in a focused and timely fashion.

Kent Yunk is VP and SEO Strategist with Roaring Pajamas