The weather’s getting colder, the days are getting shorter, and holiday fever is spreading around the country like wildfire. For retail marketing pros, the holiday season presents incredible opportunities for reaching shoppers. By making a few SEO (search engine optimization) improvements to your retail marketing website, you can take advantage of local search to turn these online holiday shoppers into in-store customers.
1. Understand Local Search & the Holiday Shopper
When it comes to local search, the rules of the game change each holiday season. Nine months out of the year, your SEO is focused on a certain set of keywords. However, when the holidays roll around, shoppers change the way they search for local stores and products, using more specific brand-related search queries. This means your retail marketing strategy should change, too, shifting your SEO to more brand-specific keywords to optimize for local search.
2. Location, Location, Location
The only way to drive in-store traffic from your online SEO efforts is by remembering the “local” portion of local search. The most common local search behavior includes a consumer searching for a product or company online, then actually going into the store to make a purchase. But in order to get in front of these consumers, you have to optimize your retail marketing site for local terms as well. Using longtail local search keywords, such as “Spokane Samsung HDTV dealer,” you’ll not only reach a very qualified audience, but you’re not likely to have much competition for the keywords.
3. Local Search Often Means Google Places
As anyone who has ever performed a local search knows, searching for nearby products and companies typically lead to Google Places being listed on the search results page. Creating or improving your Google Places business listing should always be a part of your holiday retail marketing efforts. To improve the way your listing appears in local search results, you can update the description or include custom attributes using holiday-related keywords, similar to or the same as those used within your website’s SEO.
4. Add Products to Google’s Merchant Center
Speaking of Google, another great tool for retail marketing pros looking to improve SEO for local search is Merchant Center. As part of its Shopping search results, Merchant Center shows local product inventory when possible. This is a very powerful tool for attracting online shoppers to your brick and mortar store, especially those last-minute shoppers who don’t have time for an item to be shipped.
5. Be Flexible with Being Politically Correct
As marketers communicating to consumers from every walk of life, we’re typically very careful to be politically correct. However, people aren’t necessarily politically correct when it comes to local search. For example, “Christmas gift ideas” strongly outweighs “holiday gift ideas” in terms of search frequency. Be careful not to offend consumers, but consider optimizing your retail marketing site for keywords consumers will actually be using to find your products.
Excellent points in this article about “holiday” SEO. Even non-retailers might benefit from this if their services are affected by SEASONAL events, weather, localized trends, etc. If you try some of these SEO tweaks, an outstanding place to verify whether your optimization is working is Local Search Tool http://localsearchtool.org/ Plus, Local Site Submit http://www.localsitesubmit.com will help any company dominate the local search directories year round. Thanks for the article, Jeff!