If you haven’t already begun planning for the holiday buying rush, then it’s time to get moving. In this Part Three of Prepping for Holidays, I’ll show some of the things you can do to ensure online buyers find your products and services. (In Part One I talked about aligning your online and offline strategies, and in Part Two I covered how to spruce up your virtual store-front.)

In our free e-book, The Link Economy, Matt and I talk about how successful search marketing companies develop all of the components of a search marketing campaign at one time.

What we mean by this is a savvy marketer will sit down and plan out the campaign strategy, keywords, and content (i.e. blog posts, landing pages, offers) before implementing the campaign – often months in advance.

Pre-campaign planning gives you the 30,000 foot perspective – and it allows you to see and fix any bottlenecks or problems before the campaign launches. When planning for the 2009 holiday shopping season, you’ll want to keep in mind the following search marketing best practices.

First, Find the right keywords.

We’ve covered this topic considerably in previous blog posts (see here and here).

Suffice to say, the foundation of your successful online holiday season starts with the right keywords. How do you know which keywords to use for the holiday season? You can use the tips in the two articles cited above plus these special (and guaranteed enjoyable) “holiday” keyword tips:

Read dead-tree media – If you sell consumer products to women, for example, read the gossip rags. One, you’ll learn how women talk to each other – “baby bump,” “gladiators,” and “hobo bag” are all terms women know and use in their online searches – and two, you’ll learn what the celebrities are wearing. This is important information as women often search by celebrity name plus the product – for example, “angelina jolie makeup.”

Watch TV – Watch popular shows, such as American Idol or Sunday football games. Again, pay attention to what people are wearing or talking about in the off-the-cuff commentary. Also analyze the commercials – what are the big retailers advertising and how are they doing it? Do they use URLs that take people to a specific landing page (i.e. www.domain-name.com/TV offer)? If so, test the URL and offer to see how things work – and note any roadblocks you encounter.

Do a mall stakeout – Park yourself on a bench at the mall and let the crowd flow by you. Listen to people talk on their phones and face-to-face. Look at their clothes and other items. What’s hot? What’s not? Teenage boys, for example have made Vans, a popular skateboarding shoe, a hot selling item – and in fact, “Vans skulls” (a shoe with a skull pattern) is a moderately searched keyword!

Second, develop your search campaigns around your holiday keywords.

Now sit down and plan out your PPC and SEO campaigns around these keywords. Again, we’ve written many blog posts on these topics:

Setting up PPC Campaigns

Three Big PPC Mistakes – and How to Avoid Them, Part I and Part II

Writing Effective PPC Ad Copy

Creating Keyword-Rich Content

The goal here is to develop well-thought out campaigns (re: strategic) that are targeted and optimized for what people are looking for. In your plan, note how many new pages you’ll need in terms of SEO – or if you can tweak existing pages by changing Title / meta tags, headlines or page copy. Also note any new PPC ads you’ll need plus the landing pages that go with them.

Third, plan out your blog posts in advance.

Blogs should be an important tool in your marketing strategy. One, it’s easy to create keyword-rich content “on the fly” and two, blog posts are often included in the search engine results pages within hours of being published – versus the days or even weeks it can take the Google, Yahoo or Bing crawlers to find your new “static” HTML content.

If you have a blog, develop a holiday editorial calendar and note when you’ll write posts that announce in-store events or online sales and when new products become available. Also be sure to include time for ongoing research and writing posts in response to “news.”

For example, if you’re reading a gossip rag and you see a celebrity teen boy wearing Vans with skulls – and you sell this very shoe – then you’ll want to include a picture of the celebrity in a blog post plus the fact that people can find these shoes at your store (when other retailers are sold out). You’ll want to optimize the title of your blog post with the keyword phrase plus link the keyword phrase “Vans with skulls” to your landing page where you sell this shoe.

We here at Yield Software want to see you have a hugely successful holiday season. If you have tips or suggestions for how to improve online sales, please send them to me at derek(dot)gordon(at)yieldsoftware(dot)com and I’ll feature them in future posts.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, sign up today for our Yield Web Marketing Suite. At $129 month, it’s affordable and provides lots of value – namely, it increases SEM campaign ROI and saves you a ton of time having to manually track everything. To learn more, take the software for a spin for 30 days at absolutely no cost or obligation to you via our free trial offer.

Rather than spend money in these tough times, consumers are saving it (savings accounts are the new black). Instead of resigning yourself to a red holiday season (in the bottom line sense of the word), now is the time to gear up and make the most of the holiday season.

And you can – with a few well-thought out strategies that I outline in this, Part II of Web Marketing Holiday prep. (If you missed Part I, wherein I talk about aligning online and offline strategies, you can find it here.)  This week: getting your online house in order!

First: Ensure your site is extra secure for online transactions.

I visited the website of a financial institution recently and was appalled to note that the little “lock” icon was missing from the right corner of the Web page AND the secure “https” was missing from the URL.

Even worse, this site wanted me to log-in to my account using my social security number. Bad news, people! According to SSL.com, if you’re asking for customers’ sensitive information, i.e. credit card numbers, your website should be super secured using SSL.

Having a secure website eases customers’ fears about ordering from your site – and it gives you a leg up over those clueless retailers who leave security to chance. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to educate consumers about how you’ve secured your site as many people don’t know about how online security works.

Second: Help buyers compare similar items.

In a recent trip to the mall, I was pleasantly surprised to see the parking lot full and the mall crowded with people. It’s not that people aren’t spending money – it’s that they’re comparing products and prices and often visiting two or more retailers to find the best deal. (In fact, consumer spending data shows that debit card use is up – an indication that people are using cash versus credit.)

Online retailers have a real advantage over their bricks-and-mortar colleagues because you can develop Web pages that compare your products with your competitors’ products, including features and pricing.

Such information saves consumers time and helps them making buying decisions – especially if they’re in a hurry and need to make a purchase, like now.

Third: Let consumers see if product is in stock.

One of my Yield Software co-workers visited Best Buy in her town in order to purchase one of those cool netbooks. First she had to put her name on a list to even get waited on, then when her turn came, she found out the retailer was out of stock of the netbook. Grrrrr!

So she went online to Staples and in a few clicks saw that a store near her had the netbook – and plenty of them. Thirty minutes later, she was the proud owner of one.

Again, you’re saving customers time and money – both of which are in short supply – by providing your customers with an online inventory database. Balking at the cost? Remember, consumers are buying your goods with after-tax dollars and using cash, meaning they have fewer dollars in their wallets. Your cost for creating an inventory database is a business expense on pre-tax dollars – so do it. Your bottom line will thank you.

Fourth: Make it easy to contact you and return product.

I once bought the wrong power cord for my laptop from an after-market retailer, and found out, much to my chagrin, that I had no way of contacting the online retailer in order to return it. The site lacked an email address and phone number!

You can give consumers confidence when purchasing from you by including your contact information – and return policy – prominently on your website.

Fifth: Update your homepage, product pages and your blog.

If you’ve been putting off website updates — including content, navigation or back-end technologies — now is the time to draw up a to-do list.  Think about who is best able to make the changes you need, consider any budget-related impacts, and assign them their duties and deadlines.  Now is not the time to put of until tomorrow what you can get done today.  If you’ve been neglecting your blog lately, start reinvigorating it now — you’ll want to reawaken search engine crawlers to the fact that you’re regularly updating your website again.  (In the final post in this series, we’ll address these issues again as they pertain to SEO, PPC campaigns and landing pages.)

Finally: Take advantage of trends.

Eco-friendly. Organic. Green. Energy efficient. Consumers are hot for these trends and will spend hard-earned cash if they believe they’ll some positive impact in the long run (and believe me, consumers are becoming much more savvy about how their purchases affect the environment).  As I’ve already hammered-home, frugality is the order of the day and trumps all other trends (with luxury brand categories a possible notable exception), so you should also be sure you’re highlighting how it is your products and services saves money, time or other resources.  Think about two-for-one or gift-with-purchase promotions.  More than anything else, shoppers want to see value in their purchases.

Instead of offering products (such as robotic singing elves whose voices make you want to commit suicide) consider offering products such as wooly blankets made from free-range sheep. Your customers will walk away with a good conscious and they’ll stay warm over the winter to boot.

In part three of this series, I’ll cover how to prepare your landing pages, paid and natural search keywords, and PPC campaigns for the coming holiday rush. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet checked out how the Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you better manage your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns, now is the time (before the holiday season rush gets underway).

Sign up for your free, no-obligation 30-day trial – and see how Yield Software can help you achieve better ROI this holiday season.

I know, I know: every day it seems you hear news about the dismal sales climate in the US. And it’s true: consumers are sitting on their wallets.

However, with a little strategic planning and creative thinking, you can help ensure that you finish the year with a bang. In this three-part series about prepping for the coming holidays, we’ll cover how you can drive traffic to your site and increase conversions.

And the first step is ensuring your holiday campaign components work – not just in driving traffic but actually work together without glitches and snafus.

Case in point: A few weeks ago I visited Williams-Sonoma at my local mall. While ringing up my purchases, the sales clerk informed me of cooking classes the store was holding – and gave me a flyer listing the class topics and dates.

Cool! I’ve always wanted to learn how to make pasta dough from scratch. However, while in-store cooking events are a great tactic for getting people into the store (and buying things), Williams-Sonoma made a big error: people interested in the classes have to call the store to RSVP. Even worse, the flyer from my store didn’t list the store’s phone number, a URL for online information or an email address.

Many Williams-Sonoma stores across the U.S. are holding these cooking classes – and a quick search showed that people are posting videos to YouTube about them and talking about the company on Twitter – yet W-S doesn’t incorporate these consumer-generated videos on its own YouTube channel or website, and it seems there are at least a couple Twitter feeds: the Santa Monica, CA store has a Twitter feed but is not following its fans; and a corporate Twitter feed that has a few hundred followers, but only follows a few dozen in return, and that has a tweet in August that obliquely refers to cooking classes in the stores this weekend (with no link to calendar listings).

It should be said that I am a HUGE fan of Williams-Sonoma (my kitchen is testimony), and so it gives me no joy to use them as an example of poor marketing integration strategies.  But by not integrating its campaign components, W-S is losing some serious buzz opportunity!

Whether you’re a pure e-tailer or a bricks and mortar business with an online presence, consider the following strategies when planning holiday campaigns:

First: Integrate offline and online – Make it easy for people to do business with you. All printed promotional materials should, at the very least, include your phone number, email address and website URL. If you’re hot into social media, include your Facebook and Twitter URLs.

If you’re holding an event – whether virtual or face-to-face – develop a special landing page where people can sign-up and use this URL on all promo materials.

W-S, for example, does have a Facebook Fan Page but doesn’t list events on it. On top of that, the paper flyer the store gave me lacks any contact info, making it difficult for people like me to register for the cooking classes (now I have to go online, find the store, look up the phone number and call – not convenient).

Second: Join the conversation – Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company and its products. You can either ignore this conversation or promote it. When the group Msyto & Pizzi did a video to the Geico theme song, rather than ignore it Geico added it to their website.

If you haven’t already, develop a Twitter profile, a Facebook Fan Page, a YouTube channel, a blog – or even an iPhone app. Reserving your profiles now, even if you’re not ready to use them, is important because cyber-squatters are stealing brand names.

Once you’ve developed your social media presence, reach out to the people already talking about your company. Retweet their tweets, thank them for their contributions, promote their videos, and even ask them the write guest blog posts. You’ll create more buzz – and more sales.

Three: Test, test, test – In his book, “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands,” Kenneth J. Weiss talks about how poorly branded and badly-executed software-powered applications negatively affect your customers and your brand.

This includes landing pages where the order process is broken (or those e-tailers that make people register before making a purchase – my pet peeve!) or even something “small” like making people call to RSVP for an event versus signing up online.

Once your campaign components are in place, test them – and have your family members test them, too, from their clunky home computers and smart phones. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to feedback from your testers and fix the bottlenecks.

In my next post, I’ll cover strategies you can use to increase traffic and conversions for the holiday season.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free e-book, The Link Economy: Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses.  In it you’ll learn why integrating your campaigns is important and how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage your search marketing campaigns.