The holidays are here and it’s going to be an especially aggressive holiday season with every vendor fighting tooth and nail for consumer dollars. The question at hand is: have you taken appropriate measures to garner consumer attention and is your site working in conjunction with other avenues to broaden your appeal and scope? If not, consider a blog as it has become one of the best proven methods for the vendor to give personal touches, reviews, and recommendations to their products that otherwise could not be expressed in an e-commerce store.

What can a blog do for your e-commerce online store?

An accompanying blog to your e-commerce site offers numerous benefits for, quite frankly, minimal effort. There are the obvious benefits from an SEO prospective, but more importantly is assisting consumer decisions in products purchases along with funneling them from your blog into your e-commerce site.

One of the unsung benefits of accompanying blogs is providing you, the vendor, with a platform to provide reviews and additional information without cluttering your e-commerce site. More and more, consumers read reviews and ratings before they purchase a product online. At the very core of the issue is consumer confidence. The consumer feels they are getting the best “bang for the buck” from ratings and the consumer feels confidence in purchasing from reviews, even if vendor sponsored.

Additional potential benefits from an accompanying blog are:

• Obtaining better Google Page Ranking
• Drive traffic to your online store
• Obtaining better Alexa traffic ranking
• A great branding and exposure to the public
• Interaction with your potential customer
• To compete with your competitors
• To show your customer that your are serious about your business
• Be the number one blog in your niche

Directing traffic to your e-commerce site

• It’s your blog. It’s your choice to link and direct your traffic to your e-commerce site. Many post hot deals, discount coupon, new products, news, announcements and industry news which in turn directs traffic to the accompanying e-commerce site. Ideally, you will need to have your own unique domain name for both your e-commerce site and blog. For example, www.SEOwhat.com’s primary site is at www.SEOwhat.com and their primary blog can be found as subdirectory of at blog.SEOwhat.com

Great branding and exposure to consumers

• With your blog, you have a greater chance to be known by million people who search on the Internet. Blog posts can be searchable and provides yet another avenue for further branding and exposure via additional content.

To show your customer that your are serious about your business

• Frequent blog posts will show your customers that you are updating your site and you are serious about your online business. Blogs also provide an arena to answer your customer’s question should you choose so. A blog also provides additional tracking/ analytics data to know consumers are looking for.

Interacting with your potential customer

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  • Two best topics to post in your niche to attract your potential customers and interact with them are “how-to” and “FAQ” articles. Regardless of what you are selling, people are looking for solutions. If you are selling jewelry, you should post about how to properly size jewelry items, or how to clean different metals. This shows your customers you care about the subject and care enough to impart knowledge. Customers will show you that they care by returning for future purchases or linking to your articles/posts.

4 TYPES of HOLIDAY SHOPPERS!

Early Birds

• Proven successful targets! 2/3 of these shoppers are women, the majority are within the baby boomer generation and prefer personalization.
• Large business/ corporate gift buying presence as most business prefer to get shopping out of the way early.

Successful Past campaigns:

• Extra 10% w/ early (Late Oct – Early Nov) expiration date
• Free gift w/ purchase
• Buy 1, get 1 free

Prime Time Shoppers

• High advertiser target rate, in other words, you’ve got stiff competition.

Successful Past campaigns:

• Top selling gifts under $20, $25, $50, or some other predetermined amounts
• Gift guides
• Discounts on bundles of certain items or of a certain total price target (ex: 5% off when you spend $50, 10% off at $100, etc.)
• Free shipping or free shipping when you spend $X amount

Procrastinators

• This group tends to have the highest % of young shoppers within the 16% of total holiday season shopper groups.
• Gift cards are the biggest fad in this group as they are easy to obtain and for a set amount (FYI: Gift cards are the most wanted gift by women, and overall the 3rd most wanted gift by men).

Successful Past campaigns:

• Free gift wrap w/ purchase
• Extended holiday hours whether for brick and motor operations or customer service
• “Almost Sold Out” or “5 Units Left” are great enticers
• Announce “Last Day to Purchase to Have by December XX” or other hard ship dates

The Desperate

• Mixed group although has a higher % of males than females.
• Just because they’re “desperate” doesn’t mean they’ll pay through the nose, rather, they’ll pull the trigger on a purchase more quickly if a) it seems like a good price and b) they can get it in time.

Successful Past campaigns:

• Announce “Last Day to Purchase to Have by December XX” or other hard ship dates
• If gift cannot be received on time, printable announcement stating item is on the way (something they can give even if they can’t give the gift)
• An email signup to be reminded early next year to avoid the crunch, entice with a 5% off next year’s purchase with signup (great way to get emails in any group!)

SEO What Dot Com

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is something that many bloggers and website owners participate in without really understanding what it is, or how to use it to get ahead on the internet. So let’s start with the basics. Search engine optimization is how you can optimize a website by improving both internal and external aspects, with one goal in mind: increasing the amount of traffic that the website receives from popular search engines, including and specifically Google and Yahoo. Google dominates the search engine marketplace with nearly 40% of all internet searches done through it, and Yahoo isn’t that far behind with just about 30% of all internet searches done through it. Suffice to say, it is important to use SEO in a manner that will influence rankings in Google and Yahoo.

Let’s start with the basics of SEO: how seach engines work. Search engines use automated programs known as bots and spiders to crawl through the internet and individual pages. These bots and spiders comb over individual pages to look for information on it, including essential keywords. They do a good job, considering that there are an estimated twenty billion pages in internet existence, and over half have been crawled by search engines. Search engine bots and spiders look for keywords so that they know how to index your site, and when to pull it up for search engine queries.

So, how can you make the most of SEO? The biggest thing is to use essential, ranking keywords throughout your site, but in a manner that isn’t considered spamming, also using keywords that actually mean something to search engines and the visitors that use them. These keywords can be used throughout your site: in meta tags, within links and anchor text (including headings — those are lines of text that are enclosed within h1 tags, and on their own.

In addition, you should build your website to SEO standards. This means not spamming with keywords, using headings, using anchor text, and also: watching your links. Limit unique internal links (these are links that go to other pages on your website) to less than one hundred, don’t “bury” pages more than three clicks or links away from the homepage, avoid iframes and regular frames at all costs, and use navigational links in standard form (avoid dropdown menus and other fancy scripts).

Finally, you can use a search engine optimization service, such as SEOwhat.com, to further optimize your site and boost its rankings. For more information, visit http://www.seowhat.com.

About the Author

Kimberly Green is combing the sand for the most ethical and effective SEO Firm out there. The answer is in the proof. Just look at the results of existing clients and the longevity of the relationships a firm has with these clients. Evidence is what I want to see when judging whether or not I want to utilize any Company’s services. It is not any different when choosing an SEO Company.