A lot of people think summer is slow and not the time to focus on their websites.
So many people are out of town, some businesses slow down. Not to mention we all have concerns about the economy right now.
I want to propose a different perspective.
1. People are sticking closer to home because of high gas prices. You’ve all heard the term “Staycation” thrown around by the media. If you watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart you heard John Hodgeman (the PC guy from the commercials) create his own new word for the “stick closer to home because gas is way too expensive” phenomenon: “Holistays”.
No matter what you call it, people are sticking closer to home. People are shopping online even more.
It’s a great time to offer a shipping special. With the cost of shipping going up, again due to the cost of gas, a shipping special is much appreciated right now.
You can tap into this situation by playing it up. Just as The Daily Show created a segment that was funny and garnered a lot of attention; you can find a way to make the current situation work in your favor.
2. If things are a little slow, it is actually the perfect time to devote some of your time to your website.
It is suggested that you review your website and refresh it at least once a year. Just a handful of suggestions for you:
- Now is a good time to check the links and pages within your site and make sure everything is in working order. Get rid of those pesky 404 errors from broken links.
- You could also come up with a summer special.
- Jazz up the site.
- Add some testimonials.
- Look at your web stats and see if you can increase conversions.
3. Now is when you absolutely must start focusing on your upcoming holiday campaigns.
No one wants to think about the fall and then winter and the holiday season, while enjoying the sun and probably some time off. However as we all know, time passes quickly and I hate to be the one to say it, but holiday season will be upon us before we even know it.
- Start planning your campaigns
- Write your ad copy
- Design your graphics
4. Top rankings don’t happen over night. It takes time for the engines to rank your site for your top keywords. It is not too soon to start your optimization in anticipation of the upcoming holiday season.
On the flip side; if summer is your busy time, you don’t want to ignore optimization now. When the busy time settles down a bit, you want optimization in place to help bring in traffic to boost what would normally be a slower time for you in the fall.
No matter which way you look at it, and no matter when your busy time is, the truth is putting off optimization is never a good idea. If you don’t need free targeted traffic from the search engines, then this won’t apply to you. I don’t really know of any website that isn’t looking to increase traffic and get more sales though.
So take a look at getting your site optimized and prepare for the upcoming change in seasons. You aren’t going to be happy if the holiday season approaches and you aren’t positioned to benefit from it.
For those reasons and more now is actually the perfect time to focus on your website’s growth and improvement.
Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing for EcomBuffet.com. Over the past 10 years Jennifer’s expertise in marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on SEO and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer is the editor of the popular Spotlight on Success: SEO and Marketing newsletter. Follow Jennifer and stay current on SEO, marketing, social media and more. http://twitter.com/EcomBuffet
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Summer time slow down?
At SMX a couple weeks ago Eric Enge and I did a 20-25 minute interview. The interview transcript is now out in case you want to read through it. We discuss some of the ways to get links that are likely to stand the test of time:
Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an editorial link by someone, and it’s someone that’s informed. They are not misinformed, they are not tricked; there is no bait and switch involved. It’s because somebody thinks that something is so cool, so useful, or so helpful that they want to make little sign posts so that other people on the web can find that out.
I mentioned link-generating methods from original research to case studies, a service, or even an open-source product. We also discussed widgetbait and some of the criteria on whether Google would consider something spammy or not. We talked about when reciprocal links can get excessive. We discussed a good rule of thumb of when to link out to other sites (when it’s good for your users).
At the very end of the interview, I took the opportunity to send some props toward SocialSpark. As opposed to some services where paid posts pass PageRank, SocialSpark posts require nofollow so that any paid links don’t pass PageRank. If paid posts respect that requirement from SocialSpark, they’d be within our webmaster guidelines. I’ve noticed once or twice where an advertiser tried to get an extra nofollow’ed link in a SocialSpark post, but when I’ve mentioned those 1-2 examples, IZEA has taken action to correct that. So we’ll continue to keep an eye on things, but I wanted to mention the progress that I saw in SocialSpark.
By the way, we’re currently caught up on paid link reports, so if you know of sites (maybe in your search niche) that appear to be selling or buying paid links that pass PageRank, it’s a great time to let us know. Use the authenticated paid link spam report form and someone will investigate the report. We’ll be concentrating primarily on the sellers, but if you send us a site that appears to be buying links that pass PageRank it’s trivial for us to look up all the backlinks for that site to find potential sellers and work from there. That feedback will also help us improve our algorithms, so thanks in advance for any feedback you want to provide.
What’s the second search tidbit? Last Thursday I was a guest host for the Daily SearchCast. I thought it was going to be a slow news day, but when I woke up that morning Jeremy Zawodny had just announced that he was leaving Yahoo. So Danny Sullivan and I ended up having plenty to talk about.
Original post:
Two search tidbits
The NY Post is reporting that despite public statements from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and CFO Chris Liddell that the offer on the table is final and that Microsoft might “walk away” from Yahoo, there may in fact be a new and improved offer to Jerry Yang and his fellow Yahoo board members through “back channels.”
Stay Tuned: Will Microsoft Sweeten The Deal?
The Get Elastic Blog noticed Google testing displaying the AdWords URLs above the ad description. Typically, the AdWords URLs are displayed below the ad description. Here is a compare and contrast picture:
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Google AdWords Tests Display URL Above Ad Description
Click Forensics released their statistics on the click fraud rate for the first quarter of 2008, showing a click fraud rate of 16.3 percent. That number is down from the previous quarter, which was 16.6 percent. Compared to a year ago, when the click fraud rate was 14.8 percent, we are up.
Click fraud on the content network was at 27.8 percent, down from the 28.3 percent rate a quarter earlier but up from a year before at 21.9 percent.
The rest is here:
Click Fraud Rate Declines Slightly, Says Click Forensics