Last-Minute SEO – Here Come the Holidays!
Unless their business is summer-related, summer is the time of year where many website owners (and managers) slow down, kick back, grab a beer, and enjoy those long, hot, sunny days! As long as Google doesnt release an update or manually devalue your site, it is the time of year where you feel most able to take the time to relax a bit. You tell yourself, "Labor DayLabor Day," then you will kick it back into high gear! Surely you deserve that time - well, unless you are in charge of site traffic for a website that relies on the holiday season to pay the bills. Then you might have been relaxing just when you should have been prepping for the end of year.
When Labor Day comes, you get back to work relaxed and ready to start working on your site visibility plan for the holidays. But then the bad news: your in-house SEO team or online marketing agency tells you its too late - maybe they can get some results, but highly competitive and valued terms cannot be reached without the risk of incurring Googles wrath or at least directed irritation. Suddenly you realize you just missed your holiday window and there is no time to fully implement a proper SEO strategy. Now what? Dont panic. There are things you can do.
Summer is always a fairly slow time of year in the land of search engine optimization, but like those annoying Santa Claus displays that hit your stores by October, when is it too early to start your holiday planning? (Well, never.) When is it too late? (Now.) And if you missed your window, what can you do?
Most holiday markets are very competitive. Since most companies dont start making the majority of their money until Q4 (the term "Black Friday" came from the idea that most companies dont turn a profit until that day of the year), website visibility during this time of year is often very important to an online companys yearly financials and its successful bottom line. But what if you waited and now you wont have the website visibility needed to reach your goals?
Website visibility used to be called just SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization). The thing is, today there are so many different strategies you can use to bring clients and users to your site that we need a broader definition, so lets call it "Website Visibility."
Website visibility is basically anything you do to bring your site to the eyes of potential users and/or customers. These methods typically fall under organic and paid umbrellas.
Organic search is generally used to refer to how well your site factors against that search engines organic algorithm and then how well that engine positions you in the search engine result pages (or SERPs) as a result.
Not that many years ago we had quite a few of these things called search engines, but today we are primarily referring to the "Big 3": Google, Bing, and Yahoo in that order, with a small, but growing percentage beginning to use Duck, Duck, Go. Mostly, though, people optimize their sites to Googles algorithm first, then Bing and that is about it.
There are some other methods that some might call organic, such as interviews, article writing (for legitimate zines), events, and most forms of social media. However, the term "organic" is typically paired with the term "search" for practical purposes.
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Last-Minute SEO - Here Come the Holidays!