This is Day 2 of our Holiday 2011 Run-Up preparations for your website. We want you to start adding all holiday related content to your site now so Google and Bing have time to find it by the time Thanksgiving comes around. For our European readers, that's the 3rd Thursday in November.
Google will take a while to find your new website content and show it in the SERPs. So what you need to do this week is figure out what items and brands you will carry during the Holiday 2011 Season and put that information on your website.
Let's explain using an example.
We noticed a recent ad for Alamea Hawaii that we liked so we'll give them a mention here. They produce hand-crafted wood and titanium rings. Their website is http://www.alameahawaii.com and they make a good candidate for this example.
First preparation step is to figure out which of their items you will have in the store during the Holiday Season. To decide, you should call your rep and ask them if they have a flight schedule of ads for any magazines. Get your hands on the ad materials and the advertising media locations. Depending on what they will advertise, you could select your store inventory to match.
It's always easier to align your website or local advertising to that of your suppliers. This provides a 1-2 punch association of their national advertising and your local advertising.
Next preparation step is to decide at what level you are going to display this new product line on your website. You could put a dedicated designer line page on your site that introduces the jewelry, or you could add all the products to your online jewelry catalog or you can do both. We like the idea of both.
If you don't have an online catalog yet, you need to get that started. Don't fret about posting prices or jewelry e-commerce; just get the damn thing on your website! Your customers want to see the items you carry more than they really want to know prices. Remember, you serve the local community and your customers will come to your store for that touchy-feely experience anyway.
It looks like Alamea has their entire product catalog on their own website, although there are currently a few 404 errors and the images seem to be disproportioned. This is okay because you want to attract customers to your website and not theirs anyway. So call your Alamea rep and ask for original artwork of the jewelry you decided to stock in your store and copies of all the ads they will be running from October through December 2011.
Once you have copies of their Holiday 2011 ads and the jewelry photos, you need to start writing and creating new pages on your website.
Do you have a "Designer Lines" area of your site? Instead of providing off-site links to jewelry vendors, a Designer Lines area is your personal showcase of all the name brand designers you want to proudly display. Within each designer line page you include the designer's description, talk about their product line, show off their ads and show some of the products. You also need to talk about the ownership experience of the jewelry. This is where your first hand knowledge becomes important. You need to explain in writing what you would say to someone in person.
Add each jewelry style you carry in the store to your online catalog. Each individual style will need a good description. Don't get lazy here. You need to actually write out the description of each item rather than saying "Titanium Wood Ring inlay with Solid Cocobolo Wood." Sure, it might be made of Cocobolo wood, but what is that? Do you think your customers will know? Probably not so you need to provide additional information about it. For this specific example we noticed that Alamea actually took the first sentence from the Wikipedia page to describe the wood. Here "COCOBOLO - is a tropical hardwood of the tree Dalberia retusa from Central America." Although that might be a good strategy, you need to also include the in-person look and feel of the jewelry and how will this particular wood matches the design of the titanium ring. You also might want to make recommendations of skin tones that the wood would match with.
Do you see where we are going with this? We're trying to make you think correctly on how to write the descriptions for your products. The more information you write about each individual item, the better chance your website will appear in the SERPs. It's not about listing metal type, gem type, and diamond qualities any more. You need to provide a sales service in writing just like you would in-store, in-person.
Alright, now for the really important stuff.
What we've said so far is the normal process for posting new designer and product information on your website. But we need to make sure this item will appear in the SERPs for the holiday season, so let's sprinkle some magic holiday keyword dust on it....
Here are some holiday keywords that you need to pepper throughout all the new content you add to your website now. This is a very short list of the ones we've compiled and will be publishing soon in our official Holiday 2011 Run-Up eBook.
Use a variety of these phrases on each page, but make it natural:
Holiday gifts
2011 holiday gifts
Holiday gift ideas
Top holiday gifts
Gifts for men
Jewelry for men
Jewelry for mom
Gifts for mom
Top Christmas gifts
Best Christmas gifts
Christmas gift ideas
2011 Christmas gifts
These are specific phrases we found in our research for 2009 and 2010. Use them in random sentences throughout your content. Consumers won't start searching for these phrases until November or December, but if you wait to add them to your content Google and Bing will not find them in time.
Adding these to your new content now will give you an amazing advantage over your competitor.
