Are Your Sites Ready for Springtime Shoppers?

As we can all feel outside, Springtime is right around the corner! In 4-6 weeks, people are going to begin shopping for seasonal items from Grills to Bikini’s… is Your Site ready for them? Now is the time to begin preparation for the seasonal shoppers! If you wait until you are planting your own bulbs, waxing your own car, or looking for ways to trim down to get into your bathing suit, you are going to be too late! In this post, I will examine just a few ways to start building some early seasonal interest in your site, to get in front of the traffic! Best of all… we will do most of the work using the Free Google Insights and Trends tools!

Identifying Seasonal Traffic Trends

Before you ever start making changes on your site, the first thing you need to know… is what may be popular! Sure, none of us are Carnac and able to predict the future as good as Johnny Carson did, but we have the next best thing… Google Insights!

For this example, I simply used the words “Grills, Gas Grills, and Charcoal Grills” and chose “Home and Garden” from the category menu within insights.

As you can see… Demand in the general category of Grills tends to start picking up in Feb, and builds strongly for the next 4 months into June. This same trend has repeated itself over the course of the 5 previous years, so its pretty safe for me to assume it will do the same thing this year. In fact, the site I DO have about grills has already started seeing a slight increase in traffic. This tells me the time is right to start generating interest!

Take your own primary niche market and enter it into Google insights, to find out when the traffic starts to flow. If you have a market like “Snow Skis” you may be out of luck for the next month or two, but even a cold weather niche like that starts to come back to life in May, which is well within the time frame to prepare for now!

Choosing the Right Terms to Target

Another nice little feature of Google Insights, are the related terms that are shown, relative to the phrases you searched for! In my case, I can see that “Weber Grills” is just as trendy as the term grills itself! BUT… Why do I want to focus on terms that have been popular for several years, unless I already have a long record of ranking for those terms? In this case, I am going to look at the “Rising Searches” as they are not likely AS targeted! (I circled them in Green)

Just to get an idea of the volume and competition for the general terms in the “Rising Search” column, I head over to the Google Adwords Sandbox, and enter the following into the screen: weber e310, weber spirit, weber performer, and weber genesis. Although the terms with more than 10k monthly searches have a bit of competition, the longer tail phrases in the list have little to none! In all, my site will see the addition of four new sections based on these 4 terms. By all means, there is no need to stop right here either… if you continue your research and find 50 top rising items to target, build a page for ALL of them! Just take your time and do each page thoroughly!

For kicks… I researched a few other markets I know some of you follow. There are some STELLAR terms floating around out there right now with little to no competition!!

Pulling it All Together on Your Site

At this point, you may think I would jump over to my site and add EVERYTHING to do with these four target terms at once… I won’t! We already know that search engines like slow and steady growth on a site and adding everything at once, while not harmful, really won’t make a huge difference! I will stretch out my newly found content sources over the course of a full week or two, then use a few minutes each day, to help search engines and visitors find the individual pages.

First, I will slowly add the new pages (in BANS) or posts (for phpbay sites) for the four target phrases, or fit them into the existing category structure, where they would naturally occur. In the case above, all four fall under the main category of Weber Grills. Each of the new pages will contain 100-200 words of unique & relative content, and only 4 eBay auction listings! Yes, the days of full pages of auction listings are going, going, gone!

Second,  if you are building with BANS, edit your home content page (which should have little to no auction listings at this point) or the parent category page of the products, and add a short clip of news about the new content you just added! Maybe you can create a small news box somewhere, and over the course of the next few weeks, you could add 2-3 links to your deeper content every week, just to get it noticed faster! Of course, your pages will appear in your menu and get found there as well! If you are publishing with phpbay or a wordpress blog, just write a quick post about your new pages and let visitors know what they will find by visiting those pages.

In my case, since I already have a page about Weber Grills, I just added a small section at the bottom, where I will feature all the subcategories, within the main category.

Get Out and Spread the Word

Unfortunately, this is where most of us stop working… and I am just guilty as the rest! Its called laziness… plain and simple. I can get as lazy as anyone and after a page is published, I have been known to just let it grow (or not) on its own merit! Immediately after you publish your page, head out to a directory or bookmark site, and bookmark the page! Just like a blog post, you should also bookmark static pages like those in BANS.

After you bookmark the site, look around for link & article directories like the Hit Doctor Directory , that accept article posts less than 500 words in length. At the Hit Doctor directory, you can have as few as 100 words to write a quick release about your new page.

Remember… Just because it is not the MAIN page of your site, you still need inbound links, in order for anyone to find it!

In case any of you are wondering which site I am working on, its a BANS only site called Grill Auctions . The site was originally rewarded in a contest in 2007… the winner never converted it to the new ePN and one afternoon, I saw it in the TDNAM listings. Since it had a bit of meaning to me, I picked it up out of the aftermarket and just revived it over the past week. While I still have quite a bit of work to complete on the site… it is back off the ground and on its way! At some point next week, I will start a new series of posts, that details the steps I took to rebuild the site into a better resource, likely to stand the test of time and manual review!

Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:

• Yahoo and Bing are Almost One… Are You Ready?
• Get Ready for Another Slap by Ebay Partner Network!
• New BANS WordPress Theme almost ready for Release!

Rate This Post

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...