The sun is out and that means two things, the Spring sales have started and people suddenly remember they have a garden.

Boosting your seasonal website traffic

Retailers are looking to make the most of the Spring sales season both through their high street stores and online. Recent figures from some of the biggest UK high street and online retailers show what a dramatic effect taking advantage of seasonal online searches for words such as 'sale', 'sales' and 'spring sales' can have. Argos remains the most popular high street retailer, but Debenhams saw the largest increase in visits (45.3%) with Next, Marks and Spencer and Littlewoods also showing significant gains.  

Making sure your website is geared up for seasonal opportunities is a lesson all retailers, large and small, can benefit from. But with budgets tight, when it comes to driving traffic to your website we are often asked whether it's better to spend your money on organic search engine optimisation, or pay per click, such as Google Adwords.

Organic Searches v Pay Per Click

The recent experience of Debenhams and Littlewoods makes an interesting comparison. Debenhams with a 45.3% increase in sales related website visits, relied exclusively on organic SEO traffic, whilst Littlewoods with an 18.7% gain paid for most of its traffic via pay per click sales related keywords. Not conclusive, but perhaps does lend itself to our view that organic SEO provides a more sustainable impact on increasing traffic and enquiries, although Pay Per Click is a useful tactical tool for particular campaigns such as a seasonal sale. In other words, they are compatible online tools rather than mutually exclusive. 

Fair weather online searches

As you might expect, there is plenty of evidence that the weather affects online searches. The recent spate of sunshine turned people's minds to their gardens, which trebled UK Internet searches for garden furniture and tools, especially lawn mowers (which reminds me, mine needs a service!) If you sell online, does your website give you the flexibility to change your products and content quickly to meet seasonal or other spikes in demand? Our new ecommerce solution gives you just that control to maximise your sales. See a demo here.

So What?

The lesson for all online traders is that any search engine optimisation strategy needs not only to be worked on month in, month out, but also requires an element of seasonal focus to benefit the most from seasonal online search trends.

How we can help

To help you maximise your online enquiries through out the year, we offer two Search Engine Optimisation solutions (find our more here):

1.  1st page of Google guaranteed, or your money back (terms and conditions apply)
2.  Pay Per Position - you don't pay us a penny until we hit the agreed key word position targets

And don't forget, we recently launched our new ecommerce solution to maximise your online sales when visitors come to your online store. You can have a look at our ecommerce demo here.

To make an enquiry contact us here, or ring us now on 0845 6187342.

The 2009 Budget - A lot has been said about the recent Budget doing nothing for businesses. How do you feel? Please share your view by completing and submitting this two question anonymous survey. Have your say so we can share the results with you next month.
 

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How to avoid the dreaded blacklist

This month I'm talking about a subject I've mentioned before - SPAM. Not, you understand, the chopped meat version to which I was rather partial (actually, I was rather partial to any meat come to think of it) but the dreaded stuff that clogs up your email inbox.

Spam is as much an enemy of the legitimate email sender as it is to the recipient. The last thing you need when you're trying to use email as an effective marketing tool is to get blacklisted. Blacklisting is when your ISP provider blocks your email campaigns because they believe you to be a spammer.

The best way to avoid being blacklisted is to follow standard email best practice, so I hope you've read the 10 Do's and 10 Don'ts mentioned above. But there are many more than just 10 of each. To avoid the blacklist you need to pay particular attention to these 6 areas:

1. Make sure you have an opt-out or unsubscribe link and that you remove all requests within 10 days.

2. Use an email system that automatically deletes hard bounces from your data. Sending repeated emails to invalid email addresses will get you on a blacklist.

3. Be careful where you get your data from. If you are going to rent data make sure the source is reputable and de-dupe the list against any existing data you may have to remove any unsubscribers from previous email campaigns.

4. Never share data with a 3rd party unless you have asked and received the permission of the email recipients.

5. Use a Spam scorer to check your emails before you send them. This will show whether the content of your email is likely to trigger the recipients Spam filter.

6. Monitor email blacklists to check you have not been listed.

If you follow these guidelines and use other best practice principles you should end up enjoying using email to boost your enquiries and sales as much as I enjoyed eating Spam (which was a lot!)

> Learn more about using email to boost your enquiries and sales here.