The holidays can really sneak up on you, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to develop a holiday marketing strategy that can successfully drive traffic to your website. According to Retail Customer Experience, online purchases will increase between 12.8% and 14.3% from 2021 consumer behavior. With users going online for their holiday shopping needs, this is an excellent opportunity for your brand to use holiday searches to gain traction for your website. 

How to Leverage Search Listening 

Search listening is a form of data analytics that looks at what consumers are searching for online. Unlike social listening, search listening looks at people’s private questions. With search listening, you can dig into holiday data from previous years to better understand what people are searching for. Even if your brand does not sell traditional holiday gifts, taking advantage of holiday searches can help amplify your website through search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

By doing a simple search in Google Trends for “gifts for mom”, we can see when consumers are searching or “Googling” this query. A top-level insight shows spikes on Dec. 8th and Dec. 19th. As you are aware, some people plan ahead for the holiday season, while others are last-minute shoppers. It does not come up under the “related searches” category, a blog with the title “Last Minute Holiday Gifts for Mom” could prove to be a boost for SEO, or PPC ads more enticing. There is a third spike as late as Dec. 23rd, creating ads that feature expedited shipping deals and can be a great way to target last-minute shoppers.

From the related searches, we can see the various ways people searched for similar queries, such as “holiday gifts for mom”, “Christmas gifts for her”, and “Christmas gifts for wife”. These can be a starting point to find key terms to populate your blog and ad copy, helping to increase relevancy for related queries. 

Another interesting insight is “Christmas stockings” and “gardening” are related topics. Finding creative and relevant ways to work with gardening presents and stocking stuffers can also amplify SEO or your PPC ads. And this is a particularly interesting insight for gardening and plant stores. “5 Plants to Get Your Mom for Christmas” may have a bigger audience than one would have guessed.

SEO vs PPC: Which is the Right Choice for You?

Now that you have an idea of how to utilize search listening for SEO and PPC, it’s time to decide if you want to focus on SEO or PPC. (Of course, you can focus on both, but not all brands have the time or financial bandwidth to do so). 

SEO, in the long run, saves money and is easier to get started with a limited budget. But it takes time to develop your brand’s ranking. If you have a niche product, such as fish-flavored cupcakes, your company will probably rank well on SEO, but there may be few people searching for fish-flavored cupcakes. On the other hand, if you’re selling a popular item like shoes, your brand has major competitors such as Vans, Addidas, Sketchers, ect., which means you need to be creative with your audience segmentation and long-tail phrases. 

PPC ads can be a great way to be seen and get more brand recognition. Instead of waiting months to climb up the rankings, your ads can be immediately seen within hours. Of course, as you can see from the search below, there is still competition when bidding for ad space. While lesser-known retailers such as Allbirds and cariuma.com have ads at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), major retailers such as Nike and Zappos still rank high for ads.

While it may only be sustainable to run PPC campaigns for a limited time, they are a fantastic option for short campaigns, such as holiday sales. Creating ads with headlines such as “Shoes for Her – 25%-off Last Minute Holiday Shopping” can grab people’s attention, as well as hit on related keywords as well as user behavior. 

Whichever route you decide to go for your holiday marketing campaign, using data-driven information is the best way to optimize your campaign. If you’d like advice or need support for developing your search listening strategy, social listening, or content development, please reach out! We are always here to support brands as this platform continues to evolve. Book A Call With B3

What we’re reading:

• SEO vs. PPC: When to Optimize and When to Pay for Traffic (Hubspot)
• 14 Mistakes to Avoid in Holiday Marketing Campaigns (Search Engine Journal)
• Holiday Marketing Campaign Ideas and Tips to Delight Your Customers (Big Commerce)
• How to go Viral on TikTok: Is TrendPop the Answer?
• Elon Takes Over The Twitterverse