eBuzz - Searching for a Valentine

Searching for a Valentine

An article by Enid Burns in last week's Click-Z discussed the role of organic search in this year's Valentine's Day purchasing "season."

"Natural or organic search results accounted for 34 percent more traffic and 21 percent higher sales than pay-per-click (PPC) ads or sponsored results over the two weeks leading up to Valentine's Day," Burns noted. Google accounted for 75 percent of search traffic, and delivered 72 percent of sales. Yahoo served 16 percent of Valentine-related traffic, and 18 percent of sales. MSN supplied 9 percent of traffic, and 10 percent of sales.

Lisa Wehr, president of OneUpPub, was surprised by the results. "Valentine's is a short holiday, not like Christmas where people purchase items months in advance, so I thought paid would play a stronger role."

We're hardly surprised. There's a strong logical reason for the success of organic search during this short holiday buying period, and it has nothing to do with the length of the purchasing time. Quick question: what's an appropriate Valentine's Day gift for your sweetheart?

Ah, there's the rub. Once you've gotten beyond chocolate at one end of the spectrum and diamonds at the other, most people are stymied as to what makes an appropriate gift. Enter organic search. It leads the consumer, not just to products (as PPC does), but to ideas. Concepts. And once a company can offer help to the distracted customer, it's far more likely that the company can then make the sale.

Looking at holidays and asking how can I be of value to the potential customer? and then positioning yourself both to help and then to close the sale — that's how to use organic search to its full capacity. A short article using appropriate keywords will bring people to your site, while good selling techniques will keep them there.

And that's our take on the news today!

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