Executing your holiday strategies — Tyson Stockton // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “One piece that we spoke about for holiday prep is building the relationships and getting in front of the dependencies in other stakeholders that you are going to have in the organization. When you get to that execution phase, you should have already taken care of your homework in identifying who you need to have bought in and with all of us doing remote, it may be a little more challenging than the previous years.” -Tyson

• “The first question, is there going to be a Black Friday? Yes but they are not going to look anything like they were in the previous years. A lot of companies have come out and said they are closing stores on these holidays and again I see this is a glass half-full scenario for SEOs especially if you are working in the e-commerce space.” -Tyson

• “Instead of having to split some of the spotlight with the in-store traffic and sales, youre going to have more people coming to the website. So I say, there are still going to be holiday events and I do anticipate that they are going to start earlier which we have seen the last several years with inching sales forward and forward.” -Tyson

• “If I would put a date to it, I would actually be looking towards the beginning of November when I think more companies will start to turn on those typically Black Friday sales in that first half of November before Thanksgiving.” -Tyson

• “I dont know what you call it if Black Friday is before Friday or an early Black Friday. Is it like a Grey Wednesday? I think there is something to be said for, if the in-person events arent happening, there is nothing holding us to the time where everyone will be free which is right after Thanksgiving dinner, no one is working everybody can run to the store and that is when we are going to have this high value deals.” -Ben

• “With that said people are still going to want a good deal around the holidays although most of the stuff is going to happen online. Individual stores might host their own events whenever they decide to feel like it. Might be Walmart Wednesdays, who knows?” -Ben

• “As long as I have a technically strong page, all the right elements to it and I have identified what potential content pieces are going to need to be quickly updated then I am prepared no matter what the launch date is, whatever the sale price is or whatever products are trending, it is just more of a plug-and-play scenario so that as an SEO, I am already prepared for elements that are out of my jurisdiction or control.” -Tyson

• “I would say that at first, re-use your URLs. Anything that you hadfrom the previous year, if you could use something and give it a refresh, you are going to have a little headstart and depending on the type of company, I would also introduce URLs early in the sense of it being before the navigation or its something that is front and center on the homepage, I would want to have Google crawl my URLs for it and then as I get closer to it, end up actually being turned on or activated then thats when users are having more internal links going on to those pages.” -Tyson

• “So in general, the goal is to want to launch a little earlier to make sure Google can crawl your pages and sometimes that is letting thet strategic cat out of the bag as well and you could pick up that fight with your merchandising team and some of the restof your marketing team talking about when they are looking to launch their other marketing programs. The way that we are talking about this makes it seem like launch is a one-time thing where you are executing agains an individual event that you are launching.” -Ben

• “You can definitely find creative ways of getting those URLs live and then indexed and then have a couple of rolling periods of updating and refreshing to it.” -Tyson

• “I think not knowing to when exactly the peaks this year from a sales perspective and then also knowing hey Im only going to be able to get away with having this much content to start where it was once an activated campaign, I can actually show what the discounts and what the deals are, I would absolutely do a rolling launchand then that way, it doesnt matter when that peak is happening. You already have it set like you are already just flipping the switch of when it is actually an activated campaign.” -Tyson