Are you ready for Q4 in Q2?

The second quarter of the year is upon us, affectionately referred to as "Q2".  It is important for online marketers to begin to think about how they want to position their SEO efforts for the coming holiday retail sales season. Now, this seems a bit early considering departments are now preparing for their spring and summer sales,.

Although seasonal events and sales are extremely important to work on, seeds planted now in SEO will begin bearing fruit in Q4. Take action now with your content and efforts to aim for the position you want on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Any ability to rank well on certain natural search terms will also have a positive benefit for your paid search campaigns.  We recommend you begin to put the correct strategies in place today.

Here are a few reasons to help support why it is vital to begin your Q4 SEO in Q2 and hopefully they are enough to help you get started.

- The Search Engines (SEs) may index your holiday pages within a week, however it may take up to six months before they really begin to show.  You now have the 6 months to work on your efforts and get optimized for all those terms you would really like to try and show for on the SERPs.

- If you have efforts in line already, however you are not getting the top results you strive for during your busy Q4 season, now is when you have the time to play with your site and still recover if you make a mistake and lose placements before the busy season kicks in.

- What better time to begin to go after the terms that generate high ROIs for the competition when they are busy focusing on the present, instead of the future?

- Starting this early also gives you time to really focus in on a larger quantity of long tailed terms, instead of rushing to work on a few higher searched general words or phrases.


With that said, a few of the basic SEO strategies you may want to work on are:

- Content, Content, Content - Useful and educational content for customers will only help your SEO efforts.

- Meta Tags, Title Tags and Content consistency combinations.

- Working with top industry sites for backlinks where appropriate, which will have time to be crawled and registered before Q4.

- Getting that forum or blog on your site finally up and running so you can start to build some readership and return customers for your Q4 product, sale and service announcements. This also helps out with the content point above.

Many people forget about Q4 when working on their spring product lines, however, those who prepare ahead of time are the ones who benefit in the long run.

If you’d like to find out more information about how you can begin your prepwork for Q4 or want a consultation from Downtown Ecommerce Partners, please write me at adam @downtownecommerce.com and I will be happy to help you.

Best,

Adam