Valentine’s Day SEO Project

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and internet-savvy florists already have their V-Day products online. Many of you have already begun email marketing campaigns as early as mid-January!

Today, I want to talk about an effective way to generate some extra search traffic and funnel it into your ecommerce site. We’re going to go through a quick overview of a process called Siloing, first published years ago by Bruce Clay. (A similar technique is known as PageRank Sculpting was in style last year, but don’t confuse sculpting with siloing.)

The premise of Siloing is that you have a landing page based around a theme or phrase that you want to rank for, and then a series of related pages that only link back to the parent landing page or other landing pages on your site. These supporting pages never link to other supporting pages. The effect of siloing is that you are creating tight groups of focused content that have a clear hierarchy based on their link structure.

To develop our Valentine’s Day silo, lets start by paying a visit to the Google Insights for Search tool. This handy tool displays search volume patterns and trends for your keyword phrase. Here’s the report on “Valentine’s Day”:

Already you should be seeing some themes that we can use. At first glance, it appears we could create a successful silo from the terms:

• Valentine’s Day (summary or history of the event)
  • Valentine’s Day Cards
  • Valentine’s Day Gifts
  • Valentine’s Day Ideas
  • Valentine’s Day Music
  • Valentine’s Day Flowers (cuz that’s what we’re all about!)

The Valentine’s Day page will be our Landing Page, the centre of our V-Day theme. It will contain the most general information about Valentine’s Day, and link to the supporting pages within the text of the page, using anchor text that is relevant to the supporting page. In turn, each supporting page will link to the other supporting pages and the landing page. It’s important to remember that the supporting pages should only link to pages within the silo, or at the top of other silos.

If we look a bit further, there is room for the intrepid florist to expand even more! Silos are often tiered with multiple levels. A supporting page may in fact be the landing page of its own silo.

• Valentine’s Day (summary or history of the event)
  • Valentine’s Day Cards
  • Valentine’s Day Gifts
    • Valentine’s Day Gifts For Men
    • Valentine’s Day Gifts For Women
    • Valentine’s Day Gifts For Children
    • Valentine’s Day Gifts For Teachers
    • Valentine’s Day Gifts For Co-Workers
    • Valentine’s Day Gifts That Are NSFW!
  • Valentine’s Day Ideas
  • Valentine’s Day Music
  • Valentine’s Day Flowers (cuz that’s what we’re all about!)

As you can see, with a little imagination it’s easy to build quite a list of pages to create. They don’t need to be incredibly long, but they should be engaging and focused on the topic. Include pictures and link to your Valentine’s Day product selection from each page. If the content is interesting or engaging enough it will attract some links for your site. With more lead time you can create buzz by soliciting user input about their favourite/worst Valentine’s events. Run a contest and let users vote on whose submission is best/worst.

This is a quick run-through of how to approach a holiday. Ideally, this would have been done months ago, but the example is useful as Valentine’s Day is on everyone’s mind. Florist 2.0 members can get more specific guidance in the support forum on FlowerChat.com. Even last minute content can drive traffic!

While you’re at it – why not take the same approach for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, Christmas – and any other event that you feel might drive traffic.

Bonus: Don’t think you have to re-invent the wheel every year. Freshen up the content, run a new contest – but don’t delete or move the pages. Let them build authority while you maintain the freshness of the content.