Eating Up Thanksgiving Internet Traffic
By Jonathan M. Burgess M.B.A.
PR Event Cycles on Hyper-Local Sites
The Holidays create a great PR opportunity for many clients looking to build their brand, and take advantage of the largest shopping days. Understanding the cycles of the Internet as it relates to events and event planning is key to building strong and repeatable website traffic patterns.For years we have marketed local sites like this one, InlandEmpire.US. We were initially successful in building traffic by being the first site on the block. As the market matured, and the niches became more competitive, we have had to continue to look at and follow our analytical data. One thing we found, were the huge peaks of traffic based around events and holidays. The great thing is that you can plan for it.
Opportunity to Win
The opportunity to win is based on a few things. First, your site either has to have a strongly keyworded niche, or a hyper-local niche, where you are fairly competitive. Second, you must “own” the event. Owning the event is not just writing a page, but properly positioning your page, and allowing your traffic to efficiently flow through your site. The third, and most important, is that we treat the event like it is historical.
Traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing is already funneled through a previous years’ indexed page; but seeing the content is up-to-date, spiders will re-index it. The second major benefit is that your page then has years worth of backlinks to support your event.
Short and Long of It
The short term benefit is a huge spike in event based traffic. The long term benefit is that your regular traffic and branding to new viewers can be leveraged to increase your overall monthly traffic, or you simply gain new visitors.
Example: Halloween on a hyper-local site.
We have years of goodwill and well keyworded pages about Halloween in the InlandEmpire.US. We have supported those pages with event posts, ghost stories, and backlinks. What you see in Google and Bing under “Inland Empire Halloween” are two things; first we are number 1, and second we have multiple pages in top spots. In Google we have 3 pages, Bing and Yahoo have 2. This not only supports our efforts, but forces competition out of the first spot. You’ll see in the graph, that we also capitalized on “Inland Empire Election” traffic, just a few days later.
Keep Up with Us
If you would like to know more, or keep up with our thoughts on PR and the Internet, fill out our PR form here, https://inlandempire.us/advertising/building-content-with-us/
By Jonathan M. Burgess M.B.A.
Marketing Consultant and Internet Guy
In charge of day to day Internet activities for RedFusion Media, Inc, Jon has built and consulted on hundreds of website marketing plans. He currently is on the board of the AAF-Inland Empire and spends most of his time worrying about his fantasy football team.
