Creating Content for Holiday Shoppers

Shoppers….start your engines! The holiday season is just around the corner (mind-bogglingly, I already heard a Christmas song on the radio!!) and retailers across the country are gearing up for a swarm of holiday shoppers.

I want to take a moment to focus on online retailers in particular and offer some helpful advice for gaining more of a web presence during this crucial time of the year.

As more and more people take advantage of internet conveniences to both research and purchase products, so too do retailers. This convenience, which allows shoppers to quickly and easily compare a multitude of products, results in the need for online retailers to distinguish themselves and their products from the competition.

Keep in mind, though, this competitive advantage will only help if users can find you. Why wouldn’t they be able to?

It has become customary for online retailers to use product descriptions on their sites that have been supplied by the product manufacturers. And why not? It’s quick, easy and accurate.

Here’s the problem:

For any given product, there is fierce competition. So there may be literally hundreds of online retailers that offer the same products you do. If all of these retailers use the same product description on their sites, where are you going to fall in the search engine results when someone searches for “Playstation 3”?

With all of this duplicate content floating around on the web, what are the chances that the engines will ignore all of it except the description on your site?

Not good.

It’s important to make all of the content on your site unique. If you want to give yourself a better chance to gain a favorable presence on the web this holiday season, don’t put up content that the manufacturer supplies – create your own product descriptions and give the search engines, and your potential customers, something they’ve never seen before.