Thoughts about Contests and SEO

[House of Silver]

We have online silver jewellery shop, House of Silver, with affordable/budget prices and also a blog, not connected to the shop. Currently we are running a competition on our blog (jewellerysecrets dot co dot uk) giving away Sterling silver necklace. It's first time we are running a giveaway and it seems it generates lots of interest.
We are going to run more of the kind of contests - for that reason we have prepared 1 ounce silver bar to give away. The question is how could we utilise this giveaway to receive maximum gain?
Apart of the usual email subscriptions, social shares etc. what else could we get for it? Would it be good idea from SEO point of view to run it on our online shop (rather than on blog) to increase traffic?
And what would be the best way to filter out serial competition entrants?
Our main goal would be to aid SEO.

 

[Dheeraj Thukral]

Hello House of Silver,

I have been running social media competitions for quite some time and I'd love to share some results.

I'm not sure if you have heard of this term but there a lot of CONTEST HUNTERS on Social Media websites (particularly Facebook) and whose only mission is to scout and hunt for contests and earn prizes.

They don't care about your marketing team's mission or whether you are losing money on Facebook Ads. All that they care is to pose as qualified leads for a specific contest and win prizes.

I have personally experienced this for so many clients in the UK.

Social Media Contests do sound lucrative because of their high engagement rates, but that engagement is useless if that doesn't give your business the required amount of brand recall.

What I would recommend you to do in order to succeed at Social Media is this -

1. Go deep into what kind of content your competitors are posting online. This means using certain tools such as Facebook Analytics and Page Info and Ads of your competitor pages.

2. Try to understand what kind of personas you are dealing with. I want you to go really deep into this and visualize your ideal customer - What interests do they have? What do they like talking about? What blogs do they read? What kind of jewellery are they into? When is the best time for them to start using your product?

3. You can also do your competitive research by surveying your actual customers who come to our shop and buy your products offline. This would give you a tremendous boost in defining your competitive advantage.

4. Finally, if you really wish to start an online contest - You must pick a theme that your competitors love to engage with.

For example, I was selling a breast pump for my client Medela in India. We picked an event such as "Mother's Day" and planned a whole week around it.

We drafted an entire story reflecting the emotions of a mother towards his child and invited real mothers to participate in the contest by going to a landing page and sharing their stories.

So it worked like Post 1 - Introduction towards Post 7 - A complete story of a mother and how she raises her child against all odds. We even mentioned some notable working moms that we knew in our network to really add the social proof our campaign needed.

We promoted that as an ad on Facebook and received close to 3000 entries in 7 days (which was huge!)

Finally, 3000 email addresses later, we really got the list we needed to actively promote our products and so far around 80 sales have been validated from that list.

Hope that helps!

 

[fisicx]

Our main goal would be to aid SEO.

Not a good goal. A competition is transient so by the time Google has indexed the page it's over and no longer valid.

Put the blog on your main site. It's an orphan at the moment so not helping the main site. Fully integrating the two will help your SEO - if you blog properly. This post for example is pointless. People wanting this information aren't potential buyers so add zero value.

If you want better ranking competitions aren't the way to go. But there are lots of things you could do. Join UKBF as a full member to get a website review.

 

[Darren_Ssc]

Linking from your blog on a seperate domain is likely to be detrimental in the long run, so yes, have your blog on the same domain as your main site and link internally.

I would also avoid using the same descriptions for similar products throughout the site. If there isn't sufficient words to describe the minor differences between each it would be better to have them all on one page as different options rather than a page for each.

I'm not sure competitions and giveaways are going to be your best strategy, long term. How much is it costing you to give stuff away and are you really getting any benefit from it? The money might be better spent on paid search ads or on improving your site content.

 

[House of Silver]

Thanks for your comments. Basically, our aim is to improve SEO and get our shop high in SERPs.
We have hardly any organic visitors and we would like to increase their numbers. As we sell at affordable prices, we think we could make good sales, providing we are visible.
We could afford to run monthly competitions on our shop, so we wonder if it's worth it and if we could make it work towards improving our ranking. I'm aware of contest hunters, and again, are there ways to employ them in improving our ranking (through clicks, page visits etc.), or to filter them out with good technique (e.g. make contest task more demanding).

 

[fisicx]

Thanks for your comments. Basically, our aim is to improve SEO and get our shop high in SERPs.

This is going to take a huge amount of effort over many many months and probably a lot of money as well.

There thousands of sites selling affordable silver jewellery and an awful lot selling upmarket products. For you to compete you need to better than all of these.

Contests are not going to help you ranking

 

[DRDR]

First, determine where you are promoting to get all these sudden comp entries. Your blog don't seem to get much visitors so it should be coming from elsewhere. Is it social? Is it newsletter? If it came from those channels, they may be the channels you should consider focusing on first.

SEO is a long game and since your blog just started this year, you are starting from scratch it'll take you a very long time to eventually get the readers and eventually convert them into buyers for your website. There are ways to improve on organic but having a competition on that blog is not the way to do it.

Are you a wholesaler...Have you considered attending Moda fashion show in Birmingham?

 

[House of Silver]

Thank you all for your input, I really appreciate you posting on my thread.
We are quite long in jewellery trade, we know it well, but this SEO thing is holding us back. You need to get in front of potential customer to make a sale.
We are pleased with the competitions we are running, it increased our social media shares and landed us some subscribers, however we can see there are a lot of contest hunters. Will have to find ways to better utilise giveaways to get most out of it, so it is worthwhile to run it.

 

[fisicx]

As I said, if you want to rank well for general
Silver jewellery terms you need very deep pockets and to put in a huge effort.

It will be far cheaper and quicker to just use adwords and target niche searches.

 

[Inva]

You should only allow current clients in the contest.

 

[House of Silver]

You should only allow current clients in the contest.

current customers already know us, so what's the point to run contest only for them?

As I said, if you want to rank well for general
Silver jewellery terms you need very deep pockets and to put in a huge effort.

It will be far cheaper and quicker to just use adwords and target niche searches.

You are right probably to concentrate on paid search after all. Are there any other PPC worth trying? And are there any affiliate software which allows to directly work with advertiser (bloggers etc.)?

 

[Inva]

current customers already know us, so what's the point to run contest only for them?

You're not very good at marketing.

 

[fisicx]

current customers already know us, so what's the point to run contest only for them?

So they buy more stuff

You are right probably to concentrate on paid search after all. Are there any other PPC worth trying? And are there any affiliate software which allows to directly work with advertiser (bloggers etc.)?

There are loads of PPC systems. Google lists loads of them.

But I really wouldn't bother yet. The website needs a load of work before you are really for a big marketing push.