Hi,

Our site is a fashion retail site which has undergone respectable growth in traffic over the past 2 years.

A large source of this increase has been Organic. We essentially have 3 classifications of keywords that drive our traffic, Brand, Niche and Generic. In the past we have worked towards “dominating” niche phrases and “perusing” the more generic phrases.

This strategy has worked to a certain extent with good returns in organic. However we are now asking ourselves if there could be a more beneficial approach to our organic traffic?

Generic KW’s are good traffic drivers but don’t necessarily convert as well as niche terms but that said isn’t it a case of the more traffic the merrier? (As long as it’s relevant of course).

We also have an issue with seasonality in our product range, shifting from one product group in winter to another for summer so current we do the same with SEO efforts and shift focus at these times; again any advice on the best way to deal with seasonality in seo would be helpful.

Thanks,

We tend to focus most on our 'domain authority' (particularly using our blog as a link magnet) to get as many links to our domain generally as possible to increase our overall authority. We then use a lot of 'best practice' (URLs, internal links, Page Titles, Keywords etc.) to deal with the long tail so that niche stuff tends to rank 'automatically' based on our domain authority.

Where we do actively target keywords/phrases is in what you call the 'generics'. For example we decided recently we wanted to rank for terms like 'mobile commerce' and 'F-commerce' (Facebook commerce) as emerging topics we'd like to 'own' as thought leaders. Again we largely do this via our blog by writing relevant articles. (and it works).

We also look at phrases that, for you, would be product categories but for us are phrases like '[digital marketing discipline][research / training / jobs]' e.g. "email marketing training" where we focus on onsite stuff (internal link building, on page content, content refresh rates etc.) as well as offsite (press releases, link building, social).

We don't quite have seasonality in the same way you do but we do have annual events which come and go each year. The way we handle these is to have a single 'master' URL (e.g. http://econsultancy.com/events/future-of-digital-marketing) which always has the most current content. When an event has passed, and we have the content for the next one ready, we then 'archive' off the old event to a new URL (e.g. http://econsultancy.com/events/future-of-digital-marketing-2010). This means the master URL always ranks best and keeps all the accrued link equity over the years and it also means users (via search) always find the most current content/event.

It’s absolutely a nice and valuable piece of knowledge. I’m glad that you shared this helpful info with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thank you very much for sharing.

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