Hey, Scott Austin here. In this episode, we're going to talk about merchandizing for a holiday.

As I'm recording this, it's January 26th. Valentine's is coming up. So we're going to do a couple of Valentine's Day scenarios. Now, if you're listening to the audio only version of this, I am going to have an accompanying video. If you hear something you like and want to see it, you can just go to the video link to in the show notes and check that out.

So what I'm doing is I'm going to do three. Let's go tail queries. Keyword search phrases. Right. The first one is going to be Valentine's gift for 58 year old man. Second one is going to be Valentine's gift for best friend. And the third one is going to be Valentine's gift for elementary school classmates. And we'll just look in Google at what shows up for each of those who is ranking, and see if there is some learnings we can get by, you know, investigating this, you know, now, traditionally, what most people do for Valentine's Day, if they're marketing for Valentine's Day, is they'll do gifts for him and gifts for her.

These queries I purposely went, you know, much more detailed than just male female. So let's first look at the Valentine's gift for 58 year old man. Search result in Google. Now Google is identifying this as a shopping query. Which it is, right? We are actually saying gift here, right? It's not DIY ideas. And those kind of things.

It's as gifts. It's definitely a shopping query. Google agrees. So what they put up there in the first row is shopping ads.

every store, you know, should be doing Google shopping, and it should be the first ad you turn on your store. Second one should be remarketing ads.

Now, we can't control, you know, you're not bidding for the keyword phrase Valentine's gift for 58 year old man.

Google is figuring that out on their side of

all the data they've got in their database. Of all the shopping ads, you know, that you've submitted to them through Google Merchant, through the Shopify feed, to Google Merchant. They've got all that content there to pick from, and they figure out which ads are the most relevant for people that are paying for the Google Shopping ads.

And in this one, you know, it actually does a decent job. Google does a decent job of picking, you know, ideas that are probably better for men. Right? There's a beef jerky flower bouquet, which I just think is hysterical. There's a nuts about you. Valentine's ten. There's, custom Valentine's Day gift. Pop art portrait.

And then there's a bacon crate.

Awesome gift for the bacon lover. There's, gifts for construction. The grand cookie and chocolate toolbox. Right. So, and there's there's even more of them. But, you know, they're not bad, right?

brands are paying to play in this ecosystem, right? And this is on the Google search results page, not the Google shopping page.

Now, if I scroll down a little bit, you know, there's the AI results and I'm not really sure how Google's getting those in there. And that'll be interesting for all of us to learn over time. But the next section below that, right. So we got shopping ads, AI results and then there's videos,

from YouTube. And the first video is Valentine's Day Gift Ideas for men 2025 fun and affordable.

And it looks like it's from an influencer. The second one, what he wants for Valentine's Day over 50. So this has got the gender correct and the age correct.

it looks like it's from a brand. It says life and flowers. It may or may not be a brand. It's going to assume it's a brand and not an influencer.

The third one, thoughtful Valentine's gift idea is 2024. So it's a year old now.

And this one is from a charming a bull, which looks to me to be an influencer also. But I could be wrong.

those three videos, only one of them was for older men. The other two. One was for men. And then the third one was for for their whole family.

Right. So not very specific.

the reason I bring that up is I think it would be easy for brands to create video content if you if you want a buyer's guide for Valentine's, which is what I'm going to be recommending, you know, if Valentine's is an appropriate holiday for you. I will, you know, recommend that you build out a buyer's guide and in that buyer's guide, be broken down into all these different personas like men, women, older men, you know, school kids, all that kind of stuff.

I would recommend that you also make an accompanying video and post that onto YouTube for each one of those buyer guides you're creating, because each one of those videos is going to, you know, be applicable to this shopping query. And as I've already said, these videos are showing up before our organic search results,

You can't control whether you show and shopping and you can try by paying.

But Google is going to determine how relevant your content is. So the next place you get to be on the search results and compete for is in the video section. And like I said, I think it'll be a great place for brands to start competing in. And then below that we have our organic search results. And for this query, I think all of them except for one, is more media company like blog or newspaper magazine type content.

The one that wasn't, is actually a Shopify store. Groovy guy gifts.

And it's the article. It's a blog article they made and it's 95 thoughtful gifts for older men in your life. So and they're number two in organic search right behind PopSugar, which I believe is more like a blog.

And they have, you know, the best gifts for men 50 and older. So both of those are results that talk about men and the age. The third one is Amazon gifts for men over 50. So you can see a Shopify store. Groovy Guy gifts beat out Amazon for this right after that is the New York Times the 32 best Valentine's Day gifts for him.

Not age specific, just gender specific. This is why I'm broke, which I believe is a blog. 55 Fantastic gifts for Older Men who Think they have everything. So that got age and gender. Esquire's next 51 best Valentine's Day gifts for him. So it didn't get age. It just got the gender and then read it. What was the best Valentine's gift you've received?

So. And then after that, it's more, shopping ads. So in that space, a lot of the competition right now is monetizing it indirectly, right? They're not actually selling the products like the influencers that have the videos, the, New York Times or the, other blogs.

You know, they probably have affiliate relationships or something with Amazon or whoever.

They're promoting on there.

but they're creating that content with that lower margin revenue stream of affiliates than you have. Right? As a as a brand. Your margins are going to be higher than theirs if you can win in this game, which to me means I'm surprised I don't see more brands competing here right now.

Now, if I had to search for a much more, generic term like Valentine's Day gifts, fairly confident that that would be driven more by e-commerce in these results.

But

I don't see a lot of brands going deeper into that merchandizing with all the different scenarios, you know, Valentine's, gift for, you know, men who love fishing, right?

Men who love bowling, all those kind of things. Like, let's say you had a store selling bowling equipment,

You should probably have an article or a page, a landing page of some sort, which is the best Valentine's gifts for bowlers, because not many people are going to search for that term. But the ones that do, a, you're going to win that SEO game because you're going to have content for bowlers where other other brands probably don't.

And you're also very relevant because you're selling bowling equipment.

I always say riches and niches, right. And one of the places that you know, is a niche is how small of an audience you're marketing for or trying to address with this SEO effort that you're doing. All this is a little bit of advertising also, but there's highly in SEO that we're talking about with having videos up there.

That's an SEO result or having an article or a page, a landing page, that's an SEO result also. So let's just move on to another, query. This is Valentine's gift for best friend, right? Now there's also terms out there like Valentine's and Ballantine's. You could do that instead. Or play with that a little bit. Now, if we look at the results of that Google search right at the beginning, there's the, shopping ads from Google.

Interestingly, you know, there's this, the same ad shows up three times, and the three different queries I do. Right. It's the custom Valentine's Day gift, pop art, portrait on canvas.

I don't know if they're bidding really high or because their product title says Valentine's Day gift. Right? But they show up for the three very different search queries with the same product.

one of the things to think about, you know, is these results, actually, most of them are seeing Valentine's in the product title, which is probably how they're winning the bid competition in the Google Shopping ads. The second one is that same, nuts. I talked about, you know, the nuts about you Valentine's in, right? Nuts about you, Valentine.

Tim. Now, the third one is Lady Fortune's jumbo M&M fortune cookie. That doesn't say the word Valentine's in the title, so be interesting to see why that pops up. The next one is Valentine's Day flower delivery, black magic bouquet. So that has Valentine's in the title. The next one is heart black box, 24 karat gold and red roses.

It doesn't have Valentines in it, but I would imagine they talk about that in the search results. So

not only should you be thinking about in your optimizing these products for search, you know, having landing pages or YouTube videos about that content like Valentine's gift for best friend. You also want to think about having a Valentine specific product name.

So that as you do your Google Shopping ads, that Valentine's in the product name is going to rank up higher than if you didn't have the word Valentine's in the product name. If people are searching for the term Valentine's gift for your scenario here. So if you know, once again, going back to a bowling scenario, if you had the Valentine's Day bowling ball,

that would rank higher than your, you know, best bowling ball for men.

Product.

underneath this Google Shopping ads, they actually have Google ads also. So you could in this query, you know, they're not showing that YouTube videos. Let me see I'm scrolling down. Yeah. They're not showing YouTube videos at all on this one. But they also so they have shopping ads and Google AdWords. So you could be bidding for this keyword phrase, Valentine's gift for best friend and having an AdWords show up also.

Now when I look at, you know, who's number one in the AdWords, it's Westminster cheek. Luxurious Valentine's gift stuff to get for Valentine's.

just want to see.

That's an old looking website, but they're selling teak furniture, which, you know, blows my mind that teak furniture is the kind of thing

that people would, you know, buy for Valentine's, but if they're advertising for it, they must be right. And that shows you, you know, the niches of things.

So they're bidding on that keyword phrase.

They're winning that keyword phrase, which was, you know, Valentine's gift for best friends in AdWords. And landing on a page of products for sale, with actually no Valentine's, content on that page.

you've got multiple ways that you're competing for attention as Google search results pages get, you know, more and more complex,

You've got Google Shopping and you've also got AdWords.

You've also got YouTube videos, and you've also got your website content. And there's even more ideas we'll talk about in a little bit here.

But you just you got to start thinking about how do you, you know, dabble in all of these or as many of these as is possible for you. So instead of, you know, the old days where we would just make a Valentine's Day buyer's guide, post that up there and, you know, get traffic from it.

You know what I'm encouraging brands to do is to get more detailed about those things.

more detail about them in the number of scenarios like Valentine's gift for 58 year old man and Valentine's gift for best friend, and Valentine's gift for an elementary school classmates. You know that's one dimension you're going. The other dimension is where you're putting that content and where you're promoting that content.

Having videos, having pages, having ads and all those different scenarios.

So we look at the organic search results. The first one that pops up is Quora answering the question, what is the best gift for a best friend on Valentine's Day? After that is Biscuit year,

Galentine's Day and Valentine's Day gifts for best friend. So they've got that best friend query in there, right?

Same as the Quora one. That word best friend is is popping up on both of those. After that is Valentine's Day gift for friends, not best friends. And that's Etsy.

After that is Valentine's Day gift ideas on Reddit. And then after that is 20 Valentine's Day gifts your friends will love.

the next one.

After that is Valentine's Day gifts for your best friend or Valentine.

it didn't take long for the search results to not include best friend.

Because, you know, my assumption there is not a lot of people are going that tell in their their merchandizing of that and having a page optimized for Valentine's Day gifts for best friend, which to me means there's opportunity if you focus on that level, because, you know, it makes sense to start off with a, you know, Valentine's Day gifts for friends.

Page. Right. But after you do that and you compete in that space, then you want to go to the next level of detail and say, well, not as many people are optimizing a page for best friends, so therefore you're going to do it.

for every pro there's a con and this type of scenario, right. So what I mean about that is if you optimize for best friends, you're probably you know, going to have less queries of people searching for Valentine's Day gifts for best friends.

People probably search for more, you know, go on time, stay gifts for friends. So you're going to be, you know, competing in less queries. But because that query volume is lower and the competitiveness of that keyword phrase is lower, as we're seeing here, you're going to win more of them. So a small brand might not be able to win in the, you know, SEO game for Valentine's Day gifts for friends.

But they might be able to win in Valentine's Day. Gift for best friends, right? Or Valentine's Day gift for bowlers. Those types of queries. Even though there's gonna be less volume, it's going to be more volume to the small brand because they weren't getting any volume at the, you know, more traffic driving queries, the higher volume queries.

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let's roll on to our next, search query, which is Valentine's gift for elementary school classmates.

Now, the shopping ads here are actually pretty relevant. Now, oddly, you know, like I said before that that poster shows up again.

It that ad showed up in all three very different queries.

they're doing something with that title or bidding really high. I'm not sure what it is, but the other products that show up are really relevant for elementary school classmates.

Right? There's Valentine's Day fever sets of 30 Valentine's exchange cards with squishy toys, glow in the dark Valentine 72 piece, stuffed gorillas, school Valentine heart party favors, personalized Valentine's Day candy favors, and then a 20 pack of Valentine's Day drawstring bags. So very relevant in those shopping ads. So Google's doing a really good job in matching those products to the query.

Now, underneath this set of shopping ads, we once again have Google AdWords. Remember one of our three queries we had YouTube and the other two they're showing Google AdWords. Now this AdWords one is up. The first one is from minted and it's personalized Kids Valentines. The second one for AdWords is Joy Valentine's Day Gifts Valentine's slime toy with card.

So those both seem relevant to the query, but it doesn't talk about classmates. It talks about children.

you know, if you were to focus your eyes on classmates, you might, you know, win in this space and beat those competitors out because you're more applicable to the keyword phrase. And then if we go into the organic results, number one is Amazon Valentine's gifts for classmates.

Second is BuzzFeed 30 cute little kids. Valentine's Day gifts for the whole class. Third is Pinterest 210 Valentine's Day classmate gift ideas, right? And this week, click on that one.

This Pinterest goes to a specific board. Buy by a person, right? It's not an aggregated one. So whatever they did,

to get this board to rank, it's number three on Google search results,

even if you didn't optimize a page on your website for this, you could optimize a Pinterest board, right? So you could have, you know, a bunch of Pinterest boards, Valentine's Day, you know, classmate gifts, Valentine's Day, high school classmate gifts, Valentine's Day middle school class, you know, all that kind of stuff.

You can make Pinterest boards and see if those rank for you also.

talking about there's a number of ways to create content and get that content to surface inside of a Google search results page.

Pinterest ranks pretty high quite often.

be interesting to understand. I don't understand, you know, the optimization tips for Pinterest for SEO, but it'd be interesting to understand why this one specific board ranked over other ones. And I have a couple guesses in my mind, but they would just be guesses. And next after that is Etsy and that is Classmate Valentine's.

So Etsy is doing their own merchandizing, putting together a collection of products from different stores that are going to,

be applicable for that classmate keyword phrase.

And then after that, we're showing YouTube videos, right? So the first video is lollipop class. Favorite kids in my Amazon Underclass Gifts. So this is an influencer putting together a video. The next one is Valentine's gift ideas for your kids classmates. Once again, this looks like a YouTuber. And then or a influencer.

And then the third video is Valentine's Day. Gift ideas. Budget friendly also looks like an influencer. So once again, that YouTube space is dominated by influencers because that's a platform influencers use a lot. I think brands should be using YouTube more than they are today for this level of merchandizing, because those YouTube videos show up after the fourth organic search result.

So it's one way, one way for you to get to the front page. If you're on page two organically for this content, one way you can get to page one is to make a video, because not as many people are making videos around these topics.

And then after that, we have another Pinterest result parade, which is magazine.

And then, influencer blog, 20 Valentine gifts for classmates.

as I look through all these, three results pages before, recording this episode, I went and saw how many Shopify stores are showing up here, and it's very, very few. There's one that showed up that's a Shopify store. Right. And that's, groovy guy gifts. So let's look at the result page that they created. Right. And that was the search query.

Remember, it was the, Valentine's gift for 58 year old man. And what they had was the number two search result, 95 thoughtful gifts for the older men in your life. If you click on that, it takes you to a blog page. Now for this type of content, I would actually put it under its own page. I would build a buyer's guide for Valentine's and for brand like this, they might because they're very much about gifts, right?

They might, you know, make 10 or 100 different pages in that buyer's guide for all these different personas. They have one for older men. Let's actually go to their occasions and see if we can see what they're doing. Their Valentine's Day. Yeah. They've just got personalized Valentine's Day gifts for him. So they're not showing that merchandizing for older men in the round, they just have one page in their navigation for Valentine's.

Which is why they put this in their blog. They're just doing it for purely SEO purposes. And be interesting to see how many they have. For that. And the interesting I just noticed is the title of that is 95 Thoughtful Gifts for the Older Men in Your Life. It is not Valentine's Pacific. If I go back to the search results page.

Oh yeah, it wasn't not Valentine's specific and they got the number two search result for that. So that's it just to me just reinforces how easy it can be.

Easy being a relative term.

Nothing's easy in this space, as we all know, but how easy it can be to rank in these things if you just try.

Groovy Guy gifts is trying to compete in gifts for older men, but not for Valentine's. And if they did that next level, they could get even higher. Maybe.

But this blog article is is poorly laid out, right? It's just a list of products.

There's no and it's it's confusing. Like, they're not enticing things like, this is for the athletic man. This is for the men who love cigars. You know, this is for you. It's just a big, long list,

And it just takes you to that product so they could do a better job merchandizing.

But they do have like, 90 products on this page.

So if you scroll long enough, you're probably going to find something, that is going to be relevant for the person that you're looking to purchase.

So, you know, the fact they have this page is the win because they're, they're competing in this game where most of the brands are not competing in this game.

what I'm recommending for brands to do is to think more detailed about the holiday events and campaigns.

They're building out and building out content for SEO. And that content should be, you know, landing pages on your website, videos, Pinterest boards, doing the right ads and optimizing your ads for those queries. You know, having, you know, Valentine specific, product titles,

for Valentine's. Right. And maybe that same product has another, you know, title for Saint Patrick's Day and another one for Easter and that kind of stuff.

But thinking about that level of detail, you know, all of your merchandizing for each of the events and campaigns that you're building out and trying to compete in a highly competitive space in that. Now let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the keyword phrases. Right. I pulled up these random ones. I just sat here and typed in three different Valentine's queries, but it's quite possible that no one in the world searches for Valentine's gift for 50 year old men.

But you can figure that out, right? So I'm going to go into Google, AdWords and Google AdWords under tools has what they call a keyword planner.

under the keyword planner, you can get an idea for how many people are searching for a different keyword phrases. So I actually I'm going to go into my saved keywords,

for those three queries, I put those keyword phrases in and then I did other keyword phrases that are similar.

So Google will recommend other words that are like this, or the keyword phrases that are like this keyword phrase. And you get to see how many searches they have. Now I filtered mine down to last January, in February of 2024, which is the relevant time for Valentine's Day. Search queries.

if we look at the keyword phrases that I started off with like, Valentine's gift for 58 year old men in this save keywords list, it doesn't show you, but it in the other page, which I'll show you here in a second.

It actually showed me that there was, I think, 0 to 10 queries. So let's go back to the keyword ideas part of this.

And you can see every month average monthly searches was 0 to 10. So maybe we don't want to build a page that's only going to get, you know, 20 searches in a two month timeframe.

But here you can do well, that's not going to work. And by the way, when you do a, keyword phrase that has a very low average monthly searches, Google's not going to recommend other keywords.

They. Well, if your search query volumes are higher. So let's just say we want Valentine's gift for older men.

And we get the results for that. And we see the Valentine's gift for older men gets 100 to 1000 monthly searches. And it also recommends a couple alterations of that Valentine's with the apostrophe put in that gets 10 to 100 searches per month, and then Valentine is day gift for older men,

which is got the word day in it.

So there's just different variations of the way they spell Valentine's and having day or not.

In these combinations. And that could 0 to 10,

but you can start adding those up.

there could be 2000 searches per month for that keyword phrase. And maybe that's not enough.

Right? But you got to throw that spaghetti against the wall to see if you can rank for that. And if you can rank for it, can you get traffic from it? And is that traffic justify the effort you put into it?

I'm a big fan of,

you know, doing 1 or 2 of these types of campaigns and going deep in one, one holiday and seeing how your brand, is successful in that.

Create some videos, do some ads, change the product titles, all the things you're talking about, and then see, you know, how much impressions you get and how much clicks you get. And if those clicks convert to sales.

So we go back and look at our saved keywords about those other keyword phrases. What you'll see is like, for example, on Best friends gifts for Valentine's Day, there's 100 to 1000 searches and then best Galentine's gift 1000 to 10,000. Best Valentine's gifts for classmates 100 to 1000 BFFs for Valentine's gift 100 to 1000. So you can go into Google Ads into the keyword Planner.

Put in your ideas for keywords. Look at what it's recommending to you, and from that, you can start coming up with a feel for

how users are actually searching for these things, right? Do they put Valentine's gifts for best friends, or do they put best friends gifts for Valentine's Day and you can see which one gets more search query and which one doesn't.

And you might actually go after the one that gets less queries. Because when you look at our other brands, optimizing for that or not, you may find that one version of the same keyword phrase and one order is heavily saturated by big players.

So you go after the other keyword phrase that is less saturated so that you can actually be competitive and rank in that space.

And this is why you've got to do that whole, you know, throw spaghetti against the wall shotgun approach to see how it's going to work. Because what happens here is there's three different things going on that influence. How well you're going to rank one is all the effort you do. Two is all the efforts your competition is doing, and three is what customers are searching on and what they find interesting.

And actually click on

You're in control of one of those three elements. And that's why this is more of a shotgun approach,

because I usually find that you're surprised when you do that shotgun approach, what you rank for and what you don't rank for the, you know, things you work really hard to rank for, for whatever reason you're not going to, but things that you didn't think you were focusing on all of a sudden you are ranking for, and it's actually drawing in that traffic and producing sales for you.

So once again, do the shotgun approach, because you're not in control of two thirds of what's going to determine your destiny here.

but as I look through this list of keyword phrases based on those three keywords that I started with, 58 year old man, best friend, and elementary school classmates. If you add up all the monthly searches going under these different terms, it ends up becoming quite significant.

It's still tail. It's not like, you know, Valentine's Day candy or Valentine's Day flowers, but those are very competitive spaces, very hard to win in those spaces if you're not one of the big brands. So this is a way that smaller brands can go out there and be really authentic to the space. Also, back to our, you know, bowling example.

If you're selling, you know, bowling gear, you're not trying to appeal to the golfer, right? You're not trying to appeal to the soccer mom or whatever other persona or stereotype you're thinking about. You're just trying to appeal to bowlers. So optimizing around that niche that you're in that you are true to is going to let you be competitive and actually drive traffic from that scenario.

So that is my summary of looking at some tail queries for Valentine's Day, and seeing what is ranking inside of Google for them.

My advice to you that I've been reiterating throughout this podcast episode is if you're not doing it already, throw some spaghetti against the wall for a holiday. And in that spaghetti, what you're doing is you're trying to throw up a variety of types of content like shopping ads, keyword ads, Pinterest boards, YouTube videos, buyers guides that are landing pages or blog articles you want to put all that up there, and you want to come up with a broad number of scenarios.

Maybe you start off with ten of them. Try to find ten niches that your products fit into for that holiday event and, you know, go go nuts with creating content and then see what kind of results you get. Now also, be mindful that if you're trying to optimize a page or a blog article or a product for SEO, it's going to take time for that to get indexed.

now. The nice thing with YouTube, can you create a YouTube video? I've actually ranked on YouTube videos five minutes after I create them. YouTube index is really, really quickly and it just the algorithm. As you know, in the web space, it takes a lot longer times you're gonna need some lead time for that.

but your ads and your your YouTube videos, those can rank really quickly.

So hopefully think about a holiday that's really applicable for you and your products. Come up with some personas, some ideas of keyword phrases, build out some content and wider variety of content you've done before. Push it out there on the internet. Give it enough time to get index and see how that performs for you and your brand. Thanks for listening.