Today, we offer over our blog to WhiteLabelDating.com partner, Sam Chapman, to share some advice on Valentine’s Day marketing plus some SEO tips.
Valentine’s Day is a busy time of year for the online dating world, with niche websites also getting in on the action as an increasing number of people are looking for love during this time.
In an industry as competitive as online dating, it’s important that marketers use a wide variety of tools to reach potential members around Valentine’s Day and other holiday periods when people are more likely to be actively looking for a relationship.
Dating site owners are already well positioned to capitalise on Valentine’s Day, with paid search, SEO, social networking and banner advertising all owing to a love-themed marketing strategy. However, marketing techniques do not always need to be intrinsically linked to the event itself; sometimes, a little extra SEO leg work to enhance your reach, when you know people will be searching for relationships online, can be really beneficial.
The SEO and internet marketing game is changing rapidly, placing a greater focus on social activity. It’s important to utilise social sharing facilities so that your blog posts allow visitors to share your content on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, in order to increase impressions and searchability. It’s a great idea to also incorporate Pinterest into your marketing strategy, with Valentine’s Day themed images, updates and messages.
SEO tips
In addition to Valentine’s Day themed content, it’s also worth enhancing your reach in general dating search terms. Google authorship is set to be a hot topic for 2013 and goes a long way to increasing brand visibility. You may have seen content authors’ pictures and biographies appearing in search results recently; this is because Google looks for strong trust signals from websites that rank highly in search results and Google authorship helps to assert this. As with all elements of SEO strategy, time is needed to assess the real effectiveness of improving search rankings, but the early indications are extremely positive.
Mature dating is an area of search that requires a longer term investment; in this field, traffic is driven predominantly through SEO as opposed to social media. The days of ‘link building’ are long gone and ‘link earning’ is the new way to build a strong strategy.
PPC is also great for targeted Valentine’s Day advertising due to its time bound nature. Paid search ads appear almost instantly, if necessary, and can be scheduled to run across the entire period. You can then arrange them to pause when the Valentine’s Day hype has passed.
Whatever strategies you decide to use, be sure to plan them well in advance so that you don’t miss out on one of the biggest dating opportunities of the year!