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Valentine’s Day is coming around once again.

Last time this year we mentioned how many people were taking their Valentine’s shopping online. This year seems no different, with many of our e-commerce websites featuring new Valentine’s Day sections in preparation for the big day, this coming Monday.

Saint Valentine’s Day, commonly shortened to Valentine’s Day, is an annual commemoration held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions.

The day is named after one or more early Christian martyrs named Valentine and was established by Pope Gelasius I in 500 AD. It was deleted from the Roman calendar of saints in 1969 by Pope Paul VI, but its religious observance is still permitted.

It is traditionally a day on which lovers express their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards (known as “valentines”). The day first became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.

Wikipedia

Best wishes go out to all couples who will be celebrating Valentine’s Day on the 14th.

So, what is your business going to be doing this Valentine’s day?

With all hope, business will be booming as you stock many relevant red and pink Valentine’s day gifts. The problem is, in e-commerce, it is fine to stock plenty of unique and holiday specific gifts, but if you’re not getting any hits to your website, you’ll be low on leads and even lower on conversions. You need to get seasonal visitors to your e-commerce website, and that means doing seasonal e-commerce related keyword research.

Unfortunately, people have already been all over the standard keywords and phrases you expect for these holiday. So ‘Valentine’s Day’, ‘Valentine’s Day gifts’ and ‘Valentine’s Day presents’ are all highly competitive  keywords, so you’ll need to try alternatives. A good idea here is localised keywords and phrases. If you are running both a retail store and an e-commerce website, you may wish to target localised keywords such as:

• ‘Valentine’s Day gifts Stafford’
• ‘Valentine’s Day presents Stafford’
• ‘Valentine’s Day Stafford’

Seasonal holidays are also a good time for some highly relevant link building. There are many seasonal holiday specific product listing and directory websites, that are designed to help people find gifts and presents for Valentine’s day and other holidays from a variety of different merchants. If you’re lucky, and the directory website is set-up appropriately, you may be able to set up a merchant account with the website and promote your products and gifts in-line on the website.

Whether it is Valentine’s day and love is in the air, or Christmas time with high festive spirits, your e-commerce site can always benefit, especially through link building and natural search engine traffic and rankings though search engine optimisation. Here at Rapid Web, we specialise in getting natural traffic to your websites via advanced search engine optimisation techniques.

Interested in how this holiday can help your e-commerce website? Feel free to contact us and have a chat. If you want, we have collated some consumer statistics for Valentine’s Day 2010 we’re happy to share.

Valentine’s Day is one of 2010′s first large shopping day and should hopefully be a great boom for online e-commerce websites trying to promote their Valentine’s Day gift products.

Lovers will, as always, be celebrating their love and buying one another romantic gifts from a variety of places, hoping to once again win another part of their significant other’s heart.

In turns out that, according to a research company who has performed several survey’s leading up to this year’s Valentine’s day, the average consumer will spend approximately 103 USD (66.01 GBP) on tranditional Valentine’s gifts this year. This includes greetings cards, day’s out, flowers, jewelry and of course Valentine’s day chocolate. This is apparently, an increase of only 0.50 USD (0.32 GBP) from last year.

Strangely, although the increase in overall spending on Valentine’s day has not increased substantially, more and more lovers will be purchasing their Valentine’s day gifts online at various e-commerce websites. According the the Head of Research at Shop.org, online e-commerce shoppers are anticipated to spend approximately 68.81 USD (44.10 GBP) more than those shopping offline. That’s 171.81 USD (110.11 GBP) from potential e-commerce shoppers this Valentine’s day, rather than the lower 103 USD (66.01 GBP) expected from offline Valentine’s gift shoppers.

“o-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.”

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

If you’d like to discuss how you’re e-commerce website will deal with and make the most of Valentine’s day, or  any other large national holiday, please feel free to contact us.

However, if you want some more general e-commerce information, or are thinking about setting up a new e-commerce website, we have some great e-commerce related information on our dedicated e-commerce information pages.