A quick search for "christmas" in Google brought up something a little different from the big G. It seemed that a special addition of candy canes was what the search engine was providing this year. I'd have preferred some extra boosted rankings for our search engine optimisation customers but what can you do!

Interestingly, the term "christmas," according to Google Adwords keyword tool, generated 13.6 million searches in November alone. Yet, a look at the top ranking results for the term shows a total lack of optimisation effort on the part of businesses, particularly those whose biggest trade period is the run up to Christmas. Even the term "christmas present," which generated 60,500 searches for the singular and 165,000 searches for the plural, "christmas presents," in November is poorly optimised, with the top ranking site only registering 33 Google indexed backlinks and a Pagerank of 3.

Interestingly, both Ernest Jones (the jewellers) and Apple.com have PPC adverts for the term "christmas present." Yet wouldn't it have been just as easy for these two (pretty large companies, I'm sure you'll agree) to have SEO'd their websites? After all, statistics and tracking both show that organic search results generate more clicks than PPC.

Perhaps something for the retail industry to consider during the holidays.

Have a good one!