In the run-up to every Christmas, the world of e-commerce readily expects huge boosts in search traffic. However, the festive season is not only about Christmas sales; the New Year also presents an ideal opportunity to optimise traffic flow and drive revenue.

This is particularly notable for sectors that offer products that would naturally fall into the ‘gifts’ category; such as toys, video games, fragrance and jewellery. Seasonality plays a vital factor in understanding your audience and the most popular search phrases at any one time.

It’s a fair assumption that consumers will spend more during ‘Hallmark holidays,’ such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and the recent phenomenon of Black Friday. While clear signifiers can be instantly identified by fluctuations in site traffic in Google Analytics, Google Trends may also provide valuable insight into the reasons for these peaks and troughs.

By looking at the keyword ‘jewellery’ in Google Trends, we can immediately see that there is a peak in interest over the festive season, likely driven by consumers who have left their Christmas shopping just a little late. It is clear that those in the jewellery sector should therefore expect to see an increase in traffic consistent with this higher search volume in the market: However, any marketer should know to expect this and have prepared strategies for seasonal dates to ensure that their site is ranking effectively.

The trick is to fully understand how and why these strategies are working for the respective companies.

Ultimately, the best place to start is with competitors. Within every industry, there will be a clear and present market leader using a strategy that allows them to rise to the top of the ranks.

Here at Blueclaw, we have teamed up with some of the leading SEO industry data specialists (such as Majestic and Buzzsumo) to evaluate the competitive SERPs of online jewellery retail, examining key metrics such as social signals, site traffic, backlinks, content themes and keyword impressions within a MarketScout report, shown below. As shown above, the stevenstone.co.uk domain is significantly less visible than competitors, with only two page one rankings on Google. In comparison, visibility leader ernestjones.co.uk has 63 rankings on page one - likely bolstered by an impressive 701,000 indexed pages.

While theknot.com (position 7) and argos.co.uk (11) have considerably more indexed pages, the product offering is somewhat diluted. By examining the site performance analytics below, we can understand how stevenstone.co.uk compares to the market average as a whole.

It is clear that although stevenstone.co.uk has some significant ground to gain with backlinks generated, average impressions and CTR are performing above the market average.

This instantly demonstrates that the site still holds potential and has opportunities to optimise existing strategies in time to catch some festive traffic.

That said, the company needs to act quickly if it wants to close in on the rest of the group when it comes to rankings within the top 10, as the site is far behind the market average.

What is surprising here is that stevenstone.co.uk has done considerably well to achieve a Trust Flow value of 26, despite being only having 189 referring domains. This is a huge comparative difference to sites both above and below it.

In fact, it has the least referring domains from the entire group; however it does show is that what it lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality of domains.

An area that is severely lacking however is the amount of .edu and .gov links, and although this scarcity is common throughout the market, if the company wishes to gain even just a little more long-term leverage, these two domain suffixes present valuable potential.

In terms of Topical Equity, the site only ranks for a single topic; fortunately this is highly relevant for the target industry; however could also demonstrate that the link profile is too narrow. Although some other sites, such as 77diamonds.com and fhinds.co.uk share the same behaviour, stevenstone.co.uk needs to start focussing on other areas in order to gain a more comfortable position.

By looking through the numerous other topics that are being targeted by competitors, it is plain to see that there are a wide range of topics to target – a dynamic content marketing campaign could easily hit those lucrative topic areas.

Although it is unlikely that the company can catch up this Christmas season, there is a huge opportunity for long-term gains throughout 2015 and beyond.

When we look at the potential site traffic, as before, stevenstone.co.uk could see a great deal of improvement simply by broadening its topics and targeted keywords – two things which will no doubt lead to a vast increase in impressions.

Social has long been hailed as a powerful force in the digital world, none more so in fashion and jewellery. It’s clear however, that this ethos hasn’t quite struck stevenstone.co.uk just yet. Compared to Bridges, The Knot and Argos (whose product offering is more diverse), the company falls behind in all social media platforms and barely has any presence at all.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the company hasn’t even yet to utilise Pinterest, which is a great platform for this sector. If stevenstone.co.uk really wants to push its content and products, Pinterest is a powerful platform to consider.

The stevenstone.co.uk report shows that although the site ranks well for relevant exact-match keywords, it misses out on a huge amount of traffic owing to weaknesses in link equity. The Topical Equity page of the report also indicates that the site doesn’t cover as wide a range of topics compared to the competition.

While we can’t bring tidings of joy to stevenstone.co.uk (who are unlikely to catch up with their competition this festive season), there are plenty of opportunities presented through the report.

Stevenstone.co.uk is well-equipped to make the improvements necessary for success at Yuletide and beyond – who said Christmas wouldn’t come early?