The Perfect Office Christmas Party, Thanks to Search

By Aisling Blake

Account Executive

As the Christmas season draws closer, the office Christmas party has to be organised.  Where is the best place to start looking for ideas, so that this year will be the year to top all office Christmas parties? 

As with many customer life cycles, the party organiser begins by considering the different possibilities open to them, and one of the most effective methods of considering these options is to use Search.  Search provides instant access to endless possibilities that can be reviewed in the organiser’s own time, while at the same time providing exposure for the venues to a targeted audience that are actively searching for what they have to offer. 

Any hotel that provides Christmas party venues or parties will want to be included in this preliminary list of options in the search engines.  The only way they will be able to achieve this is by investing in a search engine-friendly website, as well as actively optimising their website, so that it targets the most highly searched-for search queries.  Alternatively, a more short-term solution is available to the venues by participating in a sponsored listing campaign for the period running up to Christmas. 

We are currently in the middle of this period, where search engine users are looking for the best venue they can find and the venue providers are trying to get themselves into those top positions in the search engine indices, so they can be included for consideration.  Interactive Return investigated the top search queries that are being used by the party organisers, as well as the venue websites that are successfully gaining valuable exposure in the search engines through either organic or sponsored listings.

The majority of websites that have top ten organic rankings for the chosen keywords are hotel websites, with dedicated Christmas party pages.  These pages are optimised for the search engines with keyword-rich title tags and content.  The emergence of forums and user-generated content is also evident in these listings.  Many forums have high organic listings for Christmas party-related keywords thanks to the keyword-rich content in these forums.

With regard to sponsored listings, there are five or six sites that are actively bidding on all these Christmas party keywords, as can be seen from the second table of listings.  It is also evident from this table that some UK companies are deliberately targeting an Irish audience with their product offerings. 

However, no website listed in the top ten is engaged in both organic and sponsored listing activity.  They are involved in either one or the other.
Now that you've used search to narrow your choice down to a few, you're all on your own to make that all important final decision!