In terms of dollar sales, Valentine’s Day is the third biggest holiday for the $22 billion US chocolate candy industry, according to market research firm Packaged Facts.
And the findings of the NRF/Prosper Insights & Analytics annual survey reveal that more US consumers are planning on purchasing candy this year, with 55 percent (up from 50 percent) saying they will give gifts of candy.
We look at who’s winning page one in search on Amazon for Chocolate and Candy Valentine’s keywords during this high demand sales period.
Our analysis reveals that in the run up to Valentine’s Day (analysis was conducted between 1-8 February 2018), confectionery brands Dove (owned by Mars) and Godiva top the list of organic results on page one, while Green & Black’s and Toblerone (both Mondelez-owned) have the highest share of sponsored results for Valentine’s related keywords.
While sponsoring products is a highly effective way to ensure your products appear on page one of Amazon, optimizing the content of your products is key to organically appear on page one.
Our analysis reveals that 84% of the results on page one for Valentine’s related keywords contain the word ‘Valentine’s’ in their product titles. As we’ve seen with other key retail holidays such as Halloween, brands that appear on page one successfully optimize their product content according to the retail season – often using products that are not exclusively made for an event, but rather their product content has been optimized to take full advantage of it, as in the example below from Godiva.
Top tips to improve your product search ranking for this and future Valentine’s Days and during other key seasonal events:
If you want to learn more about how to improve your search performance, check out our eBook: Maximizing Discoverability through On-Site Search and Category Placement.