The Holidays are fast approaching – we’ve already had frost here in Minnesota – and that means a dramatic increase in retail spending; online and in-store.

The big question is, are you ready to claim y0ur unfair share of the Holiday market?

Ready or not, search engine land, weighed in yesterday with 5 tips you can use to prepare your paid search for the inevitable. The post includes pointers for budgeting and mobile strategy, but the most intriguing is the section on taking an holistic approach.

An increasing number of people are using desktop and mobile searches in a quest to buy locally. Amazon isn’t going away anytime soon, but SEL makes the point that you had better begin making the online-to-offline connection with your customers or you might just lose them.

You can read the entire article here. Don’t just read it. Print it and post it through the end of the year.

Then, this same time next year, you can take it out, dust it off. Consider it your first holiday decoration of the season.

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I’m willing to bet most of you have never considered the question. I know I hadn’t until I read the article on SFGate.com. According to the article, the concept “measures the digital footprint of 64 brands via 350 data points across four dimensions: Site, Digital Marketing, Social Media, and Mobile.”

Three brands, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret and Nordstrom, achieved Genius level, but some of the more interesting findings include:

• Facebook is a key element, but only four brands have fully-functional storefronts
• 67 percent of the 64 brands have mobile sites – a threefold increase over last year – and 88 percent of those are e-commerce enabled
• Innovation is imperative. Resting on ones laurels is a strategy for losing

You can download the entire report here for free. It is gated, so you’ll have to give up a bit of information, but the tradeoff is well worth it.

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