Known as one of the busiest shopping days of the year, many people are skipping the queues and spending their Black Friday online shopping. Shopify reported that in 2018 they sold over $1.5 billion worth of products, whilst purchases in brick and mortar stores were down 6% compared to the previous year. To capitalise on the shift in people’s buying behaviours, eCommerce websites must adapt their marketing strategy to entice buyers. This is where SEO comes in. Here are 8 Black Friday SEO tips your business needs.
Reflect On Your SEO Fundamentals
Before you go into overdrive and launch a million festive marketing promotions, it’s good to slow down and review your SEO basics. You must ensure your website is effectively optimised and your pages are ready to be crawled, indexed and ranked properly. Here are some fundamentals you’ll want to tidy up:
- Resolving error pages and creating redirects for lost pages or broken links.
- Optimising your loading speed and ensuring your servers can hold a higher level of traffic.
- Create visible call-to-actions
- Targeting ‘Black Friday’ keywords in your meta titles and descriptions.
- An effective link structure that allows for easy user flow through the site.
Although they may seem obvious, some of these issues may have developed without you realising. Having a broken website over Black Friday will mean you miss out on vital traffic.
Targeted Landing Pages
A great way to market a specific product around holiday themes, a dedicated landing page will drive more attention to what you want to sell. You will need to feature optimised keywords, meta tags, ad copy and headlines for the Black Friday Themes.
Create a sense of urgency on your landing pages with titles such as ‘coming soon’ or ‘limited time offer’ to entice users to purchase your product before it’s unavailable.
Year-Round Planning
Having a year-round Black Friday landing page live on your website consistently will save you space in Google’s index, so when traffic begins to develop in August you can focus your effort on driving traffic to your page rather than building one.
Ensure your landing page targets general Black Friday searches, Cyber Monday searches, and that the content piece will meet the needs of your customers year after year with little editing. Putting yourself in the best position possible means you can put yourself in the best possible position for the event itself.
Cosying Up With Publishers
During the runup to Black Friday, news publishers dominate the scene with everything from guides, the best deals and affiliate advertiser content. Google feeds favour content created by news websites and publishers as they often have a high trust score.
Get cosy with reporters and ensure your press releases and announcements are written up and ready to be released on time to get reports on your side to get your product in front of the eyes of as many customers hunting for a deal as possible.
Making The Most Of Affiliate Pages
Promote your deals through high-ranking and popular affiliate sites in the run-up to the event. Choosing smaller but specialist sites may drive less traffic to your website, but it will be of higher quality and more likely to convert.
A few website suggestions are: https://www.blackfriday.co.uk/, https://www.blackfridaydeals.co.uk/ and https://www.hotukdeals.com/.
Optimising Your Keywords
Use last year’s campaigns to get an overview of which pages had the highest-ranking keywords, drove the most traffic and had the highest conversions, build off these successes to create this year’s strategy. The two most highly searched terms on Black Friday are ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’, use these with your topics to help start your keyword research off.
Optimise Black Friday related terms such as ‘deals’, ‘gifts’, ‘discount’, ‘saving’, ‘coupons’, or ‘free delivery’, consumers are drawn to these terms and are more likely to search for these, ‘deals’ is the most common search term during Black Friday. Use these in combination with long-tail keywords that include product specifics and brand names, so you will show in searches such as ‘Apple iPhone X Deals’.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews
With the high levels of product listings on Black Friday, many will spend more time doing their research before making a purchase. Show potential customers you’re trustworthy to increase purchases.
Use your previous customer reviews front and centre on your website. Case studies are also ideal to showcase on your Black Friday landing pages to influence your customers, use one that emphasizes a unique value separating your from the competition.
Boosting Your Paid Social
Paid social media advertising is a great way to get eyes on your products and raise brand awareness. This is also a perfect time for retargeting campaigns as this will drive ads to those who have visited your site while researching purchases.
Keeping your brand at the top of people’s minds whilst providing high-quality advertisements, such as emphasising your savings and USP, is a surefire way to tempt consumers into buying your products.
Whatever industry you’re in, our dedicated team of SEO and PPC specialists have extensive experience in improving your digital presence. Contact us today to find out how we can help optimise your Black Friday SEO and all-year round strategy.
