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The world’s largest year-end shopping season is here. Consumers will be looking for discount deals all over the internet and it is SEO specialists who have to work to get the attention of those consumers. So, in this article, we will go over some Black Friday SEO tips to help digital marketers navigate this holiday season. Let’s start with the first one.
1. Create Dedicated Landing Pages for Black Friday
To get more eyes for Black Friday searches, creating dedicated and timeless landing pages gives you an advantage. Users usually find the best deals by combining keywords that comprise product or brand names and other words such as discounts, deals, or promos.
It is possible to find out popular choices using Google Trends’ historical findings in a particular product category. If you are planning to give discounts on Black Friday, dedicating a separate page for each service or product might be worth it.
And if you can plan the creation of the landing pages and the content that they are going to present in advance, it is going to be mighty helpful to you and your SEO team. Until you create those pages, implement a 302 redirect rather than a permanent 301 redirect. This move will give you enough time to prepare your page for Christmas and Google will get enough time to examine the site.
A better option would be to create a mini-website with a Christmas/Black Friday theme that doesn’t have to go live until the holiday season comes along. Once you create the required pages, add them to your navigation and XML sitemap. Don’t forget that the purpose of creating new landing pages is to bring more traffic from searches related to holidays.
Nevertheless, ensure that the updated pages are visible to repeat visitors to help them benefit from your holiday specials. Also, when you add new pages to your sitemap, you help the crawlers to locate the index of the pages in a seamless manner. Furthermore, this increases the visibility of your holiday-themed landing pages to both search engine crawlers and visitors.
Note: Holiday-related pages are permanent on your website. Hence, keep them as timeless as possible.
2. Focus on User Experience
To get the best out of your Black Friday SEO, make sure you focus on your potential customers. These shoppers always prioritize finding the best offers. Several merchants have already developed tools that help shoppers discover Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales.
Shoppers get really frustrated when they can’t find the product they are looking for or when they browse a website for a while and find out that the product they are looking for is out of stock. Also, it is simple for online buyers to switch from one brand to another and that’s why it is important for brands to keep the customer's attention on their websites. The following strategies might help:
Leverage Faceted Navigation
Faceted navigation helps customers find exactly what they are looking for and further allows them to personalize their searches with the use of several filters based on listing criteria. These are the issues you might run into while replying to faceted navigation:
- Index bloat ( search engines inducing pages that don’t have search value).
- Duplicate content.
- Crawling issues.
Optimize Shopping Carts
Providing various delivery options can also help you gain a lot of customers. Take in the following cart optimization suggestions:
Provide same-day delivery, next-day delivery, local delivery, local pickup, delivery costs, and more. It is important for brands to cater to their customer’s needs through a number of delivery alternatives.
Offer Multiple Payment Methods
Gen Z and Millennials mostly shop online and they normally demand a range of payment options. If they don’t see their preferred payment option, they abandon their purchase and move on to different brands.
In short, their want of buying will drive them to start a fresh search and finish the buying process on some other website.
Make Account Creation Easy With Social Media
Manual account creation where the customer has to put their information on their own can lead to an abandoned cart. Customers don’t want to fill out their personal information with every transaction. Instead, they want a fast and simple checkout. Therefore, make it easy for them to sign-up with their social media accounts.
Send Email Notifications About Abandoned Cart
Whether a potential customer abandoned a cart because they were distracted or they were window shopping, a personalized message goes a long way. It reminds them that they have products in their cart and prompts them to check the art again.
Use Discount Coupons
Adding a section where customers can get some discount when they are finishing a transaction is yet another way to help customers buy a product. In the end, who doesn’t love saving some money while buying a product?
Test on All Mobile Devices
Check the mobile responsiveness of your landing page or your website while it is in the development phase. With this, you can identify and fix issues before you make the page go live and save yourself from getting a bad review, which can negatively impact your revenue.
Implement a Custom 404 Error Page
Suppose a customer types in the wrong URL or the product is no longer available, a 404 error page will stop the visitor from hitting a dead end. Also, it prevents the visitor from visiting an empty page.
Improve Page Experience
It is always helpful if you improve your page experience and core web vital (CWVs). This move can increase your traffic and in turn revenue significantly. Ensure that the elements that provide a great user experience are in the best possible place. Use the following tools to make decisions related to core web vitals:
- Google Lighthouse
- PageSpeed Insights
- Google Search Console
- CRUx
- New Relic
- Screaming Frog
3. Work With Paid Search
Cyber Monday and Black Friday represent the most important weekend for retailers. Therefore, it is important to streamline your paid search with organic search. This offers the best unified omnichannel experience to your potential customers. Make sure your paid search campaign comprises fresh keywords and historical ad performance data. Keep these few things in mind:
- BFCM ad bidding might get out of budget so be cautious while selecting target keywords for your paid ads.
- Run the ads before the shopping season starts because it is less busy during that time and hence, less competition.
- When you are running paid social campaigns, make sure that you remember to match the right stage of the funnel to your campaign goals.
- Always set aside a portion of your budget for test ads. Run these test ads on LinkedIn, Google Ads, or TikTok.
4. Determine Content Needs
Next, let’s take a look at the content you might need. SurferSEO Black Friday duo can be the best for you because this tool lets you identify the word count you might need and a blend of semantically related and important keywords.
After finding the keywords you want to use, input them in SurferSEO’s Content Editor, change the settings according to your needs and click ‘Create Content Editor.’ After you complete the query, click on it and you’ll see suggestions for your content on the right-hand side.
Go to the settings by clicking on the gear icon and there you’ll find URLs that you can target. Also, make sure you are targeting non-anomalous results. After choosing the top five competitors, this tool will reset the content guideline recommendations including the number of paragraphs, total word count, and more.
You can change the settings, but we recommend going forward with the tools recommendations and clicking ‘Let’s go.’ Now, you’ll see the word count you need to establish your content. From here, you can brief your writers to write SEO-rich content according to the provided guidelines.
5. Optimize your Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is very important for your SEO strategy. Regardless of the size of your business, your Google Business Profile can be a great source of income if optimized correctly. Here are some tips to increase revenue during this holiday season with Black Friday SEO strategies:
Create a category for every season. For instance, create a category for Black Friday and once it is over, delete it and create a new category for Christmas.
Also, add all the necessary delivery-related information during the holiday season. A lack of information may get you bad reviews.
Publish GBO posts at least once a week to let your audience know about upcoming offers and other important news about your products and business.
Ask your customers to leave reviews and reply to the reviews even if they are bad.
6. Hone in on digital PR and links
When the holiday season approaches, there will be a plethora of websites offering Black Friday SEO deals. This only shows that there is going to be tough competition for Black Friday.
The next few weeks for your company should be focused on promoting deals related to Black Friday. Here are a few things you can do to gain links before the holiday season:
- Send a list of your top products or services with prices and photos to journalists that are covering the holiday season.
- The inbox of journalists will be full of such requests so make sure that you tailor your pitch so that it stands out from others.
- Keep an eye out for media requests for Christmas or Black Friday.
- Have a brief with your team and create content for promotion before and during the holiday season.
What if Your Revenue Decreases Even With a Bullet-proof SEO Strategy?
Imagine you and your team have prepared months in advance for the Christmas and Black Friday seasons. You got great links and great engagement on your social channels. Further, you notice that the traffic and the rankings were intact and not affected by a Google algorithm update.
Yet, you noticed that there is a decline in your revenue. Here, you have to evaluate external events. Maybe the customer confidence levels declined, and there’s a global economic crisis, which creates a state of pessimism.
Every brand is going through this issue recently. Gaining customer confidence for agencies and brands is tougher than ever. We have to evaluate every factor that might affect our SEO and find a solution in the process. If implementing the solution is not a part of your job then delegate it to other teams.
What to do When the Factors are Out of Our Control?
The first thing you need to do is to communicate with your stakeholders. For your customers, instill confidence in them and build trust using these methods:
- Costs (save them money on delivery)
- Offers (give them gift cards, seasonal offers, subscriptions)
- Work on digital PR campaigns and creative content
Black Friday SEO - Final Thoughts
If the holidays took you by surprise last year and you didn’t have time to prepare, this year is perfect as you have time to prepare for this year and the next. Also, don’t take the approach of prepping for holidays like it is a tangible product and boost Black Friday sales and holiday attention temporarily. Create a page that is evergreen and that you can update every year.
