Black Friday is the day that kicks off the holiday shopping extravaganza with its tremendous discounts and deals. Many retailers find that taking advantage of sales events like Black Friday tremendously boosts their sales. Cyber Monday is an ‘extension’ of Black Friday, created to allow sellers to make more sales.
Until recently, the Black Friday shopping was only done in stores, and people queued for hours waiting for the doors to fling open. But, with the ecommerce boom of recent years, many people now do a chunk of their shopping online. So, a business must prepare to capture the online customers as well as it does for its brick-and-mortar store customers.
Although discounts and deals are strong pull factors for online sales, it’s more important to ensure that customers can see you on their SERPs. Black Friday SEO strategies help to increase your brand’s visibility on the online sphere. Which helps increase traffic to your online store.
Still, Black Friday SEO is quite different from regular ecommerce SEO. This is because with Black Friday, you are rushing against time. It takes a little more effort for your website to have a high ranking position on the SERPs.
In this article, we will go over some Black Friday ecommerce strategies to help your small business rank higher in readiness for the Black Friday shopping. Let’s get started!
Black Friday SEO Tips
The first thing to note about utilizing your Black Friday ecommerce strategy is to use a combination of on-page and off-page strategies. Be sure not to put all your eggs in one basket and concentrate solely on one of these factors. They complement each other and could also be each other’s downfall when one lacks.
Here are items for your small business to check on your end in readiness for Black Friday:
On-Page Tips
The following on-page SEO strategies may help boost your Black Friday ranking:
1. Sorting Out Your Technical SEO Fundamentals
Start by reviewing the technical aspects of your page. Such as having proper URL structures, 301 directs, 404 error messages, and 302 temporary redirects for underdeveloped pages. When it comes to technical SEO, your business should have a focus on these factors:
- Crawlability
- Readability
- Usability
- Navigation
- Rich formatting and Markup
Larger websites can only succeed with the right technical elements. That’s why it’s important for your business to have these factors in mind when it comes to technical SEO.
2. Assessing the Load Time and the Performance of Your Site
Your site must load fast and function well as the customers begin to click on your URL. Slow-loading pages, glitches, missing images, or some non-intuitive navigation bothers customers. These reasons alone can give your customers a reason to quickly switch over to other sites instead of yours.
Still, even before the customers find you, Google will have lowered your ranking because problems like those are a sign of a no-good website. Immediately they are spotted, Google algorithms put your site at the bottom of your competition, limiting your chances of ever being found. Especially for an event such as Black Friday, it’s important to have these factors working and stable.
Before you start working on other issues, ensure that your website performance is par. In particular, look out for the following factors:
- Slow loading on mobile and desktop interfaces
- Broken in-content links and URLs
- Missing or incorrect canonicals
- Duplicate content
- Deserted pages
- Unsecure pages and resources
- Mobile-friendliness score
- Obsolete website pages
- Dig deep and see if there are any other inadequacies in the user experience.
- Tools to help you assess your site’s performance
These factors are critically important to have in line before having a large influx of customers come to your site. Sometimes when one of these factors is out of line, it can ruin a user’s experience and give them a reason to leave. You want to be ready and up to speed for new and current customers. Below are a few valuable tools to help your business address and assess any errors that may happen on your site:
- WebPage Test: This helps measure the loading speed and tests for multiple pages. You also get a performance score and suggestions for fixes.
- Siteliner : This checks for duplicate content, broken links, and the number of external/internal links on each page. It compares the results of its assessment with competitor pages.
- Screaming Frog : It’s an advanced tool used for deep technical SEO audits.
- Index Coverage : This tool generates index coverage reports using Google’s search console. It helps to identify any indexing errors.
- Mobile-Friendly test : This scores your website’s mobile speed and friendliness. It offers suggestions on design elements that need re-optimizing.
- PageSpeed Insights: It’s a Google tool that locates any issues affecting performance on your website code.
3. Optimizing the Web Pages Using Keyword Strategies
Keywords are fundamentals of ecommerce SEO strategies because they make it easier for the relevant audience to find you and possibly convert. But, there is a delicate balance on the words to use.
If you use irrelevant keywords unrelated to your product or words that lack a purchase intention, you lose the customer. Alternatively, if you fill your webpage with the overly competitive keywords nearly every store chooses, your chances of standing out from the crowd are slim.
So, to come up with the holiday keywords, go back to the data collected last year. Are there some specific keywords that shoppers used to find your store? Look at the questions they typed from the Queries report on the Google Search Console.
Take any keywords you find and paste them on the Google Keyword Planner for more suggestions. Check the seasonal keyword volumes and segment them by month to find the most popular during the holiday season. Although Google Keyword Planner only gives a range and not the exact search volume, use this range as a start. Examples of common phrases shoppers use during the holiday season include “Thanksgiving gift ideas” or “Christmas gift ideas”.
Then it’s time to identify high-converting SEO keywords for your website. Take these common phrases and tailor them to the customers’ purchase intentions. Prioritize the keywords with a high search volume, high relevance to your products, and low competition. For example, you could write “gift ideas for toddlers” or “gift ideas for teenagers.”
4. Checking the Statistics From the Previous Year
To get a rough estimate of the holiday traffic to expect this year, check the previous year’s search terms report available on the Google Search Console. Use these results to determine the pages that generated the most traffic because they might do it again. Also, check the queries that most people use to find the deals and products on your page. It helps your business double check the areas that need the most attention.
Other resources that could help you establish a search and purchase pattern include reviews from customers, social media profiles, affiliate links, and email campaigns. See which channels initiated the most conversations and plan to prioritize them for this year’s Black Friday sale. Those channels will most likely be popular again this next year. So, having an idea on what to expect helps your business be prepared.
5. Using Noticeable Calls-To-Action (CTAs)
On your landing pages, press releases, blog posts, and product pages, be sure to insert CTAs. The CTA should deliver a sense of urgency to increase the conversions. It also gives direction to your customers to look for more opportunities they may be looking for. Helping guide your customers by giving them a call-to-action opens more opportunities for your business to increase revenue and traffic.
6. Having a Specific Holiday Landing Page
Create a landing page specifically for the Black Friday event. Make the webpage attractive and appealing for the holiday season. Get your creative ideas flowing and think of different ways where your business can stand out from your competitors. Having the landing page be unique from your website helps capture and showcase your featured products. Along with showcasing your products and services, it’s important to interlink them with relevant product URLs.
The Off-Page Techniques
Off-page SEO techniques are the promotional and marketing activities you do to make people aware of your brand. Check your SEO strategies to see if you can include these factors to your off-page SEO:
1. Creating Links for Your Holiday Sales
The standard link-building techniques you typically use are still valuable for holiday advertising. One idea is using guest postings to link back to your ecommerce store. Social bookmarking, forum posting, blog commenting, display ads on websites, and high-quality PBNs are all great ways to build links. Link building to valuable sites also helps to strengthen the value of your own website. It helps build credibility in the eyes of Google and in return helps give your website better rankings.
2. Creating a Submission Site and Forums for Coupons
Since customers will be looking for the best deals available, use them as a pull factor to get the customers to purchase your products. Submit the ecommerce store coupons on popular coupon websites, including Love Coupons, Groupons, and Coupon Great. Just like posting in business directories, this is a great opportunity for you to get your business out there for holidays such as Black Friday.
3. Hyping Your Store on Social Media
Although social media frenzies do not typically improve search engine rankings, the Google algorithm factors them when considering a website’s traffic flow and ranking. The greater the organic traffic on social media, the better the search ranking. Any traffic that goes back to your site helps improve your traffic and revenue.
4. Exchanging Links
Creating networks with other sellers also improves your SERPs ranking. It also increases your exposure, creating a win-win situation for all parties. But, sometimes networks with sites relevant to your niche can have a greater effect on your rankings. You don’t want to be in close proximity to your competitors, but having relationships within your niche and network can help build your authority and credibility.
Improve Your Black Friday Ranking
The tips shared in this article should help get your Black Friday ecommerce strategy ready for the big shopping event. Go through our checklist again to see if you have implemented each of these factors to help improve your website’s ranking in the SERPs. Also, as you improve your store’s visibility, remember to pull your customers even more with exciting deals for the future of your business.
If you’re needing help with your SEO strategies, Boostability is here to help! With our available small business SEO services, we can help your business build a strong online presence. Learn more on how your business can partner with Boostability to build your SEO to its fullest potential.
