In 2020, Black Friday was the most popular 'deal day' in the UK, Germany and France. Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving) kicks off the festive deal season, with the whole long weekend (Black Friday to Cyber Monday) presenting consumers with irresistible deals and promotions.
Due to the incredible increase in online shopping, as a result of the pandemic, online retailers have a momentous opportunity to harness the mass influx of consumers. In 2020, mass retailers' online sales rose by 93%. Now, more than ever, it's essential to optimise your organic search strategy and maximise organic traffic to your site to capitalise on those Black Friday deal hunters.
TECHNICAL SEO
Page Speed and Robustness
Optimising site speed, fixing broken links, error pages and images that fail to load, and crucially ensuring that your site can handle the extreme increase in visitor traffic, should be the first tasks you tackle in preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (henceforth to be referred to as Black Friday).
According to Google, site speed is one of the most crucial indicators in determining page rank. Consumers will more often than not, immediately steer away from slow-loading pages and websites. Google bots register high bounce rates, malfunctioning forms, and slow loading times and will conclude that your site is untrustworthy. After all, they aim to provide the best user experience.
Do this well in advance, to allow plenty of time for your site to be crawled, indexed and ranked properly.
Check your page speeds using Google PageSpeed Insights.
Internal Linking Structure
Optimising your internal linking structure is twofold.
1. Encouraging visitors to spend longer on your site, by ensuring you have a seamless internal linking structure and offering easily accessible and intriguing options for further viewing, will help to increase your sales. The longer a visitor spends on your site the more likely they are to make a purchase. Create more relevant internal links.
2. When it comes to the check-out process, this needs to be as convenient as possible. Make sure to audit your check out system in advance. Can it be streamlined? Is it clear and quick?
Mobile Site
With Google now prioritising your mobile site when determining page rank, having an efficient and effective mobile viewing experience is essential. Thus, you may have already turned your attention towards mobile. But, did you know that in 2020 75% of Black Friday consumers used their mobile devices to research products and make purchases?
Ensuring that your mobile site can handle the excess traffic, fixing malfunctions and slow loading times, and creating seamless check-out experiences on your mobile site should be a TOP PRIORITY.
Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool to make sure your site is up to scratch for this Black Friday.
Obviously, these are excellent best practices all year round, however, during Black Friday their importance is heightened as the competition grows and shoppers have countless options to choose from. Make sure it's your website they choose.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
As a long-term strategy, your marketing campaign should begin with SEO. From this foundation, you can build social media and PPC to create a cross-channel digital marketing strategy. Furthermore, with paid ad costs on the rise, organic search traffic is increasingly important.
Keyword Research
Analysing your previous Black Friday campaign is the best place to start. Which pages drove the most traffic and the highest conversions? Note the highest ranking keywords and begin your keyword research from there. You can use these to generate similar search queries in your Google Keyword Planner.
If you don't have previous Black Friday campaigns, never fear! Begin by selecting broad high volume keywords, such as 'Black Friday sale' and leverage this in combination with more specific terms such as product type. Think about consumer intentions and whether you have products that fit them.
Select keywords that your business can be competitive with. Keywords that have relatively high search volumes, low competition and relevance to your business are ideal. Focus on long-tail keywords that include specifics. For example, 'Black Friday cashmere jumpers' (obviously only if your business sells cashmere jumpers). Adding terms such as 'deals', 'gift', or 'coupons' is also good practice.
Landing Pages
Now you've identified your target keywords, it's time to use them on your landing pages. Optimise your meta tags, create targeted copy and product descriptions, and focus on Black Friday search queries. Identify and optimise existing weak and mediocre pages.
Creating a page dedicated to Black Friday deals is an excellent way to include lots of high ranking keywords and display your promotions in one place for improved user experience.
Including creative visual content is strongly advisable, to engage random visitors and encourage page sharing.
Backlinks
Reaching out to influencers, bloggers, local citations and Black Friday listings, will also boost your SEO.
OTHER USEFUL TIPS
Customer Testimonials
With so many mind-blowing deals to choose from, consumers look increasingly to reviews and testimonials to determine their purchase. Include these on your landing pages to build trust and demonstrate credibility.
Email Marketing, Social Media, PPC
Collaborating with your digital marketing efforts and diversifying your campaign has proven benefits for brand awareness and sales.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday offer tremendous opportunities to boost sales and make a significant contribution to your revenue. Optimising your digital marketing efforts by leveraging SEO to its fullest potential can transform your Black Friday campaigns. Being prepared is the name of the game here.
For more information about how to improve your SEO, get in contact with our team at Bell. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.