Black Friday, another great American tradition following Thanksgiving that is now celebrated worldwide, especially by the SEO community considering a majority of these transactions are carried out online!
Although store traffic is declining, Black Friday and Thanksgiving are still the busiest shopping days of the year. Even if customers power through their post-Thanksgiving bellies and make purchases in-store, 23% of them research these products online while 75% research items prior to purchasing anything in general.
This is a huge opportunity for ecommerce owners to make the most out of the holiday season and ensure they reap the most benefit from this surge of shoppers.
But how do you prepare for Black Friday? Here are some SEO tips to maximise your organic traffic this holiday season:
- Assess Website’s Speed & Performance
- Study Last Year’s Trends
- Holiday Keyword Planning
- Dedicated Holiday Landing Pages
- Integration with Marketing Efforts
1. Assess Website’s Speed & Performance
Ideally, you should not be saving this for the holiday season given Chrome’s new badge system that might come into place. Slow speed and broken pages. have dire consequences during the holiday season as it could lead a visitor making a purchase to leave your website and go somewhere else. Keep a close eye out for:
- Slow website speed
- Lack of internal links
- Duplicate content
- Broken URLs
- Large numbers of redirected URLs
2. Study Last Year’s Trends
We all look for ways to improve our website rankings by assessing which keywords and content perform best. Similarly, it is essential to look into your most successful pages from the previous year to make sure you optimise correctly this year. Google Analytics and Search Console are great tools for this.
With large online traffic generated on Black Friday, online visibility is extremely important. To reap financial benefits from this online traffic, it is essential that you site is visible. Myposeo’s SEO Visibility Audit tool is perfect for this as it analyses a list of keywords, calculates their positions on search engines and finds other websites that rank for these keywords up to 10 pages on the search engine.
This gives you a comprehensive view of your Black Friday competition as well as your online visibility and how to optimise it.
3. Holiday Keyword Planning
You must ensure that the content you’re putting out there contains high-traffic and long-tail keywords that are unique enough to be specific, but generate enough traffic to ensure online visibility of your website.
Create a holiday keyword plan by segmenting keywords and creating groups for specific topics related to the holiday season. Although keyword planning is key (pun intended) throughout the year, it is especially important during the holiday season to be seen through the increased traffic.
Some keyword suggestion and planning tools to help you during this time include:
4. Dedicated Holiday Landing Pages
To maximise your chances of showing up on the SERPs on Black Friday related search queries, having a dedicated landing page containing targeted keywords is advised. Depending on the type of industry, you could create landing pages with target keywords like ‘’Black Friday deals’’ alongside your products.
Don’t wait till Thanksgiving to create dedicated landing pages.
Create your pages ahead of time using a temporary redirect (302) to hide the page until you need to launch it. The goal of creating these dedicated landing pages is not only, to drive traffic to your page from search queries containing these keywords, but also make it easier for returning visitors to find these pages and view your holiday deals.
5. Integration with Marketing Efforts
Your holiday SEO strategy must align with your existing marketing efforts to ensure you reap the maximum reward from your new endeavour. This consistency will improve user experience on your website and ensure visitors easily find what they’re looking for.
Create and share posts on your social media platforms on your Black Friday offers, including links to the corresponding pages you have created. Don’t forget to include all your Black Friday keywords in your ads as well!
Make the most of this year’s high-spending holiday season by incorporating these tips to your marketing strategy and see the difference!
Discover Myposeo’s SEO tools and reap holiday-season rewards throughout the year!
