“It’s almost Black Friday. Now is the time to break revenue records!”
… That’s something I hear in the days and weeks leading up to Black Friday. But why should it only be right before the biggest sales day of the year that you remind yourself of this? Why not make sure everything is planned well in advance? And, most importantly – why not incorporate Black Friday as part of your SEO strategy?
The battle for customers only grows fiercer every year. That’s exactly why planning is key – especially if you recognise yourself in the earlier quote.
It’s completely understandable that we only decide which products and categories to focus on right before Black Friday. I just put on my SEO hat and think:
How can I contribute with a long-term strategy that, over the years, will run almost automatically?
If you keep reading, you’ll get the chance to hear my thoughts.
Black Friday SEO in the short term
For those familiar with SEO, it’s no secret that SEO is a long-term strategy. That’s also true for Black Friday SEO. However, when it comes to SEO in the run-up to Black Friday, there are some short-term actions you can already start in the weeks leading up to the event.
Review last year’s Black Friday trends
Data, data and more data. Advertising budgets soar before and during Black Friday. The more budget, for example, Facebook and Google Ads receive, the more data we can extract and use.
This might include data on campaigns, products and specific product categories that performed well – or not so well.
When the day – and the days – leading up to Black Friday are hectic, we often get tunnel vision. The campaign has been planned, and now we focus on just one particular area.
But… You might discover that things you had low expectations for actually deliver surprisingly good results. That’s why it makes sense to look at last year’s trends. Where was demand high? Where did we achieve much higher turnover than expected? What made it perform well?
Are you relatively new to the market and don’t have much data?
Don’t worry. Google Trends can get you started and help you spot trends and potentially valuable insights: Google Trends
For example, use Google Trends to find out if certain services and products peak around November.
Provide key information for your visitors
This one is obvious – and you’ll probably think: We tell our customers everything we want to share.
There’s just one problem: All communication is audience-specific! That means even if you say everything you want, it doesn’t necessarily match what your customers and visitors want to hear.
Example:
“Save 40% on bikes this Black Friday.” It’s a classic. We see these everywhere in the lead up to Black Friday. And yes – it’s a great offer.
But with the example above, we don’t account for those where:
- Return policy is crucial because it’s a Christmas gift?
- Delivery time is the deciding factor?
- Shipping needs to be included in the price?
- The right of cancellation is important for the purchase?
- They care more about other factors than just the price?
The short summary: Yes, price is a key factor when it comes to Black Friday. But my point is that price rarely stands alone. If delivery takes four weeks, there’s no return policy, and shipping costs are doubled, these are just obstacles to making a purchase.
The technical element must be in place
Technical SEO. It always sounds complicated. People talk about coding, and big words like “Schema”, “JavaScript”, “HTML”, and “Rendering” are everywhere. The list of potential issues is long, and honestly, it can feel overwhelming.
So here’s a gift for you: four straightforward things you can check today!
Test your checkout process
Is this technical SEO? Maybe not directly. But there can be several technical tasks hidden in this step if changes are needed. I highly recommend testing the purchase process for different products, devices and browsers. Is anything preventing a smooth purchase?
This applies not only before Black Friday – but every other day of the year too!
Imagine you’re a customer looking for one specific product. Fast delivery and a high response rate are most important to you. You’re using an iPhone 8 and Google Chrome. Are there any issues?
Repeat this with different scenarios. Some things will be easier than others!
Speed
Your customers are busy. They’re impatient. And they’re ready to buy. Everything points to this Black Friday being your best year for revenue. But a slow website can ruin everything. If your site takes too long to load, there are 100 competitors ready to take your customers.
So I strongly recommend checking your site’s speed – and do it well in advance. You can do it right here.
Besides the tool, use the classic approach: manual testing. “Surf the web” and visit both your site and your competitors’. Are you faster? Or are they beating you?
After testing your site speed, don’t hesitate to contact your developer or a reputable web agency. They can help with everything from analysis to implementation.
Need a helping hand? Read more here.
Can your website handle a ‘traffic boom’?
Traffic and revenue figures – hopefully – explode on your website during Black Friday. But are you sure your website can handle the extra load?
Imagine: It’s March, your annual tax statement is ready, and you log in to see if you’ll get money back. But you’re stuck in a queue – a long one!
This method might be annoying for the user, but it’s used to stop the website from crashing – which would be even more frustrating for everyone. So what should you do?
The best recommendation is to contact your website host, and simply ask: How many visitors can my website handle at once?
From there, you can better assess whether you’re fully covered in this area – or if they can help you with the upcoming challenge.
Conversion rate optimisation
Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is about refining your efforts to increase the number of conversions. A conversion can be many things, divided into hard and soft conversions. Examples of hard conversions include online shop purchases, booking a meeting or submitting a form.
Soft conversions might be number of visits to a specific page, number of product reviews, or time spent on a page.
But how do you optimise for conversions?
Optimise your Black Friday pages
Your visitors and potential customers are busy on Black Friday. So it’s crucial that the pages you want to direct traffic to (via all channels) instantly convey exactly what users expect. They should quickly be able to identify with the page, its content and its message. Otherwise, there’s a good chance they’ll leave.
Are your USPs clear?
We’ve touched on it – but why should customers choose you? The age-old question with no single answer. You have some strong selling points that parts of your target group value. Show them! While competitors focus on lower prices, next day delivery, free returns for 100 days, you might highlight being sustainable or offering free shipping. That’s what you’ll be chosen for – and sometimes why you’re not.
Quick and frictionless navigation
“All roads lead to Rome.” A well-worn saying, but one that applies to your SEO work. Think of Rome as your ‘money pages’ – the pages that convert well, products with low return rates, etc. The roads – all your other pages – should lead there.
Your customers don’t just arrive via Google – or Facebook ads, display banners or news articles. They come from many sources and land on a variety of pages.
Make sure your most visited pages clearly link internally to your money pages. The quicker you can send visitors there, the more visits these pages get – and the greater your chance of securing the order.
Product and category filtering?
This one’s a “no-brainer” in my opinion. We’ve ensured visitors are quickly directed to our key pages. But, every visitor has different preferences and you almost certainly sell hundreds of products in the same category.
Not everyone is searching for one specific product – maybe just the cheapest or best-selling in a category. Imagine landing on a page about TVs, knowing you want a 55-inch. How long do you think it would take without a filter option?
Exactly.
…and of course, many other initiatives
Conversion optimisation isn’t a checklist you simply follow from A to Z and then you’re done.
Many elements are at play here.
Take your time, decide to work on conversion optimisation and follow these recommendations:
- Set a clear goal. What do you want to achieve with conversion rate optimisation?
- Define your focus. Which categories/services do you want more of?
- Actions. What steps do you need to take to reach your goal?
This will get you a long way already.
When it comes to conversion optimisation, it’s about “Fail Fast, Fail Forward”. Dare to make changes and dare to fail. As long as you learn from mistakes, things rarely go badly. But if you don’t fail quickly, you rarely get that sought-after “aha” moment.
Mistakes are good, mistakes are healthy – as long as you learn from them!
Is Black Friday the time for big tests and mistakes?
Both yes and no.
No, you shouldn’t change everything overnight and just let things happen.
But yes, it’s the perfect time to make changes – as long as you follow the three steps: goal-setting, defining your focus and taking action.
By focusing on a targeted area, you can learn from it. What should you do next? What did you gain? And how much better are you positioned for next Black Friday?
Summary of a few high-impact initiatives
We’ve now covered the four steps you can try for yourself. Their impact could mean the difference between feeling satisfied the day after Black Friday – or feeling disappointed.
To sum up, Black Friday SEO in the short term is about delivering a fantastic user experience for your customers. It’s about making it easy and convenient for visitors to take the desired action. And, last but not least, it’s about getting the most from the traffic you pay dearly for via Google Ads and Facebook.
Be bold in testing, set ambitious goals and don’t be afraid to fail. As long as you learn from your mistakes and use them actively, you’ll continue to improve your conversion optimisation.
Don’t forget Cyber Monday – or Christmas trading!
We’re not quite done. The following Monday is Cyber Monday. Less than a month after, it’s Christmas Eve. This only reinforces the point that November and December are crucial months for your online shop and business.
The actions we’ve just discussed – checkout processes, speed and traffic spikes – apply not just to Black Friday but to all major sales events. In fact, your efforts here will naturally ensure increased impact over time.
Imagine that, through the above optimisations, you can increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2%. That’s a doubling of conversions without increasing traffic – the traffic you’re paying for across many channels! Just see a quick calculation here:
Now it’s time to get started. This is a sustainable solution you can start implementing in the short term – and it will also have a knock-on effect on your business in the long run. Which leads me to: What does Black Friday SEO look like in the long term?
Stick around a little longer to find out!
Black Friday SEO in the long term
Black Friday – it’s just one day, right? And SEO takes a loooong time to get going and deliver results. Do they even fit together?
The short answer: YES! They fit together perfectly. Search behaviour is incredibly complex during Black Friday. What’s never searched for the other 364 days can have a massive search volume on that one day. And wouldn’t you want to rank high organically for these keywords? Of course you would. Here’s what you need to do – served on a silver platter!
Conduct a unique Black Friday keyword analysis
If you work with SEO, know about it, or have simply heard of it, you’ll be familiar with “keyword analysis”. If not, it’s essentially an analysis to determine the demand for the keywords that are valuable to you and your business.
To apply this to Black Friday SEO, this should be your first step. Carry out a keyword analysis focused on Black Friday and your most important keywords. Below is an example of what this might look like:
This short analysis shows there’s demand for my services (bikes) specifically on Black Friday. Great! Now I just need to put it on my landing pages, add it to my page title and hey presto – we’ll be at the top of Google.
If only it were that easy.
There’s more to it. As we always say at WeMarket: A keyword analysis is useless if we don’t use it or turn it into an action plan. So here’s what I recommend you do next.
Create unique “Black Friday + keyword” landing pages
Just as you do now – or should if you’re not already – you need to target your content to different keywords. We don’t optimise keywords – we optimise our website and content so that it matches the right intent for one or more keywords.
Before you use your Black Friday keyword analysis, make sure you set up a “master” Black Friday page. This page should capture potential Google searches for “Brand Name + Black Friday”. For example, “Power Black Friday”.
You can use this page however you wish. A suggestion from me is the classic Black Friday countdown. You can collect leads for your newsletter, giving subscribers a sneak peek at products and categories that will be on sale.
Now, back to your Black Friday keyword analysis.
You’ve got your keyword analysis ready. Now it’s time to take action! In short, I recommend creating unique and targeted pages such as “Black Friday Bikes”, “Cargo Bike Black Friday”. Group your keywords and decide which should be included in your content.
When you create the right content, I can’t emphasise the value of Evergreen content enough. Evergreen content can be used again and again. In this way, you avoid reinventing the wheel every Black Friday.
If one year you offer 25% off everything, and the next year you offer 40% off selected items instead, don’t include those details. Examples of Evergreen Content should always match your focus: Black Friday + keyword.
Instead, make your pages visible through navigation. Once Black Friday is over, simply hide the pages. This strengthens your SEO.
In the weeks and months leading up to Black Friday, you should also work on internal links to your Black Friday categories. This way, both users and search engines can easily find your pages. But always have at least one internal link to your Black Friday pages, for example through relevant blog posts.
Do’s and don’ts for Black Friday
As with all SEO, there are some essential do’s and don’ts – and the same applies when working on SEO and Black Friday.
This section isn’t very long, as many of the things you should do are already covered above. If you’ve made it this far, you know what to do. Otherwise, read through again – it’s well worth your time!
Don’t delete pages when Black Friday is over
Let’s talk about what I definitely don’t recommend. First, SEO is about optimising existing or creating new content. When new content is created, it can take weeks or months before Google finds your page – and even longer to index and rank it on page one of Google.
So, it’s crucial that you don’t delete your Black Friday pages after the event. Otherwise, you’ll have to start from scratch next year. Instead, hide the pages from navigation out of season – and make them visible again as Black Friday approaches.
Years in the URL
Following on from the point above, your pages should contain Evergreen Content and you should not delete them. Make sure they’re suitable for all future Black Fridays – this year, next year, ten years from now, you get the idea. That’s why you should not add the year to your page URLs. This ties you down for future Black Friday SEO efforts.
Using the bikes example, I recommend structuring your URLs like this:
yourwebsite.co.uk/black-friday-bikes
yourwebsite.co.uk/black-friday-bikes/cargo-bike
yourwebsite.co.uk/black-friday-bikes/electric-bike
yourwebsite.co.uk/black-friday-bikes/womens-bike
yourwebsite.co.uk/black-friday-bikes/kids-bike
yourwebsite.co.uk/black-friday-bikes/racing-bike
yourwebsite.co.uk/black-friday-bikes/electric-cargo-bike
It’s important to note that your URL structure depends a lot on your industry, CMS and existing structure.
This year’s Black Friday signal, such as “Black Friday Bikes 2022”, should be sent in other ways.
Add the year to your page title, meta description, headings and anchor texts used in internal linking.
The great thing about the above is that you can easily update and optimise without much hassle. Just make sure to do it well in advance of Black Friday, giving search engines time to register your content as relevant for the big day. SEO is all about sending the right signals, and sending them early. The more signals we can send search engines, the better.
And speaking of signals, structured data is one of the best you can send as a business.
Implementing Schema on Black Friday pages
I won’t go into too much detail here. You can read much more about structured data here.
In short, structured data is about tagging relevant information. This information is gold dust for search engines. They crawl your HTML code, so you can signal that you’re running Black Friday and what niche/industry you’re in. As with all SEO, it’s important to act early. There can be a long delay between Google crawling, finding your optimisations and indexing them.
FAQ Schema
On your “master” Black Friday page, use FAQ Schema. You can read more about it here.
You can tag questions and answers and get them shown directly in the search results. These could be questions like:
When is Black Friday 2023?
Does “brand” have a Black Friday 2023?
etc.
It looks like this when implemented correctly.
Sales Event Schema
Black Friday is a specific sales event, also called a sales event. For this there’s a specific Sales Event Markup. The code looks like this – you just need to replace the red text with your details:
<script type=’application/ld+json’>
{
“@context”: “https://www.schema.org”,
“@type”: “SaleEvent”,
“name”: “Black Friday 2022“,
“url”: “https://wemarket.dk/coukxx/black-friday/“, “description”: “Grab a bargain and book a meeting today.“, “startDate”: “2022-11-25T00:00“,
“endDate”: “2022-26-28T00:00“,
“location”: {
“@type”: “Place”,
“name”: “WeMarket“,
“sameAs”: “https://wemarket.dk/coukxx“, “address”: {
“@type”: “Text”, “streetAddress”: “”, “addressLocality”: “”
} }
} </script>
All you need to do is copy this code, change the red text to your details and paste it onto your page. Easy-peasy. Now search engines have loads of information about your business and Black Friday.
Before I leave this topic, you can add even more elements than those in the code above. Find out more here.
Summary
*Deep breath*
– And let’s wrap things up. There’s likely greater potential in your Black Friday SEO strategy than you think.
There are plenty of small areas you can check in the short term. This includes your website’s checkout process, speed and the overall user experience. These don’t just have a huge impact on Black Friday – but all year round and into the future.
A long-term strategy takes more work. It requires thorough analysis, content execution and tweaks at odd times. Both before and after Black Friday. See this blog post as your armour for the Battle for Customers. You’re now ready for action – have a fantastic Black Friday from WeMarket.
