It might seem like a long way off right now (unless you’re reading this in October), but getting your Black Friday SEO in order is going to pay dividends when the time comes.
And if you’re scrambling at the last minute to put a strategy together, the likelihood is you’re not going to see any impact.
So here are six essential tips for Black Friday SEO.
1. Start basic, create a plan
Number one, start with the basics. You need to create a plan for what you want to achieve with Black Friday. Define what a successful Black Friday would look like, so you can see where to concentrate your Black Friday SEO efforts.
Which pages, products or services are going to be put on offer and how are you going to measure that success? Whether you’re looking at traffic, engagement or conversions, put a plan together to understand what that measure of success looks like when it’s in place.
2. Focus your keyword research
Secondly, conduct some keyword research so you can understand what people looked for last year. You’ll naturally consider broad keywords like “Black Friday sale”, but also be more specific to your products or service. Black Friday might be global but you should still spend a bit of time on local SEO. Look if there are any location based Black Friday sale keywords you want to target to pull in users close to home, especially if you have a bricks and mortar store as well as a website.
From here you can split out the keywords by informational and commercial intent. When trying to capture those users who are searching for informational keywords, go for the longer tail keywords. Short transactional keywords can go into your commercial intent pile.
3. Have a content strategy
Third, you want to build a content strategy.
You’ve understood what keywords are being searched for and now you want to create the content to match. If you don’t have Black Friday SEO content relevant to those keywords, you’re not going to rank for it. You need to think about how you’re going to structure that content in order for you to rank for those keywords you’re trying to target.
Some questions to ask might include:
- Have you got a Black Friday landing page?
- Are you going to add banners?
- Are you going to have pop ups?
- How are you going to structure that content?
Look at the on-page factors as well, to build that relevance to the keyword terms.
- If you’ve got a page for Black Friday, have you looked at video content?
- Images?
- FAQs?
A word on FAQs: people might be searching for specific questions around your products or service that you want to rank for as well, so make sure that you’ve researched those potential questions and have got that shit-hot content there to provide the answers.
4. Leverage technical opportunities
Next, you want to upscale any technical opportunities.
Now you’ve got your Black Friday SEO content strategy together, you want to consider the technical aspects. If you’ve got a Black Friday landing page, it ought to be fast, usable on mobile, and pass core web vitals. You should also be leveraging any other opportunities, such as schema.
If you’ve already got a schema for your products, then make sure it’s updated with the new offers. Look at Google My Business where you can add offers onto your Google My Business listings, your products can then come up in the search results and all of that good stuff.
Getting your content prepared and looking after the tech early is really important in building that visibility, so that you rank well when the time comes.
5. Don’t skimp on Digital PR
The next thing you need to consider in your Black Friday SEO plan of attack is Digital PR.
You want to create a buzz for your product or service, and obviously drive some more traffic to that Black Friday landing page through external sites. If you build links on external sites, that creates more of a touchpoint and generates interest when people see your product or service elsewhere. It also builds trust and authority, and helps you improve your visibility through a solid backlink profile.
When you’re considering Digital PR, you could look at competitions, product giveaways and anything else that’s going to attract attention from journalists. Pushing out that content early on and building some links is really going to benefit your Black Friday sale.
6. Get everything tracked and reported
The final thing you want to look at is tracking and reporting.
In the initial stages of your Black Friday SEO, you’ve created a cunning plan. You’ve decided what a measure of success looks like and which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you want to target. You don’t want to waste all your hard work, so you’ve got to ensure that’s all happening, and that your event and goal tracking is firing through Google Analytics. If you have offers on Google My Business, check you’ve got a UTM link so you can track people coming to the site through there. Basically, double down on making sure that you can actually measure the success of this campaign through Google Analytics and through tracking, so you know that all the hullabaloo has paid off.
That’s ‘yer lot. Those were the top six essential tips for SEO on Black Friday. If you fancy tearing through the SERPs, take a look at our SEO services. Feel free to contact Dark Horse too.
