Black Friday SEO: Tips to Boost Your Ecommerce Store Sales

5th Aug 2021

Black Friday is coming!!! Are you ready to get started with knowing how to boost your sales this Black Friday? We all know that the holiday season is arriving with large online shopping sales. Your eCommerce store is up and running, but are you really ready to attract Black Friday traffic to your store?

Although content is important, SEO plays a valuable role to help boost your brand's awareness. eCommerce SEO and Black Friday SEO are very different from each other. Here you are up against time and your competitors to rank higher in the SERPs.

Starting early for the Black Friday Sale will kick off your eCommerce store promotions and content outreach. So how can you set yourself apart from competitors with so many other Black Friday choices available online? Here are a few Black Friday SEO strategies to boost your eCommerce store sales.

1. Keyword targeting- Target Conversion Focused Keywords

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Black Friday is the only time we receive conversion-focused keywords that have both, high conversion rate and high search volume. Hence keyword targeting is important. The Black Friday event we see makes huge conversion-focused long-tail keywords.

Few examples of the highest keyword searched terms are "black Friday best deals", "black Friday sales", etc. Now you can use these terms as leverage with a combination of your topic or product name to serve you as a starting point for organic sales search traffic. Other common terms that are used include "gifts", "delivery", and "great deals". Combine these terms and focus on making them long-tail with keywords that include your brand name, product specs, and pricing offers like "coupons", or "discounts".

When you want to research the best keywords for a campaign to target the Black Friday audience, visit Google Analytics for a quick analysis of your campaign sales from last year. Check the pages or products that drove the most traffic, highest conversion rates, and keyword rank for any holiday marketing campaigns you have run before. The successes of these products will help you build off the marketing campaign strategy for the next coming sale.

2. Review your technical SEO

Before you discover a million marketing and holiday promotions or ideas for your brand, a good practice would be to review your SEO basics and optimize your website to make sure they are crawled, indexed, and ranked on SERPs the proper way. Your technical SEO can include:

  • Fixing 404 error pages.
  • Broken links and lost landing pages need to be redirected with a 301 page.
  • Checking your servers to ensure they can handle the high amount of traffic smoothly.
  • Optimizing your page speed for faster loading time.
  • Optimize all the landing pages for the Black Friday sale.
  • Add in or optimize targeted "Black Friday" keywords to meta tags and descriptions.
  • Adding "call to actions" for easy conversions.
  • Ideally, these are a few of the technical SEO examples you can put into action if you own an eCommerce store. A good strategy to incorporate would be an internal linking structure to allow visitors to interact furthermore with your website. A customer is more likely to make a purchase the longer they stay on your site.

    3. Optimize existing content

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    You might already have or know about the content that is performing well on your website from the previous year's Black Friday sale. Instead of wasting time creating new content, why not just update the existing content and make it fresh for the upcoming sales? There are two major benefits to updating or optimizing your content. Firstly, we do not need to get your content in the ranking race from zero. Secondly, updated content is way easier and quicker to implement. Furthermore, your existing content on pages already has backlinks, and updating them will not require you to put in fresh efforts of building backlinks. Here's an image to help you understand how to optimize your existing content.

    4. Black Friday Landing Pages

    What's a great way to attract customers to convert sales? It's the landing page. Your landing pages should be keyword optimized in the meta tags, product descriptions, and enticing titles or headlines. eCommerce owners can build links to these pages and rank for Black Friday keywords and leverage a call to action that leads them to your domain. A good landing page will consist of videos and provide informational value to the customers. In other words, they are pages that are more interactive and engaging. A timestamp message like "Coming soon" will provide excitement and anticipation for your audience before the release of the sale. Finally, creating a sense of urgency such as "limited offer period", "hurry! grab now before the offer ends" entice users to make instant purchases.

    5. Optimize Your Social Media Campaign

    Social media is one of the best and most effective platforms to advertise your Black Friday promotions and ensure it reaches the right audience. Know your social media platforms and learn which ones help you to convert customers. Consistent high engagement and followers can help you gain a lot of exposure for your brand. Surveys found out that 75% of users on Instagram will take action on a brand's post whereas 30% people on Pinterest will generate sales more effectively. These two platforms have found to be more favourable and help create better brand awareness. A good tip would be to create really good engagement posts that separate your products from your competition.

    Here are a few off-page ideas for Social Media:

    • Keyword research
    • Create content that is engaging and sets your apart from your competition.
    • Plan your engaging posts well ahead of time. You can use automation tools to post it without any effort.
    • Track all your posts engagement.
    • Use trending and related hashtags for your brand.
    • Optimize your social media profiles for bio, username and pictures.
    • Use images, videos, CTAs in your posts.

    6. Check on Your Competitor's Posts

    In today's online business world it is a necessity to know who your competitors are and where they stand. A reason for this is so that you can stand out in the crowd from your competitors. Track and analyze what's going on your competitors' pages. Once you have figured out their marketing strategy you can figure out how to plan yours for the present or future campaigns. Having competitors isn't bad, it keeps you going.

    Social media today is the best way to keep a track on your competition. There are several other tools available too to check on the analysis of your competition. This data or information provided by the tools can help you plan your own marketing strategies or campaigns.

    7. Launch Your Marketing Strategy Early

    Launching your marketing campaign early at least three weeks or a month before will help your brand be on top of mind at the time purchasing decisions are made on Black Friday. Start by beginning your promotions and launching landing pages in advance before the Black Friday sale.

    A good strategy idea would be to produce content that revolves around your product whilst providing useful information to the audience. Look up for keywords related to the Black Friday sale for your promotions. Capture your crowds attention by making videos, infographics, pictures to create more engagement. The important part is to plan and strategize all your promotions and ideas so you can write and publish your content once the time is right. You can consider updating the date and content from your last year's Black Friday landing page just to save time and effort.

    8. Cross-Channel Marketing

    All of these strategies are vain if you’re failing to leverage alternative platforms to market your products. For landing pages, I like to use Unbounce for our products/services, though wholesalers will benefit from marketing over Amazon and other e-commerce giants.

    If you have considered all the above SEO strategies and do not make sure to leverage marketing your products on other platforms then all your marketing strategies will go in vain. Its always important to look at last year's purchases to understand the importance of mobile optimization. Insights show that 64% of online Black Friday purchases come from a desktop computer, whilst a majority of site visits come from mobile platforms. This strengthens the importance of how you need to optimize your content for mobile visitors. Finally, one channel which you cannot avoid to take into consideration is email marketing. Email marketing helps to present a higher ROI than any other marketing channel. It will also help you make your audience aware of your upcoming sales and promotions.

    9. Paid Advertising

    Want to boost your promotions directly and quickly? Then paid advertising is your answer. It creates eyeballs to your promotional content and product landing pages. Paid advertising can be done over search and social media platforms. We recommend retargeting campaigns a week before the Black Friday sale begins.

    This is done so that you can drive these ads to people who have already visited your page. This will also keep your brand name in people's mind before the sale. While running ads over social media certain aspects like the ad image and headline are to be kept in mind. Concentrate on emphasizing value to your headline and create compelling images that will separate your ads from other brands. Keep track of audience analytics so you can target users that have an intent of purchasing your products.

    10. Promote Link Building

    Any link to your website page is a signal to the Google crawlers that your web page is a valuable piece of content. With such a signal, Google tends to improve the rankings of your website. Link building comes under off-page SEO. Link building can also be done for your landing page of Black Friday sales. In other words, we are extending the concept of off-page SEO to off-page Black Friday SEO. Backlinking or link building is a great marketing strategy to bring organic traffic into your website or web pages from other websites. When links are tagged as "do-follow" it helps to increase your website's domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA).

    The anchor text matters. Your efforts to get backlinks with anchor texts should be more specific such as Black Friday Sale, Best offers, etc. This intrigues customers to make an impulse shopping.

    Final Thoughts

    All the efforts you use to build your business online should work together finally. You can gain a lot of benefit through SEO and social media for your eCommerce website. But it is way more effective when they both support each other. Just having social media platforms for promoting your business may not do any good for SEO. During these festive seasons people are determined to make purchases on one or more things. But you need to ensure ways to bring these customers to your eCommerce website before your competitors get a hold on them.

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