Hey there, fellow e-commerce enthusiasts! With Black Friday just around the corner, it’s time to gear up for one of the most significant shopping events of the year. As a small business e-commerce owner, you don’t want to miss out on the incredible opportunities this day offers. In this blog, we’ll share some proven strategies to get your online store ready for Black Friday each year while keeping in mind the goal of optimizing for SEO.
Starting early with seasonal optimization is the key to scoring top positions in search engine results and winning the race against your competitors. The earlier you act, the more keywords you’ll rank for, and the more organic traffic you’ll attract.
So, without further delay, let’s dive into the three steps you need to take to rock your holiday SEO game:
1. Check Your Website’s Performance:
Speed and functionality matter all year round, but during the holidays, they’re crucial. Slow-loading pages, missing images, and complicated navigation lead to high bounce rates, which Google doesn’t like. To stay on Google’s good side and beat your competition, focus on optimizing your site’s technical performance. Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool, WebPage Test to identify and fix issues that could slow down your website – check for slow loading speed, mobile-friendliness and broken URLs – all of these are typically fixable.
ElasticSEO Story corner:
Last Black Friday, a small business clothing retailer, invested in optimizing their website for high traffic. As a result, their website’s load time decreased by 30%, leading to a remarkable 70% increase in mobile traffic. This improvement not only boosted their sales during the Black Friday weekend but also contributed to a steady increase in organic traffic in the following months.
1. Optimize Your Product Pages for Keywords:
As an e-commerce SEO agency, naturally we are huge advocates the importance of keyword optimization in driving organic traffic to your online store. When it comes to preparing for Black Friday, optimizing your product pages with relevant keywords is crucial… Conduct detailed analysis to identify long-tail keywords that resonate with your target audience, focusing on Black Friday deals and offers.
For instance, if your small business sells skincare products, instead of merely targeting broad keywords like “skincare,” consider using specific phrases like “best Black Friday deals on organic skincare” or “discounted natural skincare for Black Friday.” By incorporating these keywords naturally into your product descriptions, titles, and meta tags, you can significantly improve your chances of ranking higher on Google’s search results. These keyword phrases are usually less competitive and bring ready-to-buy visitors to your page.
**An Extra Step: Analyze Last Year’s Trends**
To predict where your holiday organic search traffic will come from this year, review the Search Terms report in Google Search Console from last year. Look at the pages that received the most traffic during the holiday season and the keywords people used to find your products and deals.
Study data from other channels like affiliates, social media, and email campaigns to determine which channel drove the most conversions. This will help you prioritize your marketing efforts for this year’s holiday strategy.
2. Create Black Friday Landing Pages:
Don’t wait until the last minute to prepare your landing pages for Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers. Plan ahead and create pages that target the relevant keywords you’ve researched. Use 302 redirects to keep these pages hidden until they’re ready to shine. This way, you have time to optimize them and allow website crawlers to index them. Remember our mantra, the earlier the act…the more organic traffic you’ll attract!
Make sure to add these pages to your XML sitemap and site navigation to ensure easy access for returning customers and quick indexing by search engines.
3. Coordinate SEO with Your Other Marketing Efforts:
Perhaps the most important tip of all! Your marketing strategy should work like a well-choreographed dance. Align your SEO efforts with your social media and paid search campaigns to provide a seamless omnichannel experience for your users.
Use social media to increase brand and product awareness, let your customers know what they can expect for Black Friday – including any crossover between online and physical retail. Coordinate paid search with your SEO strategy to complement each other. Run your promotions before the peak days to beat the competition. Create an e-mail campaign with the audience journey climaxing on Black Friday. Throughout all of this, continuously measure your efforts carefully to understand which channels work best for your business.
Content creation should be a consistent part of your SEO toolkit, but good quality content can still take time to rank. Use other channels to deploy your content where it may have a more immediate impact.
Bonus Tips for a Black Friday Boost:
– Update product descriptions with holiday-themed copy to evoke emotions and boost conversions.
– Repurpose last year’s pages and optimize them instead of creating new ones to save time and enhance SEO benefits.
– Don’t forget about local SEO if you have a brick-and-mortar location. Optimize your Google My Business profile and consider local content marketing and press coverage.
Remember, SEO is a challenging game, especially for smaller e-commerce businesses. Prioritize keyword research, focus on long-tail keywords, and create inspiring content to attract top-of-the-funnel prospects. Get your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages ready in advance, and make sure your SEO efforts align with your other marketing tactics.
With these steps and bonus tips, you’re all set to sleigh the holiday season with your rockstar SEO strategy! Get ready to shine bright in the search results and bring in those jolly sales during this year’s holiday shopping frenzy. Because, if you can’t tell by our terrible puns – these steps will also put you in a great position when Christmas rolls around the following month!
Happy optimizing!
