Black Friday SEO Tips: Optimize your Site for the Holiday Season

The holiday season is coming, and planning ahead of time is never a mistake.
It isn’t just about a spike in sales. The holidays are also an opportunity to engage new customers who will stay with your brand for the months (or years) to come.
In this post, we’ll share 10 Black Friday SEO tips to help you make the most out of the holidays.

 

8 Black Friday SEO Tips to Win the Holidays

 

 

Regardless of your niche, we suggest you:

• Make sure you have a solid SEO foundation to optimize upon
• Do some keyword research, especially around transactional keywords
• Create a seasonal landing page
• Test and optimize your landing pages
• Write informative content
• Use social media in your favor
• Analyze trends beyond keywords
• Start early

 

Check your SEO basics

Do a routine check, to make sure your website’s ready for further optimization. Make sure that there are no code problems that could hurt your SEO efforts. If you’re using SEORadar, this should be easy. Our tool detects any shortcomings across your codebase, no matter how large, and sends you instant notifications as soon as an error is detected. If you’ve been using SEORadar for a long time, you probably have a clear idea of the state of your code. But you should pay special attention to any changes around this important time of the year.

If you’re not using SEORadar yet, it’s a good time to get started.

 

 

It’s simple:

1. Sign up for an account (or start your free trial).
2. On your dashboard, go to the Domains section and click on My Domain.
3. Enter a new domain. Click on Advance Settings for some additional tweaking (Custom HTTP filters, custom cookies, and more).
4. Once you’re ready, scroll down to find the Add Domain button.
5. Next, choose the method through which you’ll add your URLs, and set restrictions.
6. Click Save New URLs, and you’re good to go.

 

Now, you can adjust your setting so you receive the most relevant SEO alerts.

 

 

Aside from our SEO disaster prevention tool, you could also use Google Lighthouse. Lighthouse will help you detect problems beyond code.

If you’re browsing the web on Google Chrome, There’s an easy way to run a Google Lighthouse check, directly from your browser.

 

 

Here’s how:

1. Visit your site.
2. Right-click anywhere and choose Inspect. You’ve just opened your Google Chrome Developer tools.
3. Press the arrows on the top bar to open extra options.
4. Click on Lighthouse.
5. Adjust the settings and click on Generate Report.

 

 

Lighthouse analyzes your site across four dimensions:

• Performance
• SEO (with very limited features)
• Accessibility
• Best practices

This tool also provides some suggestions for improvement, based on your stack.

Some Chrome extensions might make your Lighthouse results inaccurate. So, it’s best to run the test on an Incognito/Guest window.

 

Do your (Keyword) Research

Now that you know if your website needs some basic optimization, let’s move forward to more specific tasks.
During the holidays, users’ search behavior changes. Basically, the interest around certain terms grows.

 

 

For example, if you take a look at the Google Trends report for the term “Black Friday sales”, you’ll find that every November, the term has a nationwide spike in popularity.

Google also provides a series of related keywords. Just by looking at this selection, you can arrive at a few interesting conclusions:

1. The Nintendo Switch is a Black Friday favorite, followed by the Xbox One X.
2. Most searches include branded keywords (product or brand names).
3. As one of the previous infographics shows, this keyword was extremely successful in 2019.
4. Users usually structure their search query as “[current year] + black Friday sales” or “black Friday [current year]“. That way, they guarantee that the results will be relevant to them.

 

 

This is just a small sample of the kind of keyword research you should carry out. Of course, you can use other tools to get more industry-specific insight.

Once you know which keywords you should target, it’s time to start planning your marketing assets around them.

Pro tip: Go for commercial and transactional keywords. Commercial keywords focus on getting information about products and services. Users looking for transactional keywords, on the other hand, have the intention of completing a purchase.

 

Design Seasonal Landing Pages

Once you know that your site’s in good health, and you know which keywords to target, it’s time to start designing your assets.

In digital marketing, the more targeted your message, the better. And a season-specific landing page gives you the possibility to optimize for maximum Black Friday discoverability, without changing your entire website.

A great example is the Black Friday landing page for mattress startup Casper.

There are a few interesting things this page is doing quite well:

• They haven’t given up their brand. It’s not unusual for companies to let their brand take the back seat and create a landing page that fully focuses on transmitting the Holiday spirit. Casper didn’t take that route.
• They provide some extra info about their Black Friday deals, with a Black Friday-focused FAQ section and a couple of paragraphs explaining why they believe in the deals they’re offering.
• They’ve created a conversational landing page. A landing page should give extra info to users as they scroll down, expanding on key benefits and answering common questions. Basically, it should work like a conversation. When the user continues scrolling instead of clicking your CTAs, they decide that they need some extra info to buy. And the copy should respond accordingly. The Casper landing page does just that.

 

 

Test & Optimize your Landing Page

Especially if it’s not your first Black Friday online sale, you’ll probably create a great landing page. But still, as days go by, you could gather insight into your users’ behavior on your website, and make changes accordingly.

There are easy and complex ways to get it done, from heatmaps to A/B testing tools. Which one’s right for you will depend on your team’s technical expertise and the amount of resources you can assign to testing. But make sure you choose at least one method to gather UX insight and optimize for higher conversions.

 

Write Seasonal Content

A few paragraphs above, we briefly commented on commercial keywords. Your landing page should be centered around a transactional keyword. But you could also populate your company blog with season-themed posts answering common questions. These posts should target commercial keywords. For instance, let’s say you run an online pet store, and a common search term is “best cat water fountains”. You could create a list of the 10 best cat water fountains in your store, and invite people to take advantage of your Black Friday deals.

 

Leverage the Power of Social Media

You might be wondering why we’re including social media in our Black Friday SEO tips. SEO isn’t just limited to on-page activities or link building. Social media is a great ally to all your SEO efforts. Let’s say you’ve created your blog post about the 10 best cat water fountains. You’ve included product pictures, pros and cons, price comparisons, and a Call-to-Action, your post has it all. It’s informative because you focused on the products and gave an honest overview. And it creates a sense of urgency because your Black Friday deals won’t be available forever.
If no one sees it, your post won’t drive the results you need. And, there’s the possibility of being found through organic search, why not give it an extra push? Promote your deals and your content on your social platforms.

 

Think of Trends Beyond Keywords

While keyword research should be a pillar of your SEO strategy, there’s more to knowing your customer than understanding their search behavior.
Make sure you:

• Take a look at your competitors (both in the SERPs and in the general market), what can you learn from them?
• Stay on top of social media trends that may be relevant to your brand. Create opportunities to engage your audience through them.

 

Start Early

Designing landing pages, researching your audience, and writing great content isn’t something you can get done in one day. Take your time to analyze your competitors, research your users’ preferences, and plan a cohesive and value-driven user journey across platforms.

 

Take Control of your Website’s Technical SEO

In this post, we shared 8 SEO tips for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays in general. While a seasonal strategy is a good idea, industry-leading companies keep their site optimized 365 days a year.
Keep your website’s code error-free with automatic audits, competitor tracking, and more. Discover SEORadar today.