Black Friday is a that time of the year which plays a big part in any e-commerce business strategy, so I thought I’d be useful to share some SEO best practices for Black Friday and and tips on how to optimise your online shop, which can also applied to other important festive season of the year.
Here they are! hope you find them useful:
1- Have a dedicated Black Friday page on the website
It makes it so much easier to drive people to your sales and also show up in the search results when people are looking for you and the sales you have.
The page can either have products that are on sale or coupon codes or special offers people can use to get discounts.
See the example below from Mediamarkt Spain.
Also, make sure that:
- The page URL does not have a year indication so you can re-use this page later.
Google recommends using a recurring URL, not a new URL for each occurrence event.
Because it allows the site to build link equity. The longer a URL exists on the web, the more link equity it has the potential to gain.
- The page title tag does have an indication of the year, or if it does, make sure you remember to update and change it.
- The page is added to the main menu, so that it’s visible and easily accessible
2- Start publishing early:
Create the Black Friday sales page well before the sale so Googlebot has time to discover and index it.
3- Follow standard SEO best practices:
Follow the best on page and off page SEO best practices, there are some great SEO guides out there (Moz, Backlinko, Ahrefs, Google, Search Engine Journal)
Here your the Beginner’s guide to SEO by Moz.
As mentioned above in the first point, make sure you implement the basic SEO optimisations on the page. (titles, images, url, etc.)
4- Build internal links to the landing page:
Link to the Black Friday landing page from other pages on the website, especially the home page. This will help communicate its importance to Google, and help visitors find the page faster. (see an example at https://www.mediamarkt.es/es/category/campa%C3%B1as-y-ofertas-1.html)
5- Include a relevant, high quality images:
Provide a high-quality and visually engaging image, with an up-to-date representation of your sale.
6- Get the landing page re-crawled:
When the landing page has been updated with new or additional content, ask Google to re-crawl the page to get your content updated more quickly.
You can find more info on how to ask Google to re-crawl your page here
(Credit sources: Search Engine Journal & Google)
Black Friday and holiday SEO addition tips:
These 2 tips are not last minute, as they require loads of research from your side.
But I’d suggest you to consider them maybe for next year…
- Check Google Search Console keywords for the previous year
The search terms people used to find your Black Friday page last year are a good indication of the keywords they’ll be using this (or next year) too. You can find gems and optimise your page better for them.
- Create competitor pages with your Black Friday deals
But basically the way it works is:
You can potentially target your competitors black Friday keywords by creating a dedicated page within your website, so when someone searches for Black Friday deals + your competitor name, they will find your website ranking as an alternative to them.
(Unfortunately I don’t have any examples for this)
I hope you find this article useful for your e-commerce, and I’d love to know if you have run any campaigns soon and how did it go.
Leave a comment and ask any questions you might have. I’ll be more than happy to help.
Follow me here on twitter or Instagram for more SEO & SEM tips.
