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We buy with our eyes, so if customers can't see your site, how do you expect them to start shopping?
eCommerce business owners and the wider commerce market at large look towards Black Friday and, by extension, the entirety of Q4 as the goldmine of new value that it is, with many consumers viewing the holiday as their designated “get my Christmas shopping done” day.
We see different buying behaviours during this period too. With customers shopping with intent more so than any other period. It’s not uncommon for customers to put an evening aside purely to research and get all of their gifts in one go. For eCommerce businesses to reap the rewards of such behaviours, it’s key that they implement a winning Black Friday SEO strategy in order to fully stand out.
As it relates to SEO, no “5 quick tips” or “hidden strategies” are going to tip the scales in your favour unless you already have a significant strategy in place - SEO is much more of a long game after all. But so long as you’re already making an effort to improve your SEO year round, making those more time sensitive optimisations will be the final step you need.
By getting started ahead of time, you’ll give the major search engines time to recognise your efforts and push your site forwards as one of the first results that consumers see, capturing more traffic as a result. So, let’s run over some key SEO top tips to maximise your organic visibility ahead of Black Friday and the pre-Christmas season.
There’s never a bad time for you to conduct a full check of your eCommerce store’s SEO health, but it is especially worth doing before your web traffic is due to hit its peak for Black Friday and the holiday season.
To fully get an idea of the health of your site, you’ll have to look at everything from your site architecture through to your site speed and user experience. Whilst you may not be able to action all of your findings before the big day arrives, it’ll give you some key things to get to grips with and focus on for the year to come.
Missing H1s and meta titles, amongst other things, should be where you look first. But beyond that, a full assessment of how quickly your site loads, how intuitive it is to navigate, and how many missing or glitched elements it holds, and more is key. These are the main elements that Google looks at to judge your website. So, even if your marketing is killing it, you won’t show up in search results as highly as you may have hoped.
One of the easiest traps that we see eCommerce brands fall victim to is creating URLs that are far too specific. As it relates to Black Friday, this can look like making a new URL each year.
So, one year you may make the landing page: “Cake.agency/black-friday-2024”
But then you’d have to make “Cake.agency/black-friday-2025” the next year.
In the pursuit of making your content more time relevant, you’ll just end up dating it in years to come and have to recreate it year on year. Instead, maintaining a single /black-friday/ URL for reuse year after year, is much more simple and holds other benefits too.
The problem with creating year-specific URLs for each event is that you will have to build fresh backlinks and page authority every single year. You’ll have to hope that search engines will find and index your new URL in time, so that it’ll benefit from search-driven awareness.
But, by using a single URL, you won’t have to establish new backlinks, but simply refresh the content on a yearly basis. Saving you time, effort, and delivering better results too - it’s literally a win-win.
Whilst having those pieces of evergreen content plays a big role, new content is always welcomed too. After all, each year is going to bring new lookbooks, blogs, deals, etc. But keep in mind that this new content will require internal linking that’s intuitive in order to create a seamless user journey, which brings us onto the power of internal linking in general.
Those in the SEO world tend to look towards external links as the key metric to get more eyes on a site. Whilst Google’s algorithm is consistently a tricky one to truly decipher, if we know one thing for certain it’s that an external linking strategy is much more difficult and time consuming to execute than an internal linking one.
Internal linking within your website is one of the most powerful tools to help search engines find and rank your site’s content. When a site has a large number of links pointing to a page, that site is telling Google that those pages are important and Google will in turn boost their visibility.
Whether it be through the creation of blog content or including new mapping within existing pages, it’s key to get your internal linking strategy set up and direct traffic to those pages that you want the most eyes on. Similarly, Google recognises that you as a business or website owner are prioritising those pages, and will respond in kind.
It’s natural that the holiday season not only sees customers searching for product related keywords, such as “Jeans” or “Metal water bottles”, but also for more general terms too. “Gift ideas”, “Holiday Gift Ideas”, and so on.
You may think that these keywords will have a high search volume and be too competitive to realistically rank highly for. And you’d be right, but by expanding on them we can create a list of long-tail keywords that are far more likely to bring your brand value. Don’t let a lower search volume make you think that long-tail keywords aren’t super effective. They’re likely to be displayed to customers much further down the buying cycle, and who are much more likely to convert as a result.
Therefore, content that supports long tail keywords such as “Holiday gift ideas for men who like motorcycles” or "Under £50 Holiday gift ideas for your partner” will reap rewards for you year on year.
Additionally, if you want to really grab the attention of potential customers, who are likely searching for terms such as “Black Friday” or “Black Friday Sale,” one of the easiest ways to do so is to change some of your metadata for a short while. If updated, your meta titles, meta descriptions, H1s, and image tags can all have a huge impact on your visibility, and quickly too.
An example might be changing your homepage’s meta title from “Cake Agency” to “Shop Cake Agency’s Black Friday Sale.” Reactive content should not make up the basis of your SEO strategy, as any strategy is best built on strong, tried & tested foundations, but it’s certainly an effective strategy when employed correctly.
As with everything in SEO, it’s key to work in these keywords naturally, and to keep your audience at the heart of all your efforts.
We’re cheating a little bit here, as this is not a direct tip on SEO. However, the power of an integrated model cannot be underestimated, especially in the run up to Black Friday. For those out of the loop, an integrated search model prioritises both paid and organic search at the same time, which allows each channel to lean on one another for continued success. If for example you aren’t seeing results from organic search for a period of time, your paid search can pick up the slack and vice versa.
Bidding over this period can be extremely competitive. So, be 100% certain that your chosen keywords will deliver value, otherwise it’ll be ad spend gone to waste.
SEO is a tricky one to get right at any time of year, but with eCommerce merchants all tapping into their annual excess effort reserves in the run up to Black Friday, it can seem like the competition gets tougher still. This is why it’s important to prioritise your SEO year round, in order to truly see results come to fruition during the Q4 period.
Need help from a team of eCommerce experts who’ve been there and done that? Let’s talk!
