Black Friday – the largest shopping day of the year for the retailers in the US and UK since 2005. Black Friday can turn out to be a good opportunity for various brands, but it requires to create a unique online strategy for the big day.
The studies from Adobe Digital Index show that US online sales drastically increased by 14% on Black Friday, 2015. The Guardian reports that people spent more than £1.1bn shopping from the online stores in the UK on Black Friday, 2015.
So, what makes it more appealing? In this post, we’re going to offer deep insights to plan out a successful Black Friday strategy.
The first step to create an effective online marketing strategy is organizing your actions. This requires four things:
- Plan Early
- Influence at the right time
- Peak at the right time
- Repeat last year’s page
It requires a proper planning to be prepared for a seasonal event. Hence, it is important to analyze the audience, organize the content, plan out how you will use it and do some customer research to reach the best purchase with great certainty on how your business can stay ahead and boost sales.
Your Black Friday strategy should be planned to focus on capitalizing the increased traffic, so that you can use it for future festive campaigns such as Cyber Monday and Christmas. Here are some useful SEO tips to get your website instantly ready for shopping when Black Friday is just a week away:
Identify the most valuable organic opportunities
Search terms are all what you need to play with. A term which leads you to desired conversion, going beyond the traffic is the most valuable. This directly implies that the brand should always focus on the most useful one rather than one which is the most popular.
For example, “Black Friday” – This term may have the highest search volume, but when we look at the opportunities, it is the fourth most valuable search term in the UK and stays at the seventh position in the US.
However, the terms like “Black Friday Deals” or “Cyber Monday Deals” stay ahead as the top most searched terms for both US and the UK searches. These terms are the most valuable organic opportunity. Thus, some of the long-tail keywords with higher relevance can become much valuable as they offer more chances of conversion. So, research the holiday-specific keywords which are the most popular this season using Google Trends Reports.
Creating dedicated Landing Pages
Having a dedicated sales page and maintaining it year round (for e.g. “abc.com/blackfriday”) will allow you to dominate the search results for that brand term. Well, you’ll need to update this page few times a year and ensure that the page stays index-able round the year.
It depends on how extensively you offer the products, you can create two different pages for the Black Friday and the Cyber Monday sales or combine into one page.
Ensure Your Servers Can Handle The Crowds
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest shopping days of the year, you won’t want your site to crash as the customers come flooding in. Make sure your servers are all set to handle huge traffic. You should have enough bandwidth and RAM to cover the traffic spikes. Also, check your site’s error logs and fix the bugs before the holiday arrives.
Turn Seasonal Shoppers Into Repeat Buyers
Turning the Black Friday shoppers into repeat customers can have a big impact on the success of your business. This requires increasing bids for the users who made big purchases on your site using the RLSAs in order to bring them back for additional shopping in the future. RLSAs will help you stay tuned with your Google AdWords campaign to target specific customers who spent good time on your online store.
Once the festive season is over, turning the first-time shoppers into lifetime fans should be your first priority.
Final Thoughts
People are spending more and more every year in the holiday season. While online sales were higher than ever in 2015, many brick and mortar stores in the US have decided to close their doors on Thanksgiving and allow the customers shop from their online stores.
Above all these tips, remember that the basic SEO tips apply the same way even during the holiday season.You will get the best sales if your website is responsive and well-organized. Even the outrageously best deals won’t win you customers if they’re unable to access your website. To avoid disaster, test your website extensively before the Thanksgiving weekend rush hits.
Hey! Black Friday 2016 is on November 25th and Cyber Monday 2016 is on November 28th. Stay tuned for more SEO updates!
