The countdown to one of the season’s largest shopping holidays and the biggest sale of the year, Black Friday 2023 and Black Week, has officially begun. In 2023, Black Friday falls on Friday 24 November and Black Week also extends over the days before this date. The holiday marks the start of the Christmas shopping season and is an opportunity for people to shop digitally as well as in physical stores at favourable prices.
Although it may seem relatively far away, it is not too early to start optimising your website, quite the opposite. In order to see results in time, it is important that you work on your digital marketing and SEO strategy as soon as possible to boost performance and maximise Black Friday sales. SEO is more important than ever when it comes to improving your visibility and competition is high during Black Friday. If it’s not already part of your long-term strategy, it’s a good idea to implement as soon as possible, it’s not a quick fix but a strategic measure that drives valuable traffic.
Make 2023 your Black Friday year with the help of Making Science’s top 5 tips!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and is a method that uses technical measures and content optimisation to increase organic traffic and rank higher on the results page of search engines such as Google, Bing and more.
- Website Performance: During Black Friday, customers are flooded with adverts and offers from thousands of merchants. To succeed with your Black Friday sales, you need to stick out. But sticking out only with special deals is not enough if your website does not load fast or has technical issues. A slow website that performs poorly could lead to losing potential customers, which is not desirable during the biggest shopping holiday of the year. This applies to both mobile and desktop performance, it’s important that the two are in sync and perform seamlessly. Review your website’s performance well in advance and make any technical changes necessary to keep it running at peak performance. A common misconception is that SEO strategy is only about optimising texts and adding keywords, which is not true at all. The technical SEO aspect is important as well for ranking higher in search results and it is common practice for SEO professionals to work closely with developers.
- Optimise Landing Pages: To improve your visibility for searches related to Black Friday and Black Week, it is recommended to create optimised landing pages dedicated to this specific occasion. Don’t wait too long to create them, as search engines need some time to start crawling and indexing the pages. The landing pages for Black Friday, Black Week and Cyber Monday can remain the same and be reused every year. The important thing to remember is to keep them “evergreen”, which is used to describe content that is relevant and fresh all year round. In addition to creating new pages, it’s a good idea to optimise any existing landing pages you have around the topic, freshen them up and make them relevant so you can easily see results in your traffic. Be thorough and update things like Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, H1 titles and image tags. See below for an example of how a company selling electric toothbrushes can optimise their site.
- URL: company.com/black-friday
- Meta Title: 40+ Black Friday Electric Toothbrush Deals 2023! Best in test & Black Week prices!
- Meta Description: Black Week & Black Friday electric toothbrush deals 2023! Discount on electric toothbrushes online, big savings. Rechargeable, efficient & affordable!
- H1 Title: Best Black Week & Black Friday Electric Toothbrush deals 2023.
- Write text for humans. And for robots: As previously mentioned, SEO is something that, when implemented in existing routines, is hard to forget when it comes to working with texts and other content on a website. One example is how you choose to formulate and structure texts. Writing for Google’s robots is about being clear, correct and using important keywords. If your goal is to gain organic traffic, writing for bots is important as they help drive more traffic to your site. However, it’s equally important that you write for humans as they are ultimately the ones who make the choice to shop on your site. Therefore, write texts with your human audience in mind, sprinkling your keywords in a natural way and writing in ways that appeal to your target audience. It’s that balancing act of writing in an SEO-friendly way for both humans and robots that is important to get a feel for. It’s something that’s not just important for Black Friday, but all year round.
- Collect positive reviews: The search engines value pages with high authority which can be earned in a variety of ways. Product reviews are one way to gain authority as both positive and negative reviews are considered by search engines as signals and could affect organic rankings. Unsure what volume of positive reviews is needed to raise or decline your organic rankings, but do not forget the manual graders that will analyse the SERPS* in order to decide which result is relevant and needs to be prioritised. Besides being favoured by search engines (and Google!), reviews are important as they can help convince hesitant customers to go through and finalise their purchase. Working on your reviews and customer satisfaction is important all year round, but especially important to focus on, in order to win new customers by integrating them into your pages for Black Friday and Black Week 2023.*Search Engine Result Pages
- Keyword strategy for Black Friday: A well-thought-out keyword strategy is what takes you from start to finish and there are certain things that are particularly important to consider when it comes to SEO for Black Friday. One of these is to work with long-tail keywords, which are keyword combinations consisting of two or more important keywords. The goal of long-tail keywords is to lead the customer in the right direction and give them what they are looking for. Black Friday and Black Week are already identified as two of the most important words to optimise for. Keyword combinations such as Black Friday Deal, Black Friday Offer 2023 and Black Friday savings together with product-related words thus provide niche and specific search results. See examples below:
- Black Friday Electric toothbrush Deal
- Black Friday Offer Airpods
- Black Friday savings Trainers
Cyber Monday
Black Friday always falls on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which in 2023 is 24 November, but it’s not the only day to watch. The following Monday, 27 November, is what is known as Cyber Monday. Initially, Cyber Monday was the Black Friday of e-commerce, but in today’s climate, Black Friday discounts in physical stores have also moved online. When optimising for Cyber Monday, it is important to identify keywords, keyword combinations and phrases that are specific to that day. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are close together, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that search behaviour is exactly the same between the two. When in doubt, it’s a good idea to use Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends or tools like SEMrush etc, to analyse search trends and relevant keywords.
Black Friday is an incredible opportunity for all e-commerce businesses to boost their sales. Investing in SEO for the festive season is a simple, cost-effective measure that continues to deliver results.
Making Science is a full-service media agency with extensive experience in SEO optimisation on different platforms. Contact us if you want to know more about how you can create a strategy to improve your Black Friday 2023 SEO!
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