It’s coming. Inevitable as the changing of the seasons, the holiday season and its myriad sales is approaching. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Holiday deals, New Years sales; each of these fleeting events offers incredible opportunity for businesses, especially those operating online.
Ecommerce platforms are the battlegrounds upon which sales traffic is now fought. More and more people are choosing to do their shopping online, with trends showing these ratios are only set to increase. Effective Black Friday strategies seek to capture online shoppers at all points of their sales shopping journey, from the research and interest stage to the rush of the on the day sales.
Employing dedicated SEO strategies for these intense sales periods can be crucial for businesses. Premiums for online advertising go through the roof during this time of year and sinking your hard earned cash into Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing can ultimately go to waste if the website that future customers are faced with is not easy to navigate, does not contain the information they need and has low trust levels. By ensuring your SEO strategy accounts for fluctuations of the holiday season, you can save money marketing through search engines and can crucially track performance and learn for the next year.
Having worked with a range of ecommerce platforms from fresh fashion brands to fireplace fitters, the StudioHawk team has a wealth of experience preparing businesses for holiday seasons. Through this article we will detail some of the most effective SEO techniques to employ during this season to increase organic traffic, perfect user experience and ensure high conversion rates that will see your sales soar!
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Seasonal SEO?
As an ecommerce business you will be familiar with the importance of SEO and ensuring your website is visible to users by ranking highly on search engines. You will also be well aware of the changing wants and needs of consumers throughout the year, adding a seasonality to your customer base throughout the year that may not be catered for through permanent product pages and categories. Never is this more clear than in the case of seasonal sales such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, both opportunities for high traffic to a website as well as being concerned with SEO strategies. How can a website optimise for a fleeting sales period?
Seasonal SEO strategies contend with the transient nature of sales periods and provide sustainable and sturdy plans that combine your website’s broader online authority with its dedicated sales pages. On-page structures and effective content outputs all merge to make your sales as discoverable as possible, increasing organic traffic during crucial periods and encouraging high conversion rates.
Employing certain techniques that fulfil the needs of users during a seasonal sale as well as meeting the ranking criteria of search engines means that a Seasonal SEO strategy can ensure sustained authority of a Black Friday page that will be ready for use and effective year after year.
Ensure the Basics are Covered
While a distinct strategy should be employed to create an effective Black Friday sales page, without acing the basics across your website, your sales pages will be unlikely to rank well. Creating thoughtful, useful and helpful content, crafting a website that is intuitively easy to use and ensuring that the technical aspects of your site are perfected will all enable your Black Friday SEO efforts to shine.
Page speed is a vital factor when optimising for sales. Slow loading times can kill off uncertain customers and can also potentially reduce trust when making purchases online. An increasing majority of online purchases are being made on smart devices rather than computers, meaning that optimising your site for mobile is incredibly important to triumph during sales periods.
For more information on the Basics of SEO, check out our collection of resources that will give you the foundations to build successful SEO strategies.
Seasonal Keyword Research
Before you can begin with your Black Friday strategy, you need to have a strong understanding of what your customers are searching for during the sales season. Keyword research is at the heart of SEO campaigns and can reveal pathways to your products that may be unexpected! Many consumers use sales periods such as Black Friday to get ahead with holiday shopping, often buying gifts for loved ones. Therefore producing ‘gift guides’ that target your customer base can be a great way to increase traffic to your Black Friday sales page. Explore long tail keywords for terms such as ‘gift guides for outdoorsy people’ or ‘gift guides for SEO specialists’ to really refine the audience you are connecting with, ensuring that the traffic that reaches your sales pages are supremely suited to buying your products.
Check in with your customer communications team and understand common questions relating to your products. Answering queries about shipping costs and times as well as returns policies through articles can be useful to inform users about the essentials, enabling quicker purchases. We recommend using Google Trends, which can be a helpful tool to see the uptake of certain search terms during seasonal sales periods.
Designing Seasonal Sales Landing Pages
But how should you approach building a landing page for such a transitional and fleeting period? Should it be a permanent fixture of your site or should it be redirected and recreated year on year? Find the answers below:
Keep it Live!
While the temptation may be to de-index and redirect away from a seasonal sales page during the majority of the year when it is not in use, this can be killer in terms of rankings! Search engines may not be able to render, search and index this page in time before the sales and you will also risk losing the link equity that this page can bring to other pages out-of-season. Keep this page live, update its on page structure and information and adapt how your homepage links to it in the lead up to your sales.
Url Structure
The best of Black Friday pages have a constant url that does not change year on year. Therefore, ensuring you don’t include the date or current year within your url will cement its evergreen potential, making a consistent landing page for customers both engaging in the sales period or researching it in the run up. By keeping a permanent, unchanging Black Friday URL, secure the authority you gain through internal and backlinks to the page.
On Page Features
When a prospective customer sees your Black Friday landing page, what should they see? Consider elements that will enable them to return when sales are in full spring, that will inform them of your product offerings and will encourage them to make purchases outside of sales periods too! Here are some of the key elements we recommend for an effective Black Friday landing page before it is made live for sales:
- Countdown – Build excitement within your customer base and provide clear information about when the sales actually start. This can be a visually interesting element of a page, matching your branding through design.
- Product previews – Many keen customers want a heads-up of what to expect in a coming sale. Publishing articles previewing the deals to be found on your site will be key in drumming up interest and capturing the traffic of users searching for specific products during the sales. Producing gift guides for your common customer base can be an intuitive and effective way to produce helpful content that encourages traffic and conversions on your Black Friday page.
- Mailing List Sign Ups – The final and most important element that is key for a useful Black Friday page is an effective call to action in the form of a mailing list sign up! When a customer arrives at your pre-sales page, seeing that the sales are not yet live, offering them reminders through email as well as more information about product offers through a regular newsletter can be a highly successful strategy.
Internal Linking
Make sure that your Black Friday landing page is used to its full extent through effective internal linking. In the run up to the big day, ensure that all content output links back to this essential page, signposting your customers to the page. Equally, make sure that there are ample links available on your Black Friday landing page that enable the user to explore the rest of your product pages.
Reuse and Recycle
Update your content year on year to represent changing products and trends. Make use of the database of content relating to Black Friday that you have accumulated and republish it in the run up to the season each year with accurate dates and product previews.
Making your Ecommerce Site ‘Sales Friendly’
Considering consumer mentality can be important when optimising your pages for mega sales. During sales, the time spent considering purchases may be reduced, resulting in quicker click throughs. This also means that customers will be more highly sensitive to slow website speeds or lack of information. If a visitor to a product page can immediately see the value of the product, how well it is rated by other customers and its availability then they are more likely to make a quick decision and thus a conversion is made!
Reducing barriers to purchase should be key in this process. Consider what might convince a potential customer and ensure it is included on your product page.
Prepare For When Things Go Wrong
With great webpage traffic comes great responsibility, and during these times the likelihood that things will go wrong is relatively high. Common problems customers encounter may be products selling out or on page functions breaking due to high traffic. Accounting for these outcomes can avoid bounces from your page, redirecting customers and ensuring you still achieve conversions.
Optimising your 404 page
When pages break, the 404 message is a familiar one to users – “404 Not Found”. If a customer during a sales period is faced with this message, it may signal the end of their shopping spree on your site. Altering the text that appears on your 404 message can be an unexpected way to impress your brand to a customer matching your company’s tone. The most important potential of a customer 404 page is the inclusion of internal linking towards other working pages. During the rush of sales, this can make the difference between a customer bouncing from your site, or staying for more!
Inbuilt ‘Sold Out’ functions
Avoid 404s by creating inbuilt sold out functions, keeping a product page live when all items have been sold showing its unavailability. Again, ensuring that when a product is shown as ‘sold out’ that there is written content available signposting customers to other similar offerings or providing an email sign up that will send updates should the item be restocked. Once again, try to prevent this page being the end of a user’s journey on your sales site.
Extend your sale dates
Many companies have recognised the instability of the massive rush that singular day sales creates – we see this every year with in person stores on Black Friday. In response to this, many businesses spread their seasonal offers over a longer period of time allowing customers more time to consider the products included in the sale and capturing more conversions during the lead up period to the holidays.
The Essential Black Friday Timeline
We know that SEO work can take time – search engines need time to discover and crawl your page in order to rank it. With this in mind, planning ahead and scheduling the work and updates needed for seasonal sales can be essential in seeing the results you want.
2 Months Before
- Either create or revive your Black Friday landing page. Update the content on the web page to reflect this year’s sale for your company. Insert a countdown for the big day as well as a call to action for keen shoppers, adding an email sign-up for sales updates.
- Ensure the Title Tag and Meta Description for this webpage reflect this year’s date, try and include long-tail keywords that reflect the special offerings of your sale.
- Insert a link to this page in the footer of your main site, so it can be navigated to by expectant customers and crawled by search engines.
- Once these changes have been made, submit the URL to Google Search Console to log the updates.
2 Weeks Before
- Prepare your homepage for the sale by including links to the sale page.
- Ensure that there is strong internal linking towards your sale page from any content you put out during this time through blogs or on social media.
- Update your sale page to show previews of the products you will have on sale.
On the Big Day
- Update your page to show sales products.
- Submit the sales page url to Google Search Console once again.
After the Sale
- Remove any link to the sales page from your homepage’s menu, header or footer.
- Update text on the page informing customers that the sale has ended, including internal linking to other areas of the site to navigate them to other product pages.
- Include an email sign-up option on the page to allow customers to be informed of upcoming offers and sales
- Update your title tag and meta description to show that the sale has ended with a call to action message such as ‘See you next year!’ to encourage them to return for future deals.
Track Your Seasonal Wins
Once the madness of the sales season has finished, you should take time to take stock and understand how the strategy has impacted your sales this year. Using applications like SEMRush to track traffic and your rankings for the chosen keywords of your strategy will be key here. Keeping records of your process and producing a debriefing document with recommendations for the next year will guarantee that your approach to flash sales is measured and built on data driven, proven techniques.
Capture Your Audience
A good customer is for life, not just for Christmas. Whilst some of these techniques will ensure that the authority of your sales specific webpage remains consistent and is trusted by google, they also represent simply good practices for offering good user experience on your website. If you can make sure that your ecommerce platform meets the needs of visiting sales shoppers and represents the quality of your brand and products, this is a great time to capture traffic and discover repeat customers.
Work with the Best in Ecommerce SEO
As an agency, StudioHawk has developed successful campaigns for a range of eCommerce clients. From working with large enterprise companies to SMEs our range of experience has enabled us to develop responsive and adaptive strategies to suit a range of client needs.
If you are looking for an expert team to help guide your ecommerce business into an era of increased organic traffic and sustainable sales, get in touch with us today!