12 awesome SEO tips for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2020 success

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest shopping days of the year. Consumers from around the world are online and instore looking for heavily discounted deals. In the UK alone, as of the time of writing, the average monthly Google search volume for ‘black friday deals’ is 110,000, and for ‘cyber monday deals’ it is 14,800. With so many searches, it is important online stores have optimised their sites for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

When are Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2020?

This year, Black Friday is on Friday 27 November 2020, and Cyber Monday is on Monday 30 November 2020.

Top tips for Black Friday and Cyber Monday success

If you’re a business owner, marketer or SEO for an eCommerce website, find out how to optimise your site to rank well for Black Friday and Cyber Monday keywords.

Create your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages as early as possible

The longer your page is live, the more chances you have of acquiring links, tweaking the page content for SEO, and also building up some history of user signals with Google, e.g. click-through rate, bounce back to search results etc. Launch your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages as early as possible. Don’t expect to launch your page a couple of days before Black Friday and then outrank the sites that have had their pages live for weeks or months (in some cases maybe years).

Conduct Black Friday and Cyber Monday keyword research

The foundation of any SEO work is knowing what your target audience is actually searching for. Your first action is to identify what search terms people are using for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you are a smaller organisation, you will find it difficult to compete with the larger, more authoritative websites out there for the highest search volume keywords. Still, you may be able to rank for long-tail phrases specific to your niche. Don’t forget to research Black Friday and Cyber Monday specific FAQs as these could help drive additional longtail traffic.

Here are some useful keyword research tools:

• Google Ads Keyword Planner
• AHREFS
• Moz
• Answer the Public
• Keyword.io

Analyse trending products

As part of the keyword research, you will want to identify which types of products are currently trending. You could optimise the content of your existing Black Friday or Cyber Monday landing pages to include the trending products and categories. If the products and categories are particularly important and have Black Friday or Cyber Monday keywords with good search volume, you could also create dedicated landing pages for them.

Here are some useful tools for finding trending products:

• Google Trends
• Amazon Best Sellers
• Amazon Movers and Shakers
• eBay Trending
• AliExpress Popular

Create dedicated Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages

To create the most relevant landing pages, you should create a separate page for Black Friday and a separate page Cyber Monday. Not only will this allow you to optimise all of the content for each page for keywords targeting either of those days, but you will also be able to optimise internal and inbound links specific to those keywords.

Re-use the same URL if you created Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages the previous year

If you already have existing Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages from previous years, then instead of creating new pages with new URLs, re-use the URLs from the previous years. Any links and value you have built up in those pages will be transferred to the updated versions of the pages.

If you have Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages from multiple years, e.g. pages for 2017, 2018, 2019 etc. then you should consider redirecting all of the old URLs into a single version of the page. Doing this will consolidate all of the value from those other pages into a single URL.

Ensure fast page load times

Google has been using page speed as a ranking factor for many years now. Not only will a fast page load time potentially improve your organic search rankings, but it will also provide a better user experience. Waiting a long time for a page to load is one of the most infuriating things when surfing the web.

Here are some useful page speed tools:

• Google Page Speed Insights
• GT Metrix
• Pingdom Website Speed Test

Make sure your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages are mobile-friendly

Since July 2019, Google has been using mobile-first indexing to evaluate web pages. Mobile-first indexing is in use for all new websites, and Google has transitioned some existing websites over to mobile-first. Mobile-first indexing means that Google is using the mobile version of your website for ranking purposes. You want to make sure that the mobile versions of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages have the same content as the desktop versions. It is also important that your website on mobile provides a good user experience (UX), so avoid having large ads that take up too much of the screen on mobile devices. Remember, making your pages mobile-friendly is not just for SEO; it also benefits UX.

You can find out more about mobile-first indexing from Google.

Create content that people actually want

This should probably go without saying, but you should create Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages that actually contain content that your target audience wants. If you are an online store, your audience is likely looking for heavily discounted deals, so this is what you should give them. Of course, you should also have a considerable amount of text content on the page for SEO – we all know Google loves some text.

Having lots of copy doesn’t mean you need to ruin your conversions or page design. You can have some keyword-rich introductory text at the top of the page, then have the remaining in-depth, text-heavy content below your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Laying out the page in this way ensures you get the best for both SEO and UX.

Optimise your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages as you usually would for search engines

Don’t forget the usual on-page SEO best practices when building your Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages. All of the standard search engine optimisation rules apply. Ensure you do the following:

• Include your main keywords in the URL
• Include your main keywords in the page title (title element)
• Write a compelling meta description that includes your main keywords
• Include your main keywords in the heading (H1)
• Ensure your content includes your main keywords, as well as (long-tail) variations of your main keywords
• Use your target keywords in heading tags (H2, H3, H4 etc.) where appropriate
• Ensure images have a keyword-rich filename and alt attribute
• Add structured data if appropriate

Internal linking

Internal links are vital to ensuring your new Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages rank well. Not only do they allow search engines to find and crawl your new content, but they also send vital link equity to your landing pages, and allow visitors to find the new pages.

Add internal links to your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages from within the content, and also create a link within your main navigation and/or footer navigation. Make sure that you use keyword-rich anchor text, such as ‘Black Friday Deals’ or ‘Cyber Monday Deals’.

Inbound links

Inbound links from other domains are an important factor in Google’s algorithm. Not only can the links increase the perceived relevance of a webpage, but they can also influence trust and authority.

You should set up a link acquisition campaign for your new Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages. The more high quality, relevant links you can acquire to those pages, the greater your chances of ranking well in SERPs.

To acquire more links, some possible tactics could include outreaching to other relevant sites and contributing content in return for links back to your pages. You could also make use of any existing web properties you own separate from your main website by adding links to your Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages.

Integrate your Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages with other channels

While the focus of this article is SEO, you should also ensure you are making the most of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday content by promoting it via other channels. The more people that see these landing pages, the more chance there is you will earn some natural links from your visitors. Consider the following marketing activities:

• Share the pages via organic social posts
• Set up paid social ads to your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages
• Set up Google Ads to your new landing pages
• Send out a digital press release announcing your new Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages and deals
• Send out emails to your marketing lists announcing the launch of your pages, obviously with links to the pages
• Set up video adverts on YouTube announcing the launch of Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages and release of your upcoming deals
• Depending on your audience you could also make use of influencer marketing to announce your upcoming deals, driving traffic to your new pages

Wrapping up

You should now have an excellent idea of how to optimise your website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Let us know if you have any questions by leaving a comment below.

You can also reach out to us here at Strategyst if you want help with your digital marketing strategy and SEO by contacting us on 020 3239 7960 or emailing [email protected].