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Sep 19, 2022
The holiday season features some of the biggest and wildest online shopping extravaganzas of the year. Black Friday serves as the official kickoff to the holiday eCommerce sales frenzy!
If you want to boost your online sales and cash in on people's increased spending habits during this time of the year, then you need to start optimizing your business for Black Friday SEO.
A winning holiday SEO strategy in Florida plays a vital role in increasing your online store’s visibility in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. By getting started early in seasonal optimization, you can put your products in front of holiday shoppers looking for great deals and steals during this season and capture more sales.
In this article, our experts will share with you five crucial SEO strategies to improve your holiday marketing campaigns and maximize your Black Friday sales.
Before launching your holiday marketing campaign, it’s crucial to review your technical SEO first. This is the first step in making sure that your site is in tip-top shape during the holidays so it can generate more organic traffic, rank high for Black Friday keywords, and generate conversions.
Technical SEO refers to the process of improving the technical aspects of your site, such as speed, XML sitemap, and resolving any broken links, to meet all the requirements of all search engine systems.
Doing a technical SEO audit and fixing problem areas helps ensure that search engine bots can effectively crawl, index, and rank your site for relevant searches. As a result, your site can be discovered faster by holiday shoppers, and you can provide a better experience to web visitors.
Review your technical SEO basics, including:
Core Web Vitals – Update your page experience for the holidays. You want to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly, secure, and responsive. Some optimizations you can do to improve your site’s page experience and speed for the holidays are using lazy-loading, minifying your JavaScript code, and optimizing image formats.
Crawlability Issues – Crawl errors prevent search engines from reaching a page on your site. It’s important to fix this so that bots can find the content you want to rank for certain keywords. When scanning for crawlability issues, go through all 4xx and 5xx error pages and figure out where you want to lead users. It's also important to check all your 301 redirects to ensure they're properly implemented and do not affect user experience.
Broken internal and external links – Having a poor linking structure can result in a poor user experience. Both search engine bots and humans get frustrated when they click on a link, and it doesn't work, or it takes them to the wrong content. Look for any broken links on your site and replace the link with a relevant one.
Duplicate content – Get rid of any duplicate content on your site because this confuses search engine bots on which version of content, page, or your site itself it should index.
HTTPS protocol – Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor back in 2014. So, if your site is still HTTP, it’s time to switch to HTTPS.
URL structure – Simplify your URL structure to make it easier for bots and humans to follow which part of your site they’re on. As much as possible, keep your URLs short and get rid of any irrelevant parameters.
XML Sitemap – An XML sitemap tells search engine bots about your site’s structure and what they should index in the search results. Your XML sitemap should contain all the blog posts, products, and other content that’s recently added to your site. It shouldn’t contain more than 50,000 URLs.
Robots.txt file – Robots.txt files instruct search engine bots on how to crawl your site. You can use this to ensure that bots only crawl the most important pages that are being indexed. You also want to make sure that it isn't blocking any content that you want to be indexed.
Structured data or Schema markup – Schema markup helps bots better understand the contents of your pages and how they’re relevant to certain queries. Make sure you create schema markup for your site.
Once you’ve optimized the technical aspect of your site, it’s time to figure out what keywords to use to boost your site’s visibility and generate more traffic.
Through keyword research, you can determine what terms your target audience is actively searching for. You can also find the potential of those keywords, and how to incorporate them into your marketing plan to generate better results.
Since you want to capture holiday shoppers who are looking for deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, you need to research terms they’ll likely use to find your products or services online.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and write down all possible keywords they’ll likely use when searching for your products or services during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
Some of the top Black Friday and Cyber Monday Keywords include:
These keywords have a high search volume but they’re also highly competitive. This means it’ll be harder for your site to rank for these keywords because a lot of other sites are competing for them.
When choosing which Black Friday keywords to use, it’s important to determine the potential value and competitiveness of each keyword first.
Here’s how you can gauge if you should use a keyword or not:
It’s best practice to choose keywords with high search volume but low competition.
However, you can still use the top Black Friday keywords to your advantage by adding adjectives that best describe or are specific to your business or the products you offer. You can use branded KWs like, “Black Friday shopping Lara Cosmetics” or something like “Best Black Friday Sales nude lipstick”.
These keywords are called long-tail keywords. Although they generate less search traffic, they do bring in quality leads that are more likely to buy from you.
Check your long-tail keywords to make sure they’re generating enough traffic to sustain your business during the holidays and beyond.
People tend to look for the best offers in advance and plan their purchases accordingly to ensure they’re getting the best deals during holiday sales. So, when the big shopping day comes around, they know what to buy, where to buy it from, and they can shop efficiently.
This is why it makes sense to start promoting your Black Friday deals early.
To quickly develop a holiday marketing campaign optimized for Florida SEO, you need to analyze your previous campaigns.
Go to Google Analytics and figure out which channels drove the most traffic to your site, which products were a crowd favorite, which pages generated the most conversions, and more.
Doing this gives you insights into what works and doesn’t with your target audience. With this information, you can easily replicate best practices and build off of these successes to refine your strategy and generate better results this year.
Because of all the discounts and special promos that various brands and businesses whip up during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, people tend to do more research during this season compared to the rest of the year.
According to Invespcro, 90% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase. Create trust with holiday shoppers and the illusion of a once-in-a-lifetime offer by showcasing social proof and value proposition on pages with intense competition and high keyword volume.
Image from FireApps
Just like the example above, you also want to feature star ratings or customer reviews on your ad listings and landing pages to win over holiday shoppers and influence their buying decisions.
Other important proposition values or characteristics you want to emphasize on your pages include:
Landing pages are an effective way to market specific products during the holidays and attract holiday shoppers.
They’re incredibly effective in converting more traffic because they’re hyper-focused on one goal or call to action. They provide all essential information about a certain offer or product, which convinces consumers to check out.
They’re also fairly simple to navigate, which prevents visitors from getting distracted and allows them to focus on converting.
You can build links to these pages to help them rank for your Black Friday keywords and use call-to-action to take them through your sales funnel.
Here are some best practices for creating high-converting holiday landing pages:
Having a winning holiday SEO strategy in Florida will help boost your site’s visibility during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Better visibility means more traffic and more traffic, which means more leads and sales!
At Digital Resource, our SEO experts and digital marketing specialists will create a custom SEO holiday plan that will put your eCommerce site on top of the search results and boost your sales.
Want to get make the most out of Black Friday sale madness and boost your sales before the year ends? Contact us today to get started!
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