SEO: 10 Strategies to Lay A Foundation for Black Friday Success
With Black Friday just around the corner, every enterprise is in overdrive to optimize their Black Friday marketing strategies and boost their e-commerce sales. But as more and more brands join the fray, leveraging Connected SEO -a strategy wherein all digital touchpoints work together to funnel organic traffic-can give you a distinct edge. It goes way beyond keyword optimizing: it involves harmonizing content and social signals with search behavior to knit a mighty, cohesive approach to raise visibility across channels.
Here are the 10 out-of-the-box connected SEO strategies-complete with real-world examples-to help you get set up for a winning Black Friday foundation.
1. Topical SEO Strategy: Own Your Niche
Owning a niche in the busy market of Black Friday ensures you always have an upper hand. Instead of fighting for broad, high-competition keywords, target long-tail and highly specific search terms that reflect your brand. By creating in-depth, authoritative content, you can position your brand as a leader in your category.
How to:
Use SEMrush to find those niche Black Friday keywords that are niche-specific, not overly competitive, but have really strong search intent, like "eco-friendly Black Friday gifts under $50".
Create content clusters-interconnected blog posts and landing pages-centered around this niche, updating it year over year to hold rankings and build SEO equity.
Example: Patagonia has-owned the organic search results for eco-friendly shopping, thanks to their very strategic optimization of content to the "sustainable Black Friday gifts" topic. With their blog posts, product pages, and videos all interlinked and revised year over year, they've managed to consistently rank through the holiday shopping season for every type of sustainability-related search.
2. Leverage Social Search Behavior in Your Organic Campaigns
These days, consumers are turning to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest as search engines. By optimizing your posts, hashtags, and descriptions with SEO-rich keywords, you can capture some of this traffic and direct it to your website.
How to:
Research popular Black Friday-related hashtags and search queries on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. Examples could be "best Black Friday beauty deals" or "holiday shopping ideas". Use these in your captions and descriptions.
Design beautiful content-formatting that answer specific search queries to be used as Instagram reels, TikToks, and Pinterest boards. Include strong CTAs linking back to your Black Friday landing page or product catalog.
For instance, Glossier dove into Pinterest's search behavior by optimizing their seasonal beauty offers with long-tail keywords like "Black Friday skincare." They made striking pins that directed users to their site, thus bumping up organic traffic and raising search engine visibility on Google, too.
3. Go Deep into Consumer Behavior
Understand how your customers search for and shop Black Friday deals. By diving deep into consumer search behavior and trends, you can tailor your content to match what your audience is actively looking for, which also helps optimize product pages for better conversions.
How to:
Use tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Ubersuggest to identify which keywords and content are performing best. Analyze what drives traffic and conversions, then adjust your Black Friday content and product pages to reflect those patterns.
Create content based on consumer behavior, like product guides or how-to videos, that address common customer questions. Optimize these for SEO to attract long-tail traffic.
Example: Amazon deep-dives into the search data and uses insights such as "last-minute Black Friday gift ideas" and "best home tech deals" to optimize their landing pages and recommendations. This behavior-driven approach leads to more traffic, higher performing SEO, and more conversions on Black Friday.
4. Competitor Research to Find White Space
Black Friday is competitive, but deep competitor research will let you uncover white space SEO opportunities that your competitors have missed. You can focus on that chasm and fill the ranks for relevant but underserved searches.
How to:
Use tools like Ahrefs, to analyze the strategies of competitors for Black Friday SEO. Observe which keywords drive rankings and the profiling and content type for those keywords. Highlight their gaps-maybe some long-tail search terms and keyword opportunities have not been taken, or blog content has been left under-optimized.
Create content to fill such gaps- whether less aggressive keywords or different formats, such as infographics or even videos-and make sure it's SEO-optimized for Black Friday searches.
Example: Wayfair found that there was little competition for long-tail keywords around the home goods space like "affordable furniture Black Friday deals." They built out blog content and product pages focused on affordable options. This way, they captured traffic for content that larger competitors weren't focused on.
5. Build Topical Clusters Around Black Friday
Instead of creating standalone content, focus on building content clusters around your key Black Friday topics. This involves creating multiple related pieces of content that all link back to a central hub page, making it easier for search engines to understand the depth of your content.
How to:
Create a robust Black Friday hub page, then build peripheral content in the form of specific product categories, tips, or buyer guides. Make sure these peripheral pieces interlink back to the hub and with one another to form a content ecosystem that enhances your SEO performance.
Keep refreshed these clusters so that they can be related to at any time of the year. Google loves fresh content; next Black Friday, you can use this too.
Example: Best Buy created content clusters around Black Friday technology deals, building landing pages for various product categories, such as "Best Black Friday Deals on Laptops." Each one of those was then interlinked with the blog posts, reviews, and comparison guides. Such practices boost the overall SEO and bring in a huge inflow of organic traffic.
6. Integrate SEO into Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Ironically, most marketers claim that email marketing and SEO are apples and oranges, but having them connected multiplies their power. When it works as it should, email campaigns can ensure that SEO-optimized Black Friday landing pages actually get increased traffic, raising the websites in relevance and visibility in search rankings.
How to:
Place links inside your Black Friday emails to the key landing pages already SEO-optimized for keywords. Make sure the anchor text will be SEO-friendly, and the email content corresponds to user searches.
Drive the traffic to blog posts or product pages that are already ranking well. This ensures users consume the content that will enhance its search authority and relevance.
Example: Nordstrom integrates their SEO and email by embedding optimized links in their Black Friday campaigns. When subscribers click through, they fall onto highly-optimized pages for Black Friday search terms. In such a way, driving engagement on the page improves the page authority and thus further pushes SEO rankings.
7. Add Schema Markup to Black Friday Product Listings
Schema markup on product pages helps search engines understand your content better, hence giving it a greater chance of showing up in the rich results - like product carousels or Google's featured snippets. This becomes so important on Black Friday when competition is at an all-time high.
How to:
Add schema markup to your Black Friday product pages for things like price, availability, and customer reviews. Then, double-check your work with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
Clearly tag your Black Friday promotions with schema so they may feature more prominently on Google Shopping or in rich search results.
For instance, Home Depot used schema markup to show product availability and pricing directly within search results on Black Friday. This allowed them to have the competitive advantage of showcasing real-time deal updates, which positively impacted click-through rates and conversions.
8. Social Listening to Fuel Content Creation
Use social listening to learn what consumers are talking about leading into Black Friday. In an immediate sense, these real-time insights will feed your SEO strategy to help you create content that's immediately relevant and search-optimized for trending topics.
How to:
Monitor trending Black Friday-related topics and keywords using social listening tools, such as Hootsuite. Develop timely content that's optimized for both social media and search engines based on those insights.
Identify common questions and concerns around Black Friday-for example, "best black Friday laptop deals"-and write SEO-friendly FAQs or blog posts that respond in real-time to those questions.
Example: Target used social listening to identify customers discussing Black Friday deals. It created real-time blog posts and guides optimized for SEO and saw an increase in search visibility and targeted website traffic.
9. Create Evergreen Black Friday Content
Evergreen content maintains its value over time and can be reused each Black Friday season. A static Black Friday page with an evergreen URL retains its SEO strength throughout the year and can be easily updated annually.
How to:
Build an evergreen Black Friday landing page URL, such as /blackfridaydeals, which can be updated every year. Place all high-traffic keywords on this page, key product categories, and consumer FAQs.
Backlink to the page throughout the year. Keep refreshing this page throughout the year to ensure it doesn't get stale because Google likes older URLs. Refresh the content each year to give you the opportunity to rank on built-up SEO equity.
Example: REI developed an evergreen Black Friday landing page, entitled "Opt Outside", which they refreshed with new content and promotions each year. The URL remains the same, allowing them to build SEO equity and ranking highly from one year to another, without having to start over.
10. Optimize for Featured Snippets
Appearing in Google's Featured Snippets is one of the most surefire ways to steal prime real estate on the search results page. By structuring your Black Friday content in a manner that answers commonly asked questions directly, you stand a chance of being featured at the top of SERP.
How to:
Analyze popular questions about Black Friday using AnswerThePublic and Google's "People Also Ask" by structuring content to answer questions in a concise, direct fashion; use bulleted lists or short paragraphs.
Having your content majorly based on clear headings, subheadings, and numbered lists will give Google an easy time to extract and display that given part as the featured snippet. Focus on prime-end queries, such as "What are the best Black Friday deals in 2024?" or "How do I get the best Black Friday tech discounts?
Example: Walmart nailed it with its Black Friday FAQ page, featuring quick, precise answers to common questions. The mission was complete when they won Featured Snippets for spikes in searches like "best Black Friday TV deals" and hit a home run, so to speak, in one of the fiercest competitive spaces for organic traffic.
Creating a Connected SEO Strategy for Black Friday Success
Black Friday isn’t just about big discounts; it’s a prime chance to boost your brand’s authority, drive organic traffic, and build lasting SEO value. These Connected SEO strategies offer a clear path to creating a comprehensive, cross-channel system that outperforms traditional search optimization. By owning a niche, building topical clusters, and leveraging social search behavior, you’ll enhance visibility this shopping season and set yourself up for long-term success.
More importantly, create an evergreen Black Friday landing page that continues to build SEO equity year to year. By updating this page with new content and continually refining your SEO strategy, you can make sure that you attract consistent traffic and revenue for upcoming Black Fridays.
In all, building Connected SEO into your holiday marketing plan is about more than preparing for Black Friday; it's the foundation for sustained organic growth that will be there serving your brand well into the New Year and beyond. The key is to start early, think creatively, and focus on connecting all channels to form a unified high-performing strategy.