Black Week is officially underway, and for the companies that have done their SEO right, the week will mean a massive boost in free and robust traffic from Google. In this post, we will go through what is essential to keep in mind when applying your search engine optimization for Black Friday, but also other well-known big upcoming holidays.

There is excellent awareness among consumers about the various sales and promotions that occur annually. These shopping days are also closely monitored and debated in the media from different perspectives. As a result, many exciting search behaviors have been created that can be capitalized on.

According to Google Keyword Planner, the pure search "Black Friday" alone had over 823,000 searches in November last year. Given that recent years' trend continues, there will be even an increase in such searches this year.

Single's Day, Cyber ​​Monday, and the classic mid-day sale are some other examples of annually recurring shopping opportunities. As a reaction to these shopping days and the shopping that some believe they encourage, other alternative days have also been created. An example is White Monday, which is a day where companies can encourage consumers to review circular alternatives instead of buying new ones.

The idea of ​​this post is to give our readers the tools and mindset they will need to get their product site to rank at the top of this type of keywords - no matter what kind of campaign is relevant for your business to implement.

The focus is on campaign pages that will capture broad keywords that occur over a short period of time each year, such as "Black Friday", "White Monday", "single's day", and so on. The mindset can also be used to advantage for narrower searches and campaign pages, for example, "black Friday tv," where the search volume is undoubtedly lower, but the traffic even more relevant, and the competition is not as high.

Ready? Good, let's dive in!

Start on time

It takes time to rank pages well on Google, especially when the competition is high. Even if you have a healthy site, you should have a time horizon of at least a few months before you can see good placements on a competitive keyword, such as "black friday". If there is less competition and the search behavior is not fully established among the users, such as for "white monday", less time may suffice.

However, it never hurts to be out in good time, especially when it comes to SEO. Never forget that!

Content

Google is primarily a search engine for text, and you need to write good content that covers the queries that a user searches for on Google. Focus on the primary keyword for the page, such as "black friday", and build with many secondary keywords that you see users google on in the current campaign. For Black Friday, for example, it could be "what is black friday", "black friday 2020", and also "black week". Also, mention the dates that are relevant to the campaign in the text.

Divide the text in a semantically correct way and use subheadings and lists where appropriate. Also, have at least one image on the page that has a relevant alt attribute.

Links

Whether or not you need to build links to your campaign page depends on how much competition is there on that keyword and how strong your domain's authority is in Google's eyes. The search "Black Friday" is hugely competitive, while "White Monday" has hardly any competition.

If you can do something creative in marketing around your campaign that generates links, you will have an advantage over your competitors. Here is our tip to dare to think outside the box and not do as "everyone" else.

Have permanent pages

The basis of all search engine optimization is to have relevant landing pages on your site that match users' searches. If you want to rank on, for example, "black friday", you need a page that is optimized for that keyword.

Many companies make a common mistake to create temporary pages that are then deleted when the campaign is over. From an SEO perspective, it is a colossal waste of resources and time. We need to be very clear about Google-rank the same page over time, also next year. Then we get the best conditions to succeed in keeping good positions on that specific keyword.

When a campaign is over, the page should not be deleted. Leave the page on the site and ensure that Google can always reach the page in some way via its internal links. The page does not have to be high up in the structure but must in some way still be accessible via the internal link all year round.

Avoid years in URLs

The same searches return year after year, for example, "black friday", "black week", "cyber monday", and so on. Since we want the same page to rank next year as well, it is a bad idea to include the year in the URL.

Good URL: https://www.example.com/en/black-friday

Bad URL: https://www.example.com/black-friday-2020

It would be best if you instead worked with the years in elements such as title, meta description, headings, etc.

In that way, Google has plenty of time to think that the page is relevant for next year. Using structured data on your campaign page, you can make it clear to Google what different elements of the page are. It does not make your rank better, but you can be rewarded with a more superior presentation in the search results.

Internal link for upcoming campaigns

Your campaign page needs time to rank well. Therefore, it is essential that you start linking to the page in a good time. The home page is the most vital page on the site, so it is useful to link from there before the campaign starts.

If it disturbs the user experience too much, an alternative is to link internally to the footer's page instead. Your campaign page then gets link power from every page on the entire site (because the links in the footer are site-wide).

The closer in time the campaign gets, the more you should highlight this page on the site by linking it from, for example, menus and internally from other pages.

Synergies with SEM and Paid Social

Another advantage of having the campaign pages accessible on the site in advance is that you can set cookies on the users who visit these pages. In this way, you can reach out to these users with targeted messages in other channels through Advedro, Google Ads, Facebook, etc.

Change nothing significant at the last minute.

Last but not least - make no significant changes at the last minute. Especially not if you have a page that already ranks well on a competitive keyword. No one wants to risk Google re-evaluating the ranking unnecessarily.