Black Friday is just around the corner, and for many business owners (small and large) it’s the most profitable time of year. According to Techradar, a whopping $3.34 billion was spent last Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Ready to get your piece of the pie this November? It starts, and ends with optimizing your website. Learn the most effective SEO tips to strengthen your brand, achieve higher sales and surpass your ecommerce dreams!
First Things First: Cheat Your Way to Sales Success (With a Checklist)
It’s not really cheating — in fact, it’s a strategy to blow your competition out of the water so that you reach the true ecommerce sales potential that you deserve. While Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year, it can also be the most stressful day of the year as well. How do you guarantee your website won’t crash with high volume traffic? How do you best increase the amount of spending per customer? With this handy checklist, of course! Cross off each task one by one, and you’ll skyrocket your sales just in time for Black Friday:
- Set up an autoresponder series for abandoned cart visitors. If you already use an automated email marketing series to keep your customer engaged, make sure to add a ‘Black Friday’ campaign. All you have to do is capture those viewers who added your product to their cart (but then left your site). Send a reminder email to them with a special, additional 10% off coupon – if they come back by midnight to complete their checkout.
- Create a pop-up landing page with a discount code. The average viewer only takes three seconds to view your site. Instantly grab their attention with a compelling pop-up landing page, placed front and center on your homepage. Do you want to create a greater sense of urgency? Design a landing page that includes a timer, counting down the hours, minutes and seconds before your deal expires.
- Create a banner to display your too-good-to-pass-up Black Friday deal. Banners are easy to create (just head over to canva.com to create a free one). Create a bold heading and font that specifies what your deal is. The more instantly visible your Black Friday deals are, the more viewers are likely to buy.
- Be absolutely sure your store can deal with the demand. Don’t underestimate the power of your product. When Black Friday comes, consumers (old and new) will want to take advantage of your deals. Check ahead of time with your suppliers, making sure they can handle your surplus of orders.
Black Friday SEO Tips
Now that you have a website equipped for high sales and a low drop-off rate, it’s time to optimize your online business to reach the masses in record time. Apply these five tips to your site ASAP, and you’ll become the epitome of #salesgoals.
Create SEO-Focused Gift Guides
Forget struggling to optimize your sales. One highly effective shortcut is by suggestive gift guide pop-ups as they go through check-out. According to Google’s trend report from 2016, over 70 percent of online consumers start shopping without having something particular in mind that they want to buy! For example, if you sell women’s clothing, put together a few gift guides that include related interests for women, such as fashion bracelets, necklaces and a subscription to a women’s magazine.
Utilize YouTube
Make a few ‘Black Friday Gift Idea’ videos on YouTube and reach even more potential customers (a whopping 68 percent of consumers turn to YouTube when they don’t know what they want to buy!) Just make sure you follow YouTube’s SEO rules by including no more than 2 percent density keywords and 700 words — max — in your video description (or your video won’t get uploaded).
Add Popular Keywords for Holiday Gifts in Your Marketing Copy
Black Friday is the perfect time to utilize SEO keywords in all platforms of your marketing copy, including: emails, landing pages, PPC ads, blog posts and product descriptions. Start off your search with ‘Black Friday’, and make sure to also utilize ‘related searches’ for more keyword ideas.
Know Your Buzz Words
Once you have your list of Black Friday keywords, make sure that you add holiday specific buzz words to your marketing copy. For example, it’s not enough to simply describe what your product is with ‘Black Friday’ keywords. You have to hook your audience with additional words like ‘Best,’ ‘Incredible,’ ‘Rare,’ or ‘One of a Kind.’
Peak their curiosity with buzz words, so that whether you’re selling champagne filled chocolates or cashmere sweaters, you’ve hooked them and compelled them to click, buy — and become a customer for years to come.
Force the Masses to Discover Your Sale
While content has been and always will be king, never underestimate the power of a really good image. Many businesses use images in their blog posts or web content, but fail to maximize their exposure by forgetting about the alt tags. This holiday season (as well as any other day of the year) remember that your audience is visually inspired. Add stock photos of a picturesque setting, or of a child receiving the perfect gift on Christmas morning. Find images that evoke Universal desires we all have: a sense of joy, wonder and even magic. Then, take advantage of alt tags so that visitors can find you — and inevitably, the perfect Black Friday deal they just can’t pass up.
Republished by permission. Original here.
Black Friday App Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “Apply These Secret Techniques to Improve Your Small Business Website for Black Friday” was first published on Small Business Trends