When preparing for a black Friday event it’s imperative to ensure your servers can handle a multitude of users, especially if you are offering spectacular deals to customers. Create a landing page specifically for the event will make the user experience as great as possible which also allows for you to get creative. Many companies leverage sales on this day, so make sure you can offer enticing deals that will result in direct sales there and then. Often the urgency of time pushes customers to make a conversion. Lead capturing campaigns are also a great initiative to collect users to use at a later point when there are less distractions from competitors if you aren’t able to offer anything unique for customers.
Rachael Waine – Digital Marketing Coordinator
AMR Hair & Beauty Supplies
My team spends months getting ready for the holiday shopping season preparing multiple ad creatives, copy, A/B tests, video, etc. Make sure to load your facebook/Instagram ads early to allow enough time for them to get approved. Last year, Facebook Power Editor went down right before Thanksgiving with advertisers scrambling to upload their ads. Optimize your ad spend for the time of day. For Cyber Monday, for instance, most people browse for specials on their phones while at work but make their purchases at home later in the evening. Optimize for mobile impressions during business hours and desktop conversions later in the evening. Despite your months of preparation, also Be available and willing to adjust in real-time because every eCommerce holiday shopping season is different. Finally, Cyber Monday this year will be the latest in the calendar year it can be, so expect customers to procrastinate, minimizing the amount of time your company will have to deliver products.
Gavin Jocius – EVP eCommerce
Circle Graphics
During the Black Friday season, retailers can greatly benefit from a variety of opportunities in SEO if they begin with a solid site structure foundation and positive domain authority. One specific tip to focus on is to find a search term or group of closely related search terms that have both high search demand and historically generate a Featured Snippet on Google. These Featured Snippets come in the form of paragraph snippets, lists, or tables. An important point to remember about search demand is the numbers that keyword research tools provide are usually a 12-month trailing average so the real search-demand during the Black Friday season is actually much higher than those figures suggest. Follow the best practices that are recommended to generate a Featured Snippet and supplement that effort with high quality and timely link building. Even if you do not wind up generating that coveted spot this year, you are laying the groundwork for a head start on this effort next year.
Gennady Lager – Senior Director
DealNews
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
