Submitted by Katie Hellmuth on | 0 Comments
We're helping you prep for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on your website, and the most important thing is to lay the seeds early!
Sabina wrote a great blog post about how to market your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and capitalize on each sale for future sales. This post is about how to spread your message in the search engines, aka SEO. And you definitely need to start early.
According to my brain, and confirmed by Google Trends, a tool created by Google that shows how many searches occurred for a phrase throughout the year, searches for "cyber monday" and "black friday" start in October, quickly build into a spike through November, and end December 1st. That means that the searches are going on now as I type this!
As you can see from this chart from Google Trends, interest in Cyber Monday is growing. Searches for Black Friday follow a similar growth pattern:
Your goal? You want your website included in these search results. When someone types in "cyber monday", you want Google and other search engines to serve up your website in their list of recommendations. Here's how you're going to do that:
Publish a webpage or blog post about it 3 weeks out: Google and other search engines need time to "index" the content on new web pages. They've gotten very swift at doing this, and can do it in a number of days, but you want to give them time to find yours. Remember to include "cyber monday" or "black friday" (whichever sale it is) in your title, plus other special words that you are selling, like "pink earrings" or "sexy sunglasses". People get very specific when they search online, and this is your golden opportunity to deliver your gem.
Spread the wealth, post your sale on other websites: Here at Tin Shingle, we know you need multiple angles to accomplish your goal (to get more sales). That's why we encourage our members to post their sales in our Events Calendar. You will want your sale to appear on other websites as well, such as this one. Why? You want to claim as many positions in the search engines as you can - as long as they all point back to your website for the shopping to make their purchase. If you're website isn't strong enough to claim a high ranking, a larger website might be.
Go for the "long tail": What the heck is a long tail, you ask? Sounds silly, I know. It's an industry term for "really long keyword". For example: I'm focusing on the term "cyber monday". But, you're not going rank #1 in Google, or even probably on page 3 for the term "cyber monday" alone. Competition for that term is too high - there is too much history published already. Plus, you don't want to. It's too broad. You want a focused search. A search from a person desperate to find what you sell. A "long tail" keyword is a phrase that has additional words in it, like "cyber monday chocolate sales" or "cyber monday pumpease coupon".
Let's break each of these terms down:
- "cyber monday chocolate sales": this would be typed in by a person who does not know about your company, but wants to buy chocolate on sale during Cyber Monday. Cha-ching! Enter you. In this case, enter our member Simply Sweet Arrangements, who is having such a sale! If Simply Sweet Arrangements wrote a blog post about their Cyber Monday sale, with links and pictures and other SEO goodness, they may show up in the search results for this term. They also posted their sale here on Tin Shingle. A person may see that as well, and even though they are getting Tin Shingle, they are linked to Simply Sweet Arrangements to get their chocolate fix and party favor ideas. Same goes for any blogs that include Simply Sweet Arrangements in their shopping guides.
- "cyber monday pumpease coupon": This term would be typed in by a person who knows about the company that designs stylish pumping bras. They are looking for a coupon, and they're figuring Pumpease is offering one for Cyber Monday. And they are right! Pumpease also posted their sale here on Tin Shingle. That doubles their chances of coming up in search results for that term.
Now that you have your marching orders, let's go claim some Cyber Monday and Black Friday searches! Remember to use your most special, descriptive keywords to help people find you! You may have pictures on your website, but search engines and people need to read the words describing what is there!
And, if you want to get listed in our Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping guide, or any other round ups we feature, read about our special Event Listing benefit, and get yourself a ProPreneur membership today, and get these and other business tools to help your business succeed on many levels!
