shopping cart with wrapped gifts
Insights
#POV

SEO Holiday Trends for Black Friday thru Cyber Monday

Download now

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday now behind us, it’s time for part two of the year’s most prominent retail week: trends reporting. Overall, the strongest activity we saw for SEO across the week was on Black Friday itself, where we saw revenue increase across all SEO related searches by 6% compared to 2018. In general, the trend across the board was that traffic and revenue were down over Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend (-7% year-over-year), as well as Cyber Monday itself (-2% YoY).  

Why are we seeing this downward shift?

People Still See Value in In-Store Shopping

As we recently reported, more people were actually researching online first and then going in-store to buy over the course of the week. Shoppertrak reported that stores saw a decrease in foot traffic in-store by 1.2%, but this was an increase compared to a 2.3% loss in foot traffic in 2018. People are still finding value in store shopping.

Black Friday really was “Black Friday”

Shopping itself was up in 2019, with more people shopping on Black Friday this year (93MM) vs. last year on Cyber Monday (83MM). 

Shopping Prior To Thanksgiving

As Thanksgiving fell on the last week of the month, more brands were running Pre-Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions, especially given the shorter timeframe between Thanksgiving and Christmas. As reported by BigCommerce, email marketing this year was running ads for brands prior to Thanksgiving and the Tuesday and Wednesday before the holiday showed higher spikes in Traffic and order value compared to last year.

The Amazon Factor

As reported by Amazon themselves to CNN Business, “shoppers ordered hundreds of millions of products between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.” Amazon went on to say that Cyber Monday was the biggest day in their two-decade existence. 

Key tips to keep in mind for 2020:

Research and Build New Content & Optimize for Pre-Holiday Events. As the holidays and shopping continue to be a prolonged experience, building evergreen, content rich and optimized pages for  the days leading up to Black Friday will continue to be critically important.

Optimize Amazon with SEO Best Practices. If you are a brand that is on Amazon, you should be researching and optimizing all of your assets for it. This should include product listings and your Amazon store front (if you have one), or investing in building a good store front if you don’t.

Make Sure to Use Google My Business Best Practices. People are still going in-store and while that may continue to slow down, it should not be ignored. Using online promotions or promoting in-store deals with Google Posts is a must. Accurate categorization, name, address and phone number are essential to create a frictionless experience that drives the customer to the last digital mile experience.

SEO Holiday Trends 2019

Download "SEO Holiday Trends for Black Friday thru Cyber Monday"