Black Monday Shopping & Local Search Engine Optimization

The Friday after Thanksgiving this year my sister-in-law was up early to hit a special 4am sale at Best Buy. When she got back loaded with electronics she jumped on the Internet looking for special sales at other local retailers.

If I had really been on my game I would have asked her a few months ago what she would have been searching for over the next couple of days and set up pages that were optimized for her keywords. Knowing a little bit about her Xmas present budget I think I could have made a tidy sum off of affiliate deals from her alone.

So what does this mean for a local retailer? If you really want to pull out all of the stops for days like Black Monday, Cyber Monday or whatever you want to call it here are a couple of suggestions for the SEO part of your strategy:

1. Figure out what words your customers are going to be searching for in the days after Thanksgiving. For example if you live in Pleasanton, CA they might be looking for the following:

• “Pleasanton Thanksgiving Sale”

• “Day after Thanksgiving Sale in Pleasanton”

• “Black Monday sale Pleasanton” (although I wonder how many people really have this term top of mind when searching)

• “Best Cyber Monday deals in Pleasanton, CA”

etc.

1. Several months ahead of time create pages on your website focused on these terms. Write an article about what your business is doing for Black Monday and be sure to mention sales by other stores. Make sure you mention the local big box store sales and link out to them. Use terms for these stores that you think people will use when searching so you have a good chance of showing up in Google when they search. Make sure each page that mentions another store has a very prominent promotion for your own sales to entice

2. Get some links to the pages on your site with your targeted terms.

Another strategy that could work is for mom and pops to join together to make a single site like shoppleasanton.com which would have sales info for all of the member stores. Each could link to the site from their own sites and each page on this mega site could target a different search term. The local chamber of commerce usually has a site like this already available, but they likely don’t know much about chamber of commerce sites and search engine optimization. If you want to get this strategy going for next year you may want to start talking to them now.

Happy shopping!