The company
Grosbill is an online retailer. Black Friday is the kind of moment that can make or break a period for a retailer, and it is also when every competitor is bidding and publishing at once.
The need
Most retailers treat Black Friday as a promotional event and start working on it a few weeks before. By then it is too late for SEO, and the paid campaigns land on pages that were never designed for the occasion.
The goal was to use one set of pages to win on both channels.
The approach
We created dedicated xxx-black-friday pages, for products and for categories, several months in advance. That lead time is the part most teams skip. A page that only goes live in November has no time to be crawled, indexed and to earn its position before the peak.
Each page was optimized for SEO, so it could capture searches that combine a product or category with Black Friday. We then built ad versions of these pages, so paid traffic landed on a page made for it instead of a generic listing.
One idea, two uses: the work on the pages served organic search and paid campaigns at the same time.
The results
Over the period, revenue from ads was multiplied by 7 and revenue from SEO by 4.
On the SEO side, 47% of the revenue came from these Black Friday pages alone.
What to take from it
Seasonal peaks are won before they start. List the products and categories that matter, publish their seasonal pages months ahead, and make them work for ads as well as search. If you want to do this at scale, the chapter on pushing to production and managing indexing covers the part that takes time.
