Keans Claremorris, an esteemed jewelry retailer, set out in 2023 to revolutionize their Black Friday campaign, shifting the spotlight to organic growth. Facing a baseline of 295,810 organic impressions and 8,397 clicks from the previous year, they aimed for a 40% boost. Our strategy? Enhance evergreen content and optimise for Black Friday keywords. The result? A significant leap in organic traffic and a stronger online presence, meeting and exceeding their ambitious targets.

Following a Black Friday in 2022 that relied heavily on ads and paid media, Keans wanted to put a larger focus on Organic traffic for 2023 – Putting less reliance on paid ads and driving engaged traffic to the website organically.

November 2022 saw the website gain 295,810 Organic Impressions and 8,397 Organic Clicks with an Average Ranking across all keywords of 35.4 (Google Search Console).

The goal was to increase overall rankings, put the Keans website at the forefront of customer searches and drive a larger percentage of the Black Friday traffic to the website organically.

Their “Black Friday” focused traffic was marginal. Throughout November 2022, Keans had 10,265 Organic Impressions and 176 Clicks for Black Friday-related keywords, receiving an average ranking of 32.8.

Their goal was to grow this significantly, with a target increase of 40% in organic clicks and impressions, growing rankings across Black Friday keywords, and driving users to the Keans Black Friday landing page.

Every year, websites create landing pages geared towards annual events.

They develop the page, make unique content, and start ranking. Then they either remove the page, or forget about it, only to develop a new page again next year.

Black Friday 2022 saw Keans create their landing page. It was indexed and ranking and drove a small bit of organic traffic. So why would they start from scratch next year?

Evergreen content is just that – Ever Green. Black Friday is not going to change year over year. So maintain the same page every year, grow on last year’s rankings, and update content unique to that year.

The results lead to a page that search engines are familiar with. They have already indexed and ranked it, new crawls display that the page is being updated with fresh, relevant information. So when the time rolls around, theoretically, you should be ranking higher than competing, new pages.

Following Black Friday 2022 we removed the page from the website’s navigation, simply to stop users from accessing the page through the website. But we did not un-publish it, de-index it, or delete it.

We updated the content to explain that the sale is over but to check back in next year for the Black Friday 2023 sale. Already focusing on content and keywords surrounding 2023. We utilised a newsletter sign-up on the page in an effort to have any potential users interact and engage with the page to offset any potential bounce / exit rates.

Early in 2023 we updated the content to begin talking about Black Friday 2023. We went into detail on “When is Black Friday 2023”, “When will the Black Friday Sale Start”, “What Brands are included”. We identified common questions surrounding the event and used the landing page to target those questions.

We created internal links and made the page accessible through navigation. A link in the Footer ensured ease of access for both users and search engines.

The landing page was fully optimised using SEO best practices and it was ready for the 2023 season.

The main challenge to this campaign was the sheer popularity of Black Friday. Every retailer, blog, review site and news outlet is targeting this – The largest eCommerce event of the year. All of our competitors are targeting this event, and usually only the largest retailers and publications have any hope of achieving any success organically.

The challenge was being heard among the sea of eCommerce giants such as Amazon, Currys, Harvey Norman, Tesco, Boots and publications such as The Independent, RTE, BBC and more.

Keans is a local retailer from Claremorris, Co. Mayo. Attempting to steal organic traffic away from our competitors for the largest eCommerce event of the year was a modern-day David Vs Goliath.

Late October / Early November, Keans captured the Featured Snippet result for “Black Friday 2023”. With over 60,000 searches in October alone, Keans of Claremorris was front and centre in Position Zero thanks to our informative on-page content.

With such a large volume of clicks coming in, other Black Friday related keywords shot up in their rankings and drove significant volumes of engaged traffic to the website.

Between October 1st & November 30th, 2022, Keans average ranking for “Black Friday” keywords was 33.9. For the same period in 2023, it was 12.6.

Organic impressions as a whole for those two months increased by 248%. Organic clicks increased by 86% YoY.

For those Black Friday keywords we sought after, to drive traffic to their key landing page and take the dependence off of paid media for the Black Friday campaign, Organic Impressions increased by 3,887%, and organic clicks for Black Friday keywords increased by 3,323%, with website revenue increasing by 67% YoY for November.

We held a Featured Snippet for the most searched Black Friday keyword and held off eCommerce giants as Keans was put on the map and maintained page 1 rankings throughout October and November, during the peak retail event of the year.

There’s a lot of talk about AI and the change in our industry. How companies need to adapt or be left behind. There are constant articles and guides about how to grow SEO, “trends to look out for”, how to stand out from the crowd.

But at the end of the day, simple SEO best practices, content and understanding user intent will always be favoured by search engines.

Nothing in this campaign was groundbreaking. We didn’t use Chat GPT, we didn’t pay thousands for guest posting or backlinks. We simply went back to basics, implementing simple content structures, internal linking, forecasting trends and matching content to popular consumer queries and the results speak for themselves.

We blew last years Black Friday results away, dominated page one for multiple high-competition keywords, and turned Organic from being the forgotten child last year, to the golden child in 2023, driving the best performance for the website, outgrowing Paid Search & Paid Social and achieving Kean’s goal of being less reliant on those paid channels.