Hey, Scott. Austin here.

I'm recording this episode on Black Friday 2024, so I thought what I would do is I look at the internet to see what I could see about Black Friday deals online, and then see if we can make any learnings from looking at a whole bunch of them in aggregate. Now I'm going to be recording my screen.

So for those in the audio version of this, there'll be a link in the show notes to the video version where you can follow along, but if you're on the audio only version. I'll try to explain what I see so you can follow along also. So the way I got started is I just did a internet search for best gifts for holiday 2024, and I found an article from Good Housekeeping with 28 different products they're recommending.

And I use those 28 products if they were a generic term, not a brand specific term. And I use the generic terms, and I did an internet search for, you know, that term with Black Friday before it or FCM before it and then after its sale or deal.

So we'll just go through each of those search queries and look and see what we can find.

So as I started searching for different keyword phrases to see what the results were on Google, I wanted to get a feel for. You know how tail my queries were. So I went into a Google ad planner and just set the dates for, last November. And I see it's changed here, so I'll try to update it again for last November.

And last December

And what I did like this one here is, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday insulated stainless steel water bottle sale. And I tried different combinations of things. And what I realized is a lot of my queries were really tail and didn't show any, search volume. Well, there's probably a little bit when it's very small.

Google won't show that to you. So then I wanted to look and see, you know, if queries a little higher up, a little less tail were searched on. So there were a couple that I was looking at here, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday travel backpack deals. There was another one for a travel jewelry case or something. So I just tried a generic term or a more generic term like black Friday luggage deals, and started seeing more query volume when I did that.

And in looking at all this and playing with some some things, one of the things I noticed is that deals gets more search volume than sale, and Black Friday gets more search volume than FCM or Cyber Monday, although there can be query volumes on all of them. So just keep that in mind as you think about optimizing your campaigns, what words you're going to use are going to be important part of that.

So let's go into our first query, which I put in BCM rechargeable hand warmer deals. And when I go through each of these pages and the search results, you know we're not going to dig into what Amazon, Target and Walmart are doing who pop to the top a lot in the search results. We're going to be looking for smaller brands that, you know, are more likely to be Shopify stores and see what they're doing and see how they're ranking in this.

And what you're going to see in a lot of them. Also is a lot of blog type content or magazine type content is popping up because they're building list, you know, best gifts for, you know, mom, best gifts for dad kind of list stuff that they do.

So while we might note those, we're not going to dig into what they're doing on the magazines and the media side of things or in the National, you know, brick and mortar retail retailers.

We're going to skip over what they're doing and look at what the smaller stores are doing now in this search term here. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Rechargeable Hand warmer deals. Interestingly, I had this happen across my experience. I think it's a pretty bad thing that Google's doing from a relevance standpoint. So what Google did and I had to play this a little bit to figure it out is I've got this, you know, under underneath the, navigation of all shopping images, forums and that kind of stuff on Google.

And before the sponsored links, I get this green band which says shop deals and it says shop all deal categories. And I click on it and it takes me to their Google Shopping deals page, which the only thing relevant about it to what I'm doing in my search query is the word deal. Because now I give a very tail query, rechargeable hand warmer.

And that's not what I see when I go to the deals thing. So I'm very surprised that Google's doing something like this, which is basically marketing their own deals. Portal inside of Google Shopping without the relevant, relevant, you know, without the relevant results of what I was looking for. So, you know, pretty bad on their part. If I take away the word deals from my search query, what I noticed is that didn't show up.

So it's only when I put in the word deals that they use that one word and ignored the rest of my query to show their own internal promotion, their, And then there's always a mix on our keyword phrases, whether Google is showing the shopping ads, which are not going to be, you know, marketed to Black Friday because they're just looking at the products at that level.

There's no feed or no control that we have over that, that shopping feed from Shopify into Google shopping. And sometimes they'll show the shopping ads and other times they'll show the keyword ads. And we'll look at those in this case here, they're showing the shopping ads. So nothing in the content says Black Friday or deal at all, because it's just a product based promotions.

And then, you know, organic results. You know, Amazon is the first two results. And then there's a couple of magazine blog type places. And I'm scrolling down to see if I see any,

other that's TikTok. Oh, there we go. Oreo Canada or oh, that's that's the name of the brand or. Oh, he did hand warmer 14 hours of warmth.

And I click on their product listing and it takes you to a product. It is in a Shopify store. There's nothing on this page that is Black Friday, although in their, header they have Black Friday sale. But on this page here, I don't know if it's part of the sale or not. So this is just basically a product listing that was not optimized for Black Friday.

That showed up. And you know, what's happening here is I'm doing a search for a really, tail query, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, rechargeable hand warmer deals. So it'd be very rare, you know, very unlikely that someone's going to optimize for that keyword phrase. But if someone did, it would be very easy for them to win in that space because there's not a lot of competition because it is such a tail word.

So let's, move on from that query. And the next one is Black Friday, Cyber Monday travel backpack deals. So this is a little less tail, than the first one. And it's got the sponsored shopping ads up there. So none of those are Black Friday relevant. And then it's also got, Google ads. So it's showing both types of ads up there.

And the two paid ads it's showing. One is winter sale and the other is Black Friday sale. So those brands are optimizing for the Black Friday cyber Monday keywords in there. And if we look at Osprey, which is one of them, what they're doing in that ad is they take me to their travel and like, so they're not on Shopify, they're on another e-commerce platform.

They're taking me to Osprey Comm for slash travel for slash luggage, which is a collection page. And on that collection page, I see nothing about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, which is interesting. So the keyword phrase, remember was Black Friday, Cyber Monday travel backpack deals. They did an ad winter sale up to 40% off is the title of their ad.

I click on that and I see nothing. Nothing about a sale. Even the prices aren't like crossed out and showing a sale price or anything, so they're even paying for an ad for the phrase they're putting sale in their ad and not following up on that. Oh, nope. Oh god, that sucks. So in their header above their header and what I would call the top bar, they've got a scroll link, text, you know, promotion, let's call it.

One of them is Discover the Perfect Present shopper holiday gift guide. And the other one was something. And now it's not going, oh, there it goes. Up to 40% off. Plus free shipping happening now. Shop our winter sale. So I have to notice that way up there, which I didn't. I was like so ignoring that I went I went to the content of the page below the header and didn't see anything about sale.

So that's really, you know, and let's actually see what happens when I click on that sale promotion in the top bar. What it takes me to shop our winter sale. I click on that and it took me to a sale page, which just a sale. Nothing about a start time, nothing about an end time. They've got a header which makes me think, you know, winter because there's people hiking outdoors because these are travel backpacks in the snow.

So it's kind of relevant that way. But basically this is their sale collection. But they don't talk about the specifics of the sale. Like when it starts, when it ends, what I have to to qualify. There's no sense of urgency with the ending type of stuff, but I do see sale prices. So at the very least their ad could have come to this page, which they're promoting in their top bar anyway, so pretty poor job on their part in setting up their ad campaign.

Now, the other ad that showed up was by Monos, and I'm going to click on that and they take me to a page. I'm noticing this this year that, I don't know if it happened before and I just was never noticed it, but people are very into the color black on Black Friday. So here what I've got is this full page image.

This is Black Friday, our biggest sale of the year, black Friday, up to 40% off. Black Friday use code Black Friday. And so black and white, you know, luggage photo in the background. So it's very relevant to Black Friday. It's just so dominating with this black thing that's going on. And I think their their brand looks like it's black and white anyways.

Predominantly colors. But let's go back to see. So those are the two paid ads. Let's see what happens in the first organic listing. And it's by G tech. And what I see is FCM deal. And I did search for the keyword phrase BCM, not Black Friday. In this query. So they just happened in the next one down.

The organic one is also a BFC. In their title. So let's go into this one. This is looks like a Shopify, site. Because it's for slash collections for slash Bfsi deal. All right. So the the collection is named FCM deal. And that's the only thing in the title says FCM deal. But they've got all the products in this collection.

That is what's getting it. So they're getting relevance for the keyword phrase because of the collection title of Bfsi and deal. Right. And then they're getting relevance for the product that I was looking for, which I think was travel Backpack here because their products are relevant to that here. I can see a, a backpack,

and different types of luggage and stuff like that.

So the product and there's another backpack. There's another backpack. I don't see the word travel yet, but so there collection title gets some relevance for FCM deal. And then their products get them relevance for the product that I'm looking for. So they don't have you know, I'm not landing on a specific page for just travel backpacks, but they're selling bags and cases and gear, you know, holders.

So they're they're normal, you know, sale page. Their FCM deal page is relevant for that. And that actually looks like a you know, I know if they did that in or not, but it's working quite well for them because they're the number one organic listing for that keyword phrase. So now let's go back to the search results and look at, the next cabin zero and same thing.

This is a collection in Shopify. And the could well the handle is FCM 15th November 2024. I would recommend they don't put the date on that. I would keep the same FCM collection throughout the year. So, you know, let's just assume for a second they created this on the 15th of November in 2024, and it got to number two in the organic search results, which is fabulous.

But if they leave the same page up every year, maybe they get p number one next time. And once again, I got this big banner, with this black thing taken up, most of the page, but not all of it. And, you know, Black Friday sale with a lot of black in it. Like, people are very focused on the black.

There's not a lot of holiday in these, you know, it used to be you'd see Christmas trees or, you know, families opening presents. A lot of it's just black,

this is a collection page on Shopify. So I so I can see a couple of products on the page and I scroll and interestingly here, so they've got all these products that are on sale 50% off, 40% off.

And I can see what percent off each of them is. But the first row of four are all sold out. The second row for one is sold out. So in them being sold out shows that they're popular. They're scarcity. That's good. But you know, showing five of the first eight things being sold out. Not the best of things.

If I was them, I would, you know, move the sold outs down on the page, and you can do that. I think the free Shopify, search filter discovery app will move your, sold out once to the bottom of the page. Other filter apps do that. Also, I think the Shopify free one does that also.

But to me, it's not a great experience when I get to this page, you know, and the first four things show is sold out.

One way of looking at that is it shows how popular your products are. And I've talked to a lot of store owners and like don't I want to show. So I literally have this conversation this week with a client. Don't I want to show my sold out products on my page to show up popular? My products are.

that's one way to look at it.

The other way to look at it is I'm a customer. I come to this page and I see this fabulous backpack. I want that and then I see it sold out. Now I'm upset, I'm disappointed, I'm sad. Whatever. You know, adjectives you want to use, am I going to keep shopping for the second best item, or am I now going to leave because I can't get the best item?

I actually think, and I haven't done any studies on this, but I actually think it's not good to show that your best products are sold out, because that just encourages people not to buy your second best products. Now that that's different than strategies, I've seen some stores do. They show one product is sold out, you know, randomly, and I've seen stores that do that, you know, literally with code, they just randomly pick a product and make it sold out on a collection page to create a sense of urgency that things could sell at any time.

That's a different strategy, I think, than coming to your sale and going, yeah, if you'd been here yesterday or early enough this morning, you could have gotten the sold out product. But, you know, you suck. You don't get it. Therefore you get the second best. I, I would not do it that way. But that said, this page is nice.

It's a collection page once again,

showing, you know, it's Black Friday focused. It doesn't show me, though, what the, dates of the campaign are. So they're not yet creating an urgent urgency for me. Is this only today, it being Black Friday right now, or is this going to be good till Monday? Is it? You know, what is that, urgency or time frame that I have for this, but in general, not a bad page.

So let's move on to our next search term, which is Black Friday ice cream maker deals. So in this case I search for Black Friday. Not back. And the first thing I get in Google is I get their sponsored links. They got a whole bunch of product showing, and then I see, Home Depot, then they've got another promotion where they look at brands, and then I see Amazon, Tom's Guide and Gadget, Amazon, Sirius Eats, which is more like a blog magazine.

9 to 5 toys, blog magazine. Yeah. Pen life and is a, newspaper. So nothing on the first page is, you know, a smaller store brand, making it to that top. And that just could be a function of the product that we're talking about. Ice cream maker

to move on to the next one. Black Friday digital picture frame deals once again searching for the term Black Friday.

First thing I see is the, shopping ads. Then I see Amazon Reddit, Amazon Aura frames or frames is a manufacturer of these. So it is taking me to the home page of or a frame so they don't have a page on their site optimized for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Now, I do see that they have a Black Friday deal, save $40 or promoting that on their homepage.

If I click on that, it takes me to.

A product page, I think. Yeah, it's a product page, but nothing about it says Black Friday, Cyber Monday, although I can see there's a $40 off. But it doesn't tell me that it's for Black Friday. Cyber Monday doesn't tell me when the sale ends kind of thing. So looks like, aura, which is, you know, I from what I can see, the top, brand for digital picture frames did nothing to optimize for that term.

And they showed up in the organic search results because, they're known for the digital picture frame part of it. And then the rest of the search results are either, you know, blogs, papers, magazines or big stores. So let's move on to the next one.

And what we're doing here is Black Friday insulated stainless steel water bottle deals.

And I see the sponsored, you know, shopping sponsored links here then Amazon, target, NBC news, Good Housekeeping,

24 bottles. There we go. There's a brand. Let's click on that one. We're going to a collections page. This is Shopify store and the collection name is Black Friday. So once again they've got an collection with the collection optimized for Black Friday or Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

You know, if I was them, I'd make sure it is Black Friday and somewhere, you know, have Beekman at all. So in Cyber Monday. So you, you try to hit all the keywords, or, you know, be dressed in to test it out. If you had a Black Friday page and a bookmark page, which one ranks higher kind of thing.

So once again, I'm looking at a, banner image. Now this banner, if I'm on desktop, this banner image takes the whole desktop, right? So I can't see any products down below it because the height of the banner so big and I've got a, in the foreground, a water bottle, which actually looks kind of scratchy to me, but I just think it's the art on the bottle, but it looks kind of crappy because I think it's scratch.

Right? And it's a black bottle, and it's held by a woman who's fuzzy in the background, and she's got black nails and a black sweater on. So once again, and a lot of black eyeshadow. So very heavy in the the black theming of this. It's not holiday, it's not gift giving. It's just black. I don't know why brands are doing that

on this Black Friday collection page it says Choose your Heroes Black Friday.

You're still in time for design. I really don't understand that. It's probably part of their brand. Maybe I'm designing my own water bottle. I don't know that here. And then there's a discover button, which keeps you on the same page, which is kind of weird. You know, if I was had shorten this banner up and start showing the products more quickly.

But I would also, you know, they're not talking about, you know, the size of the deal. It looks like a it looks like a straight 20% off on everything where they could just say that in the header. Right. And you know, if 20% off is their best deal of the year, they should also say that, you know, our best deal of the year, 20% off store wide or whatever.

And talk about the dates from Friday to Monday, you know, or from, you know, November 12th to November 28th, whatever the dates are, create that sense of urgency, you know, 12 hours remaining today, only, no one yet has created that sense of urgency that I'm remembering and what we've looked at so far. But it's just a collection page and I can see lots and lots of products.

20% off. So not bad. Not bad at all.

Let's see if there's anything else in that search query.

It is sponsored ad from, Hydro Flask, 40% off travel tumblers.

I land on a shopping page for bottles and drinkware. It mentions nothing about a deal special, a sale. I can see sale prices, but it's not mentioning a sale. So pretty poorly done there, especially for a paid ad.

So now we're going to move on to the next keyword phrase, which is Black Friday Gold initial necklace deals. And we've got the Google Shopping ads at the top. And the first organic link is for Baublebar, which is baublebar.com. I'm going to click on that.

it's a brand. It takes me straight to a product page for the initial necklace.

So this site won organically because of the keyword phrase for the product called initial necklace, because I don't see anything on this page about. And whenever I say on this page, I mean below the header, right? I don't see anything on this product page about,

a sale, right? I don't even see this product being on sale now.

They do have they've got the top bar. I can't stand when brands do this. So there's four promotions in the top bar. Right. And so now it's on free shipping on order 75 plus. So now I'm waiting. Was there a black. Oh here we go. Black Friday starts now 30% off sitewide and 20% off custom discount auto applied.

So they say that in the top bar, one fourth of the time I'm on a product page where they don't mention it anywhere but in that top bar promotion. But they're showing it one fourth of the time. So if you're going to show your promotion in the top bar only, don't show it with three other promotions. Just show that one that is, you know, remember this is Black Friday.

This is the as relevant as it gets for that promotion. You know their free shipping promo can wait until after Black Friday is over.

There's still time to get custom with delivery by 1219. Not as important as it's Black Friday. Here's our best, you know, sale of the year. It's only good for the next 12 hours, whatever that timeframe is.

So, you know, they did great in getting the number one organic search result for this query. But I think they did it by lock and not by doing anything. Well. And what they were doing.

So let's go back to the search results. The, the next, organic search result is Oak and Luna. So we'll see what that looks like.

Now, this one's taken me to a collection page. Looks like a, BigCommerce store. And the collection is named Black Friday. So, you know, I can see some necklaces that kind of apply to what I'm talking about here. The, you know, the query of the initials and gold, but it's not just that content. So, you know, it's more generic, relevance that they're matching with, but that means this one collection page will be relevant in a number of similar but also a little bit different queries.

Right? So if people search for silver script necklaces instead of gold or things like that, this page would still be relevant for them. But it's that at the collection level, having Black Friday as the collection name.

Go back to the search result and we'll look at one more. And that is Brooke and York. So interesting enough in this query here, the first three organic results are not the national retailers or Amazon right.

There's no Walmart target. Amazon's showing up in the first three I actually I'm scrolling down now. They don't show up at all which is just amazing to me. Oh and there's Amazon way down at the bottom of the page. So I don't know what it is about this query that the, the smaller brands are doing well, but kudos to them.

So Brooke in York they have a Black Friday jewelries deal collection. The collection handle is Black Friday deals and it is a collection. So it's a Shopify store.

And they're just a collection right now. Once again, they're not telling me any dates now in their top bar. Black Friday sale 15% off your order and free shipping code one day auto applied at checkout.

So they're not showing me the sale price as I'm shopping because they're doing an automatic discount. I've got to assume, because the code is one day that it's only good for today. But they're they're not explicitly telling me that. But they do say our best sale is here. Three, two. Oh, there we go. Three, three days, six hours, eight minutes.

Left shop now. So I guess it's good till Cyber Monday, but the code is one day, so, you know, those two don't sync up with one another.

you know, not poorly done, but also not the most elegant, implementation. And one of the things is, and this is hard, right? Is a lot of us are putting our promotions in our header because that's seen on every page.

And that's that's totally great, right. But if you have a Black Friday specific collection, which is looking like is a best practice here, right? I would definitely be thinking about doing that if I was managing a store right now.

But if you're gonna have a Black Friday specific collection, I would also put more details in that collection description.

So it shows up in the, in the the meat of the page, not in the header that a lot of people like me just ignore and go straight to the meat of the page.

All right. We're gonna move on to our next search query, which is Black Friday wearable neck fan deals.

I've got the typical, shopping ads at the top.

Then there's Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, the exact opposite of what you saw with the the gold necklace, right. This is totally owned by the big brands. Positive promotions.

Real simple. My my cooling store looks like the first smaller brand. I don't know what platform this is on. It's not Shopify or BigCommerce. It's a really dated looking site, but we are on a Taurus wearable neck fans and nothing in the, you know, the meat of the page is about the sale.

I do see. So, well, here we go. Shop early Black Friday sale. Today's Black Friday, so I would have assumed their shop early. Black Friday sale was for Thursday or during the week, but on Friday you would change that to say, you know, shop our black Friday. You know, longer early. It's now Black Friday. All right. So they're probably not keeping up with their on store merchandizing because they're, you know, off for the weekend taking a extended vacation or something.

So I think it's pretty poorly done.

We're gonna move on to our next, query, which is Black Friday travel jewelry case deals. Starts off as always, with the Google Shopping ads, because Google is really good at knowing what's a shopping query and what's not. And then we see, Amazon and then there's a store named Gem true.

Let's look at them. Stupid pop up, email collector that every brand does. The second I show up on a site like the stores. Why do you pop up email collection the second I see your store for the first time ever? You know, I don't even get to see what the banner image said. And the email collector shows up.

It's just so poorly done. You know, I usually recommend that that brands, you know, do that on their second page. You and you know, once again, I'll, I'll argue with store owners about that and they'll say, oh, but I'm going to lose so many email collections on people on the first page. I'm like, do you have any data that shows that people are signing up before they even look at your page and look at your site?

Because I really doubt that that's what's happening. But here we are on a collection page in a Shopify store. The collections name is Black Friday offers. And once again, I got a banner. It's all about black and how it does, you know, Black Friday, up to 50% off. So let's talk about the deal also. But there's nothing in that imagery about holidays, about gift giving.

It's just all black.

And if it's a trend or people are lazier, I don't know what's going on there.

does not say when it ends, although there's a little bit of text here. But hurry, these deals won't last long. Shop now and take advantage of our Black Friday savings before they're gone. So it's got that trying to create a sense of urgency copy, but it doesn't tell me when that is right to have to do that today.

Do I have over the weekend to think about this? Please help me out.

And they're not they're not helping their customers. They're.

Let's look, Mark Ingram is the next one here in the organic results. We'll look at that one.

Once again, I got an email that pops up. Now, I hadn't mentioned that before because I'd actually been through a lot of these stores before I walk through them with you. So I had already closed out all those email pop ups, but it's kind of ubiquitous, and there were some stores I would get two pop ups in the first second that I was there.

Like, they've got two apps or whatever, and both have pop ups turned on and it's just it's just crazy. Like brands, you are way, way too crazy with your email pop up collection, especially on Black Friday. Right? Maybe you're this aggressive in August where you're trying to collect email addresses to get ready for promoting your Black Friday sale come November.

But when it's, you know, when it's go time here, don't get in the way of your customer finding your great deals. They don't need to see your 10% off coupon when you're given 20% off and the two can't be combined, you're just confusing your customers. Please stop doing that. All right, so I land on a,

personalized travel bags page, jewelry and watch stores.

So this is not optimized for it's a collection page on a non Shopify platform. And it's not optimized for Black Friday. But I do see on the product listing in the collection page it says Black Friday deal extra 30% off clearance prices is marked so and limited time offer. So they're trying to let me know that this is for sale right now.

And that's the best one I've seen so far of that at the product listing level.

And then they've got promotion at top order today to get gifts in time for Christmas. I don't think anybody's worried about that on Black Friday. They're worried about that come December 12th or so.

Yeah. So not the best experience here. Also, let's move on to our next query, which is Black Friday fleece throw blanket deals.

Interesting enough, I do not have any ads on this page at the top in Google. The first thing is Amazon. Then there's popular products, which then shows the, shopping links, Walmart, Berkshire Blanket and Home Company. Let's click on that one.

And this is a Shopify store. We are landing on a collection page named Black Friday Sale, up to 40% off sitewide.

And it shows, you know, a bunch of sheets and fleeces and stuff like that. So it's relevant now. It once again, it doesn't give me any indication of when the sale is over. That's the biggest fault I've seen so far, is people not telling you how much time you have to make this decision, you know? So on Black Friday, you know, like a lot of us, I got up this morning and ordered the things I knew I was going to order ahead of time.

But I knew what I wanted to order. And what you have to think about here is there are a lot of people who just, you know, they don't know what they're gonna order yet. They want to do the deals. Are you want to let them know how much time they have to consider your deal? Because maybe looking at this and three other things for the person thinking about getting the gift for and you're not creating that, you're not letting them know how much time they have to create that sense of urgency.

So another store they might be assuming, oh, I got until, you know, next week to to make this decision. But on your store they may have less time. So I would definitely recommend letting people know how long the deal is for always showing that, you know, so we'll do that with a countdown clock. Others just say it right.

And this one here. Yeah, this one just says Black Friday sale, not by FCM. So, you know, that makes me think it's just today. But, you know, most people's Black Friday sales are two weeks long now, so I just don't know.

Oh, up the top it does say today on or it's a Buy more. Save More.

So that's an additional sale on top of the sale. And that's just confusing right. They probably think they're helping people. But when I look at that I'm like, I don't get it right.

So let's see if there's another the target on this search results scrolling down Home Depot Macy's, Home Depot, JCPenney, Etsy. Yes. Only one smaller brand on that search result.

And we are in very tail queries here, right. So I'm being very, you know, picky on the results, but you know, very few brands are going to be optimizing for some of the terms that I'm talking about here.

But the next one, I would actually suspect that there should be some companies optimizing for this one. And that is Black Friday Coffee Club subscription deals, because I think coffee clubs could be an interesting gift, you know, give to mom.

She can remember you all year long as she gets new coffee every month or something like that. So the first thing I see is the Google Shopping ads. Then there's vice, CNet, Atlas Coffee Club, there's our first brand Black Friday sale is the title. I go to the, page. It is a collection page for coffee subscription service.

And they've. So that's the Handless coffee subscription service in the URL. But the collection title says Black Friday sale. Now, my guess is what they're doing is they're taking their normal page for this, subscription. And they're just changing the title for Black Friday. I wouldn't go to the next step beyond that. And actually make the exact same page.

If they want to make it the exact same page, but have its handle be Black Friday sale or Black Friday coffee subscription deal or whatever. So that it ranks even higher because in the search results, I had to scroll quite a bit for getting before I got to this page, in the search results. And that's probably because they didn't change that title until very recently because it's their normally use page.

So it hasn't done enough time to get, you know, indexed inside of Google.

it does tell me black Friday sale. Get your first bag free personalized your preferences. Get started. I click on that button. It takes me farther down. It takes me half a click on the on the mouse wheel down. I don't know why the second brand I've seen do that.

Black Friday sale, first bag, free each box. Yeah, it's just a hard page because the subscription is hard, right? You got multiple choices. You have to make. Which, you know, can be a challenge. You know, it's a complex subscription. You know, I don't know how to make that easier. That's just a hard thing. They've got to think about.

And now I've got this thing down at the bottom. So saving for your deal? Eight minutes and 20s. You know, it's one of those, you know, artificial create senses of urgency B.S. that a lot of stores do. But here I am. It's a Black Friday. Why? Why do you give me eight minutes to make a decision? And my guess is it's it it doesn't affect it on Black Friday because the Black Friday deal is probably better.

But I don't know. Right. And that's, you know, because they're using the same page they use most of the year. And they didn't optimize a separate one for Black Friday. I'm getting that other urgency creation tool they've got on their their page. That is probably inappropriate today. And also, you know, on this page here

what they should be merchandizing is how this makes a great gift.

But they're not. And nobody's done that yet. Right on. Any of the things we've seen is they're just showing their products. You know what we've landed on so far? Most of the time it's been a product page with nothing special but Black Friday, or a collection page that says Black Friday with nothing special about it. You know, the content about the deal and things like that.

Nobody's merchandizing really. Well, nobody's talking about how this is a great gift, and this would be a great one here if they had a separate page just for Black Friday coffee subscription, they could talk about how that coffee subscription makes a great gift for the coffee lover in your life kind of thing. None of that merchandizing happening here or anywhere else.

What have been so far? Going back to the search results page,

no. No other brands on this page.

Atlas shows up three different ways on this page, interestingly enough. Oh, Nomad Coffee Club. Let's see, one last one is the last, link on the page. Once again, super black, banner ad. It's just everybody's doing that.

It's crazy. It to me, it just there's no festivity. This to this. Right. It's the kickoff to the holiday season. Everybody supposed to be thinking about gift giving, sharing time with their friends and family and their loved ones. Nobody. Not one of the pages we've been on has given me that tone yet, right? It doesn't have to be a Christmas tree because it's just trees, you know, aligned to one religion, I get that, but you can show human beings getting together during the holidays.

Well, actually there was one, the the luggage one. There was two people walking across snow together. Right.

But everybody else is just doing these black banner images with just Texas Black Friday on the,

lazy and uninspiring. Right. That's the part about it that I don't like it just it's not setting the right tone for me. So the next one, Black Friday smiley face slipper, deals.

The first link Amazon not shopping ads, then the shopping ads pop up,

then Yahoo, then Walmart. More product listings and then, oh, smile to get smiley socks free. So I go to oh takes you to the homepage. So these guys rank because they probably. Yeah they have smiley face slippers on their homepage basically. I guess that's what they sell was just smiley face slippers.

So they didn't do anything in their pages to optimize for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. They're just ranking because they sell smiley face slippers. So and I don't even oh, Christmas sale get smiley face socks for free and it's not even clickable. So one little promotion on their whole page about it. So super poorly done.

And you know, I realized I have been going through this and I didn't know what it was going to be. Right. I didn't know how inspired and impressed I was going to be about these results or how disappointed I was going to be. And I so far I've been consistently disappointed. Now, some of that is because I am searching on super tail queries.

I get that. But the other part of it is I think people just aren't doing that good of a job and want to look at it. Smaller brands, right? We're not looking at the you know Amazon's and Walmart's and Target's and see what they're doing. A lot of these smaller brands are doing such a poor job about preparing for their Black Friday, promotions and promoting them well on their site.

When people get their and, you know, optimizing their site so that people find it, whether it's through ads or through organic search, when they're searching for things. So let's move on to the next query, which is Black Friday cubic zirconia tennis bracelet deals. It's a common product in the jewelry space, so I would think we should see some better stuff.

Let's see. We got the, shopping ads showing up at the top from Google, then Amazon, and then vertical. Let's see what that is. It's a Shopify store and their collection is bracelets, tennis bracelets, jewelry. Email pop up as soon as I get there. So this page is not optimized for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But it is just for it is a cubic zirconia tennis bracelet.

So they're getting relevant because of the product query that we did not for the Black Friday sale that we did, even though they do have a Black Friday sale. Banner image, it looks like it's across their entire, site. So it's more in the header than than the collection banner, but usually enough that image is pure image, right?

So none of the text that shows up in it is going to help me from an SEO standpoint, or help them from an SEO standpoint. And you know, interesting thing here is

I look at that banner image which has a black background. Surprise, surprise.

You know, we're given jewelry and they can even, like, make it about gift giving.

It's just crazy. But it's sale 40% off, over $100. Full price items use

code black for zero. So black 40, right, 30% off full price items. So. And then use a different code for those. So they have two different codes. The customer is supposed to figure out and use based on if the product is over $100 in its price or not.

So that's just crazy. Crazy to expect your customers to understand the difference of those things and figure those things out. And what if I want to buy an $80 product at $120 product? I'm only going to get a sale offer on one of them. So I got to check out twice with two different codes, right? Can you make it any harder for your customers?

Wow, I'm starting to get pissy here and I, jcpenney's the next organic listing. Lots and lots of products shown up on this page because the nature of the query

and I want to see if there's anything farther down. Nordstrom, Macy's, Walmart. Tov essentials. So I don't know what Tov essentials is.

That small brand will check them out. So we're going straight to a product. 14 karat gold cubic zirconia tennis bracelet. So once again this is not optimized for Black Friday. This page, they just happened to be relevant because of the nature of the, product query in that that search query we're looking for, and what's again, they got a Black Friday is ending soon.

Don't sleep on it. Top bar element, but it just scrolled away on me. But it didn't tell me when Black Friday and Black Friday sale up to 50% off. So they had these different Black Friday things scrolling through, but it doesn't tell me when it ends. Just poorly, poorly done.

All right, that's enough for that query.

We got two more to go, or it looks like one more to go. Black Friday retro oval sunglasses deals. Now, let me take a step back. I've been saying these retail queries. Right. Which is true, but also remember that Good Housekeeping listed these 28 products as the best gifts this year. And I'm sure that's not editorially accurate at all.

I'm sure they were paid to put those products on that page or had some sort of, you know, influence driving those decisions. Right. But if you were to see Good Housekeeping or someone else do a list and you have those products, the, you know, the savvy brands are going to jump on that and optimize a page for that as quickly as they can, because people are more likely to search for those teal queries then other more tail queries.

Right? Because now someone's saying, hey, there's going to be pop in. It said, you know, these are 28 most popular things this year. So, you know, if you see something like that happen in your space, you might want to jump on it and optimize for that query in case, you know, that article does create some interest. So here we are on Black Friday.

Retro oval sunglasses deals Amazon shows I don't know how this happens. Is happened a lot of times where the shopping listings show up underneath the Amazon and an Amazon doesn't say sponsored. So it's an organic listing. I don't know how Amazon gets above Google Shopping ads, but they do a lot. So Amazon's above the Google Shopping ads and they're below it.

And then Walmart and then giant vintage eyewear. Let's see what that is. That is a Shopify store. And they are it's a collection page for oval sunglasses. So once again, you know they're relevant for the product part of the query, not for the Black Friday sale. Part of the query.

Scrolling down the search results more Amazon again, more product listings everywhere from Google Shopping. Then there's gap, Reddit, American Eagle, pure. Wow. I don't know what that one is. Oh, it's a blog promoting Amazon links. So not a lot. There.

that is my last one. So.

My summary is I was pretty disappointed across the board.

I don't think once I said, oh that's awesome, right. There are a couple things that were okay, but most of them were horrible, right? Most people were not optimizing around Black Friday. And the ones it did right. What does work well is having a collection that says Black Friday and it and I would do Black Friday, BK you know, FCM Cyber Monday.

I do all three of them. Right. And you might even have that collection have everything be in it. So it's as relevant for as many of your products as possible kind of thing. Or maybe everything that's on sale shows up there, how however you want to do that. But I think the brands that were showing up in organic search that, you know, were relevant were the ones that were doing at the collection level, not at the product level.

Right. When people did it, the product level, they were showing up because the product was relevant to the search query, but they weren't doing anything around the Black Friday, Cyber Monday part of it. So I would recommend, you know, for next year's holiday that you, if you're not already doing it, have pages. Pages are collections probably collections. Right.

Collections that are optimized for Black Friday sale, Black Friday deal, those kind of things. And on those pages showed the products are on sale. But also talk about your promotion. Right. And don't put in black banner images that take up the whole page. Right. That's my pretty short summary of, you know, looking through this stuff and being pretty disappointed on what I saw.

All right. Thanks for listening.