Marketing for Black Friday Using PageRank Ideas
Although for most of us consumers, the plethora of deals available on Black Friday has not even crossed our minds yet. However, according to Jamie Faulkner, that should not be the case for any businesses planning on partaking in this nationwide sales event. Faulkner’s article, “How to Maximize Your Sales Ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday”, provides businesses with advice on how to increase their sales percentages for this weekend through modifications to digital activity and campaigns. This aspect of marketing is gaining in importance as everything around us is turning towards the internet as well. For example. customers are turning towards the internet to preview Black Friday deals or are skipping the trip to the mall all together and depending solely on finishing their shopping on Cyber Monday. Faulkner highlights quite a few search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that businesses can carry out to ensure that their Black Friday deal pages have the highest possible online visibility on web search engines.
These strategies all depend on creating or updating an optimized page for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and ensuring that these pages rank highly on search results on popular search engines. In order to ensure this, Faulkner insists that, first, these pages should be live all year-round, so they can maintain their relevancy. His main point of advice is to ensure that Google understands that the new pages are important by adding links to them from the business’s main page. In addition to this, Faulkner advises businesses to keep the current year out of their URLs and just update the same Black Friday page each year. This allows them to avoid having to redirect to a URL each year and aids their search engine ranking ability.
These tips of adding a link to the Black Friday page on a business’s home page and making the page’s URL live and consistent throughout the year build upon the theory of PageRank explored in lecture and in chapter 14. Following these tips increases search engine rankings for the Black Friday page because a page is viewed as important if it is cited by other important pages, and nodes or pages that are viewed as more important get to make stronger endorsements. As main pages of businesses are usually frequently visited by a variety of individuals, they are usually more important or stronger hubs. Therefore, if home pages provide links to their respective Black Friday pages, then according the principle, this page should have a higher order in search results for search engines such as Google who utilize PageRank methods for ranking websites.