An SEO's guide to finding the best Black Friday deals

So Black Friday is nearly amongst us again and, like me, you'll probably be at work pretending to look busy whilst scoping out the best online deals (just kidding boss, if you're reading this). Whilst most companies will have spent months planning how to guide you to the deals that they want you to see, what if what you want isn't so hard to find? Take these deals for example: Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Warehouse-Deals/b?ie=UTF8&node=3581866031 - The little known Amazon Warehouse, where returns are sold cheaply with some great bargains to be found https://www.amazon.co.uk/slp/black-friday-tablet-deals/u8t8ebhumjyyr6c - A page for tablet devices this Black Friday These were not easy to find on the site, but may contain bargains which other pages will not do on the day.

So why are discount pages hard to find?

There are several reasons why a discount page is not easy to find on the site. These include:

• The website wants to guide you towards the deals that will make them the most money
• These deals are being saved for loyal customers via the newsletter
• The page was used in previous years but has since been forgotten about
• The deals are exclusive to users of their marketing partners (ie, their affiliate network)
• The discounts are meant to be shipped to foreign countries, where the tax laws are different

There are a lot of reasons why these pages exist and the bigger the company, the more chance that you will be able to find them. This is because there are multiple teams in different departments who are creating pages for their own needs and they don't always communicate with each other particularly well. Often the SEO's voice is the one that won't be heard so these pages will be created with no thought on how Google or Bing indexes them so that they can easily be found by searchers who know what they're looking for. Users will often use the websites internal search function, but these will usually primarily search for products unless specific redirects have been put in place. So don't be surprised if searching for a deal on the website returns no results.

How can we use Google to find discount pages?

The answer to this is simple; use search operaters. These are special commands to tell google to look for specific pieces of information. Here is an example of a search query using operators:

"faux wool coats" inurl:black-friday intitle:"black friday" site:example.com

There are 4 operators in this query; "quotes", inurl, intitle and site. Searching for a term in quotes (eg "faux wool coats") means that Google will only return results that contain that exact phrase within the text. If you don't include the quotes then Google will return results for similar queries which might not always be relevant. inurl: returns results that contains a particular word or string within the url. For example, using "inurl:black-friday" might contain the page www.example.com/black-friday/wool-coats in the search results. intitle: will only show search results which contain the phrase in the page's title tag, which is usually what is displayed in the search result listing. site: will only contain search results from a particular website. For example, site:example.com will contain search results exclusively from example.com. You can have multiple instances of the same operator within the same query, such as:

"coat" "faux wool" inurl:black-friday site:example.com

This will search for instances of "coat" and "faux wool" within the text of the page, but they don't necessarily have to appear in the same sentence. There are several things to be careful of when searching for Black Friday related deals:

• A good digital marketing team should be able to hide unwanted pages from Google, so don't be surprised if your search result returns no pages
• Some pages will be outdated and won't contain up to date deals
• Traders on sites like Amazon and Ebay will add "Black Friday" to their product names to increase their visibility

Some examples

You can search for more specific deals using the following examples:

"faux wool coats" inurl:black-friday intitle:"25%" site:example.com - Pages with 25% off deals "faux wool coats" inurl:black-friday intitle:"half price" site:example.com - Pages with price deals "faux wool coats" inurl:black-friday intitle:"free gift" site:example.com - Offers which contain a free gift

So have a go and let me know if you find any good deals! Enjoy this? Try our handy guide on how to automate ecommerce product keyword research.