Black Friday is a key period for people looking to buy an artificial Christmas tree, with many retailers jumping on the Black Friday hype and offering discounts. So how did we make sure our client, Christmas Tree World, was dominating the SERPs for the fourth year in the row?
We’ve worked with Christmas Tree World since June 2021, and they have just had their best Black Friday to date.
SISTRIX’s recent ‘Christmas Trees’ SectorWatch report also reveals how Christmas Tree World takes the top spot for the highest visibility in the sector for “do” (action/transactional) terms, outranking giants such as Amazon and B&Q.
But how do we do it?
The Client.
Christmas Tree World is one of the UK’s leading artificial Christmas tree retailers, offering a vast range of high-quality, lifelike trees to suit every home, business, and festive occasion. They have built a reputation for providing some of the most realistic artificial trees on the market, with a product range spanning everything from traditional green trees to snowy, pre-lit, and fibre-optic varieties.
With a highly seasonal business model, their success each year is largely determined by their ability to dominate search results in the months leading up to Christmas. Competing against major retailers such as Amazon, B&Q, and John Lewis, as well as budget-friendly newcomers like Temu, means Christmas Tree World needs a robust and agile organic growth strategy that ensures they remain the top choice for customers searching for artificial Christmas trees online.
The Brief.
Each year, our goal is simple: to ensure Christmas Tree World sells more trees than the year before.
By staying ahead of emerging trends, optimising for high-intent searches, and securing authoritative media placements, we’ve helped them achieve record-breaking Black Friday and peak-season sales year after year.
The Strategy.
Our approach to Christmas Tree World’s organic growth encompasses both SEO and digital PR.
As soon as we’ve finished off our end-of-season wrap up in February, we dive straight back into planning for the year ahead, focusing on how we can make the upcoming season bigger and better than the one just gone!
But in a really saturated market with tough competition, how do we stay on top?
Understanding the customer.
We really pride ourselves on having a really deep understanding of Christmas Tree World’s customers, and the ability to meet them exactly where they are searching. By having high-ranking PLPs for even the most niche of searches, including emerging trends, we can point users to the perfect page for them.
Keyword research tells us people are searching for trees by colour, size, style, lighting options and many more variations – so this means we need to serve searchers the most useful possible page to them. And with this comes a huge keyword footprint, spanning almost every Christmas tree search you could think of. In SISTRIX’s study, Christmas Tree World ranked for 78.9% of commercial-intent keywords, appearing on page one for 48.6%.
Continuous improvement.
With such a seasonal business, data is everything. We use a combination of previous-years’ data and predictive trends from sources such as Google Trends and Pinterest to identify priorities for the year ahead – which do change year-to-year. We might see trends such as people shopping earlier in the year or shopping more in the January sales – and we need to prepare for this.
This continuous improvement also extends to evolving with the SERPs. Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen the presentation of search engine results pages change dramatically – meaning you can’t just rely on the same tactics year after year.
Instead, we’ve prioritised visibility in organic shopping listings by making sure PDPs and Merchant Center data are top-notch, as we know these free listings are a) taking up more and more SERP real estate each year, and b) a massive missed opportunity for many brands.
Knowing our priority periods.
As an e-commerce business, we know that Christmas Tree World have key events in the calendar to prioritise – the biggest of these being Black Friday. The timing of Black Friday – right in the middle of the site’s peak sales period – makes this day even more valuable for the brand.
So we need to capitalise.
With a strategy spanning all pillars of SEO, we begin planning for Black Friday as early as possible. We recap on what keywords drove traffic this time last year, when they began searching, what journalists published round-ups of the best Christmas trees, what deals got people talking… we get all the insights we can to carve this year’s strategy.
From here, we simply need to make sure our on-page SEO is better than the competition’s, while also building authoritative links directly into our sales page. We ask Christmas Tree World to share their Black Friday deals with us as early as possible, and we start to build our media lists of journalists who we know cover Black Friday. We start to open up conversations with these journalists to ensure that Christmas Tree World is included in any round up articles alongside their competition, with the goal to earn links directly into the Black Friday sales page. It’s the combination of these two factors that has helped Christmas Tree World consistently rank in top three positions for keywords such as “Black Friday Christmas trees” over recent years.
Using our expertise to our advantage.
While some brands think it’s impossible to rank highly against the likes of Amazon and other big-name sites, we see it as a challenge. With such a broad product range, Amazon can’t possibly rank #1 for everything.
And we have something they don’t: genuine Christmas tree expertise.
The Christmas Tree World team are so passionate about what they do, and it’s our job to showcase this across the site (and the whole internet) by ticking every E-E-A-T box we can. Whether it’s decorating advice, guidance on how to fluff your branches, or a calculator to help you buy the right number of lights for your tree – the Christmas Tree World blog is packed with genuinely helpful advice that is clicked on and read by potential customers. We take this one step further as our team of expert digital PRs outreach this content to the press and secure coverage that cements our reputation as the industry’s top experts.
Building relevant and high authority links to increase search visibility and brand awareness.
For our digital PR ideas, our planning starts in summer, where we celebrate Christmas in July during our annual Christmas Tree World ideation. This brainstorming session has taken place on the hottest day of the year before, and it’s always strange thinking about Christmas in the midst of the warmest weather.
We know that for Christmas Tree World, we need to have our strategy in place to ensure that our pre-planned pieces are ready to go from September onwards, as this is when we ramp up our activity as journalists start covering Christmas content.
We know from previous years that September is when journalists start to cover Christmas, however, if you’re ever not sure if a journalist is covering a topic, you can use Roxhill’s Pinpoint feature to see how many articles are published on certain topics. Below we can see 816 articles were published from the 2nd – 9th September on the topic of Christmas.
We also use Google Trends to show if something is trending, and again we can see here that interest in Christmas starts to steadily increase from September onwards.
When we look at Black Friday articles, we can see that these start to increase in October, with the peak being from the 25th November to the 2nd December, with 3,099 articles published across that week this year.
As mentioned earlier, November and Black Friday are key sales period for Christmas Tree World, so it’s important we’re already well underway with our strategy before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
We execute data-driven hero campaigns as part of our digital PR strategy and this year we launched a number of campaigns before Black Friday including our Christmas Tree Decoration Calculator and The Best Christmas Markets for 2024.
Alongside this, we also launch a proactive and reactive approach, which includes pushing out proactive pieces such as “the exact date to put up your Christmas tree”, and responding to inbound journalist requests. We’ve worked with Christmas Tree World for so long, that we’ve built up great relationships with key journalists, who approach us year after year for commentary, this proves that long-standing relationships with our clients, result in stronger relationships with key journalists, who over time then see the brand as their go to for commentary and insight.
The final piece of our digital PR puzzle is our product PR strategy which focuses on earning links into key product pages and ensuring Christmas Tree World are featured in Christmas tree round ups alongside their competitors ahead of Black Friday. So far this year we have secured product page links in a number of high authority publications such as GQ and Which, which helped boost the rankings of these pages and increase brand awareness for Christmas Tree World and not only that, these pieces of linked coverage also generated direct sales.
Our digital PR strategy doesn’t just ensure Christmas Tree World are at the top of the SERPs, but we also make sure they are at the top of consumers’ minds when considering purchasing their artificial tree on Black Friday.
The Results.
Our integrated SEO and digital PR strategy delivered record-breaking results for Christmas Tree World over the Black Friday period.
Despite fierce competition from industry giants and shifting search trends, our approach to content, technical SEO, and strategic link building helped Christmas Tree World dominate the SERPs and drive unprecedented revenue and traffic growth. The results speak for themselves:
- 43% increase in organic revenue over the Black Friday period year on year (the biggest increase of any channel)
- 300% increase YoY in clicks from keywords containing the phrase “Black Friday”
- Smashed (very ambitious) November organic traffic and revenue forecasts
- Ranked (with nearly 100% consistency – we can’t be perfect) in position 1 for their main “Black Friday” keyword
- 68 links from high authority publications on relevant topics throughout October and November
- 21 brand mentions and 89 total pieces of coverage with an average DR of 66
- Links on publications such as Ideal Home, The Mirror, Daily Mail, Which?, GQ and Manchester Evening News
- Secured a number of links (GQ, Country Living and The Independent) which resulted in direct sales
As we look ahead to the 2025 season, we know the search landscape will continue to evolve — and so will our strategy. The success we’ve built for Christmas Tree World is the result of a deep understanding of their audience, a data-driven approach to SEO, and a relentless focus on delivering results.
We’re already planning how to raise the bar even higher next year.