Black Friday on Walmart.com gets bigger every year, but with digital sales up 74% and more people than ever shopping online with Walmart, this year is going to be even bigger than usual. The retailer has recently announced its brick and mortar stores will be closed on Thanksgiving Day, likely driving even more deal-seeking shoppers to Walmart.com.

The natural question for any ecommerce professional is: How can I get my products on Walmart.com, and optimize my item pages to sell more in this high-opportunity window? But Walmart isn't like other retailers—it's solidified them as an essential option for shoppers in these strange times, but also means you can't just recycle your ecommerce strategy from Amazon or other retailers.

At SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder, we've got years of experience working directly with Walmart and its suppliers to improve product detail pages and sell more items. Here're some essential tips for Walmart.com that anyone trying to win big on Black Friday should know:

Improve Your Walmart Content Quality Scores

For a shopper to buy your item on Walmart.com, they have to find it in search. To ensure that shoppers are shown informative, useful, and engaging content when using Walmart.com, the retailer uses metrics called Content Quality Scores to determine what pages are eligible to show up in search. A page's Content Quality Score is a number from 0-100 that measures If your product page has a low quality score from sub-standard or missing content, it is far less likely to show up in search results. Pages with a low enough score may even be hidden entirely by Walmart's algorithms.

SKU Ninja's Walmart Search Boost is a tool for auditing and improving Walmart Content Quality Scores, and one of the only ways to see your scores without going to Walmart directly. To read more about Content Quality Scores and Walmart Search Boost, click here!

Target the Right Keywords

In addition to Content Quality Scores, Walmart search uses the words used in your item's content to determine whether or not it shows up in the results for the search terms a shopper uses. These search terms, also called SEO keywords or keyword phrases, Getting the right high-volume keywords into your title, description, key features, and other content is invaluable for increasing traffic and pageviews Walmart.com.

The most basic high-volume search terms for your item are usually easy to guess, but other valuable keywords can be more obscure or unexpected. To further complicate things, the keywords used by shoppers on Walmart vs. Google or Amazon can be very different. Tools like SKU Ninja's Prioritized Keyword List can generate a list of high-value keywords based on their Walmart search volume to target with your item page's content, title, and back-end SEO keywords.

Understand Your Competition

One element of selling items on Walmart.com that isn't new for suppliers coming from Amazon is competition. Showing up in search results is competitive by its very nature. The top search results for a given keyword get the vast majority of clicks, so monitoring the search engine results pages (or SERP) of keywords you're targeting is essential for understanding your competitive landscape.

Search results that use Walmart also offers pay-per-click advertisements on their search pages, called "Sponsored Products". Also called paid search, product listing advertisements are an essential part of any Walmart ecommerce strategy. Click here to read more about Sponsored Products and paid search on Walmart.com.

You don't have to copy down or screenshot tons of SERPs to benchmark your success in search! SKU Ninja's Share of Search tool makes it easy with an automated, color coded report on which brands are winning search for the most valuable SEO keywords in your category. It even shows you when an item or brand is using Sponsored Products and paid search to get the top ranks! Click here to read more about understanding your competition on Walmart.com.

Add Rich Media to Increase Conversion

Getting shoppers to find and click on your item is such a huge part of ecommerce, it's sometimes easy to forget that you're really trying to get them to click Add to Cart! Rich Media, also called Enhanced Content or A+ Content on Amazon, is a term for any content on your Walmart page that goes above and beyond traditional item photography and a product description. Adding engaging content like video can set your page apart or keep it competitive with your competitors, and research shows that shoppers are more likely to convert when you have it!

SKU Ninja's Rich Media Hosting is the easiest and most affordable way to submit rich media like video, 360 photography, downloadable documents, and more to Walmart.com product pages! For just $5 a month, you can host a single rich media module on up to 500 of your item pages! Click here to read more about the benefits of adding rich media to your item pages for Black Friday!

SKU Ninja is an all-in-one software platform that makes it easy to win on Walmart. With a SKU Ninja subscription, you'll get access to a suite of tools and reports designed to simplify and automate your work on Walmart.com and other major retailers. Email info@whytespyder.com to talk to someone on our team, get more information, or schedule a demo of SKU Ninja!

Get a Free Assessment of Your Walmart Content Quality Scores!

We're currently offering a free assessment of the Walmart Content Quality Scores of your entire catalog! Email info@whytespyder.com to learn how to send us your item list and get started!

About SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder: SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder is a digital merchandising company and Walmart Connected Content Partner with more than a decade of experience helping brands win online. We combine years of ecommerce expertise with innovative and precise software to solve the unique problems facing omnichannel professionals today.