6 Powerful Black Friday SEO Tips

As Black Friday approaches, you’ve fine-tuned your marketing strategies, got your PPC campaigns ready and scheduled lots of social media content.

But what else could you do to be proactive in the weeks running up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday to give your online store the best chance of success?

We recommend you look at your SEO and ensure everything is as it should be under your website’s bonnet, this will benefit your Black Friday sales for years to come, think of it as an investment for the future.

1. Review Your Technical SEO Fundamentals.

You must ensure you're doing the technical SEO fundamentals correctly to achieve a good ranking on Google and also Bing.

• Firstly, run a full site audit and resolve 404 errors, which can be frustrating for customers.
• Next, fix all broken links that you’ve identified as broken links also hinder user experience and add to customer frustration. There’s nothing more annoying for a shopper than a website crashing when trying to buy something.
• Check back on last year’s website traffic trends and ask yourself if your servers can handle the same amount or potentially more traffic this year.
• We’re in the mobile-first era; ensuring your eCommerce website is mobile-friendly, fast-loading and responsive is critical. In our recent blog post, ‘Top 5 tips to smash your Black Friday sales targets’, we highlighted the importance of the mobile experience for eCommerce companies.
• Find out how your website performs by using Google’s helpful PageSpeed Insights tool.
• Identify and resolve any indexing issues.
• Finally, all good eCommerce companies put teir customer’s privacy and security at the top of their priority list. If you haven’t got an SSL certificate yet, it is highly recommended that you get one. Not only will it protect your customers, but it will also help you rank higher on Google.

2. Ensure you have optimised Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unique dates in the retail calendar and, as such, need to be treated a little differently. To do that, we recommend to create specific landing pages for both. That way you can optimise the page content with specific Black Friday keywords, then reuse the landing pages every year by simply updating the content to Black Friday 2023, this keeps your authority score for the page high rather than starting from scratch every year. If you created a Black Friday landing page in the past, it's a great idea to go back and update it for 2022.

As always ensure your Black Friday landing page is in your XML sitemap and your canonicals are correct so Google's bots can easily find your pages.

3. Manually index your pages in Google Search Console.

If Google isn’t indexing your website, you’re missing considerable traffic and potential sales.

Search Engine Journal sums up the importance of indexing, “Indexing is like building a library except instead of books, Google deals with websites. If you want your pages to appear in search, they must be properly indexed. In layman’s terms, Google must find and save them.”

To manually index your pages, follow these steps:

a. Go to Google Search Console.
b. Click on the URL inspection tool.
c. To check if Google has indexed a page, copy and paste the URL into the search bar.
d. Wait a moment while Google checks the URL.
e. Click on the ‘Request Indexing’ button.

It’s a good idea to follow this process to ensure your Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages are indexed by Google, along with any other Black Friday and Cyber Monday content that you’ve published, such as blog/news content, video content etc.

4. Carry out Keyword Research.

Research has suggested that targeting keywords and phrases that mention both events is a good idea over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.

For example, if you’re a pet company selling dog harnesses, it might be worth targeting keywords and phrases such as ‘black Friday dog harness’ or ‘cyber Monday pet harness’.

But before you target keywords and phrases, look at last year’s data and analyse your campaigns to find any low-hanging fruit.

Visit your Google Analytics and Google Search Console dashboards to find out what pages drove the most traffic last year, which pages had the highest conversions and keyword ranks, and build this year’s keyword research around those.

We’d recommend focusing on long-tail keywords, which have less competition but offer the most rewards in terms of conversion rates.

5. Update On-Page SEO.

The most minor, seemingly inconsequential things can often lead to underwhelming sales. And one of those minute details is on-page SEO, which can have a detrimental effect on your campaigns if there are mistakes. One biggie to look out for is to ensure all your information is up to date. Having Black Friday 2021 on it instead of Black Friday 2022 is a surefire way to lose potential customers; they’ll assume it’s last year's deals that have already expired. Go through all of your on-page SEO with a fine-tooth comb by using Screaming Frog, looking at your H1, Page Title, Meta Descriptions etc. 

6. Add structured data to your product pages.

Optimising your product pages to reflect Black Friday and Cyber Monday themes is a good idea.

It means that potential customers can see your product information in richer ways, such as price, review ratings, availability, shipping, etc., without visiting your website. Yoast explains, “Check, for instance, whether you’ve added structured data to your product pages. Because rich results that show ratings and prices can give you an edge over your competitor.” Semrush has a helpful Beginner’s Guide to Structured Data.

Need help with your website in the run-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Get in touch with our digital marketing experts today: call us on 028 9073 1190 or email us at info@thewebbureau.com.