5 SEO best practices for Black Friday and the holiday season
Are you looking to increase holiday sales for Black Friday/Festive Season? These SEO tips will help you plan.
Black Friday through Christmas is the world’s biggest shopping season.
Do rising living costs, fall in customer confidence and frequent Google algorithm updates spell doom to SEO professionals?
We will share some SEO tips to help you plan and navigate the holiday season.
1. Make dedicated landing pages for Black Friday
It is a good thought to create a dedicated landing page for Cyber Monday, and Black Friday searches to increase your visibility.
Users will search for keywords that include [brand] or , as well as the words: discounts, deals, or promos, to find the best deals.
It is possible to see which products are most popular using Google Trends’ historical data. Dedicating a page to each product and service may be worthwhile if the goal is to offer discounts on Black Friday or Cyber Tuesday.
Plan the creation of landing pages and content as far in advance as you can, if possible.
You can then deploy a 312 redirect until the pages are actually needed. This is a temporary redirect and not a permanent redirect. This will allow you to prepare runners for Christmas shoppers and Google to examine the site thoroughly.
Even better, you could develop a “mini-site” with Black-Friday/Christmas-themed pages that can be hidden from visitors till the holiday season approaches.
After the pages are created, they should be added in your XML sitemap. These new landing pages are created to drive holiday-related searches.
However, ensure that your holiday specials are visible to repeat visitors. You provide crawlers with a map that allows them to quickly locate and index the pages.
These two actions will increase your holiday landing pages’ visibility to search engine crawlers and visitors.
Holiday-related URLs are not temporary. These pages should be kept as current as possible.
2. You should be focusing on the user experience
Online Christmas shoppers should always be looking for the best deals.
Many merchants created tools and filters this year to help with the curation and discovery of Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales.
Shoppers are often frustrated when they need help finding the right offers on a site or encounter out-of-stock items after browsing your site for awhile.
Online buyers can switch quickly to other options, so brands need to make these kinds of changes in order to keep their customers coming back to them.
These are the key elements:
- Using faceted navigation.
- Optimizing shopping carts.
- Improved page experience
Use faceted navigation
Faceted navigation allows customers to search for exactly what they are looking for by giving them multiple filters based on their listing criteria.
When implementing faceted navigation, you might face the following problems:
- Duplicate content
- Index bloat is when search engines index pages that do not have search value.
- Problems with crawling.
There are many solutions to faceted navigation issues on small and large websites.
This topic is too complex to be covered in one page. Please read the following posts for more information:
- Too much? Faceted navigation and SEO
- Site taxonomy to SEO: A simple guide
Optimize shopping carts
Consider the following suggestions for optimizing your shopping cart.
Provide multiple delivery options
To meet your customer’s needs, offering a range of delivery options is important. You should offer local delivery, next-day or same-day delivery (in the case of florists), local pickup, and delivery costs.
Provide a range of payment methods
The most influential digital customers are millennials and Gen Z. They demand various payment options.
If they can use their preferred method, it could prevent them from abandoning their purchase intent.
They will be driven by their desire to purchase the item they are looking for and start a new search to find it.
Allow account creation and sign-up using social media
If you create an account using manual data input, it could lead to abandonment.
Consumers don’t want to spend time filling in personal information for every transaction on an online eCommerce site. They want a quick checkout.
Email notifications of cart abandonment
A personalized message reminding the client that they have items in their basket can encourage them to go back to the store, regardless of whether they are window shopping or distracted.
Use Discount Coupons
Another eCommerce tactic is to add a section where customers can be encouraged to use discount coupons.
Customers love promotions, so they will take advantage of the chance to redeem a coupon for a discount.
Test on a mobile device
Consider mobile responsiveness when your website is being built.
You will be able to identify and correct issues quickly before it is too late. A bad user experience can lead to a decrease in revenue.
Implement a custom 404 error page
A 404 error page will be displayed to clients if a product is discontinued or a visitor enters an incorrect URL.
It will also stops visitors from finding nothing on the site.
Improve page experience
As a result, a rise in traffic can lead to significant revenue increases by improving core web vitals (CWVs).
Several brands have seen revenue increases up to 70% by improving their page experience.
Make sure that the page experience is as good as possible.
Using the most accurate reports when making decisions about core web vitals is essential. These are the top tools for evaluating CVs.
- Google Lighthouse: This tool gives you a score for any URL or webpage. This tool helps identify potential problems and where to start more profound research.
- Type of data: Laboratory data (simulator).
- PageSpeed Insights
- Type of data: Field and lab (accurate user data).
- CRUx
- Google Search Console
- Frog Screaming
- Relics New
These invaluable resources are worth exploring:
- Page experience vs. web vitals: What are they?
- Core Web Vitals score increases for high-ranking sites
- Understanding page experience using Google Search results
- Tools to Measure Core Web Vitals
3. Paid search: Work with us
Black Friday (BFCM), Cyber Monday (BFCM), and Cyber Monday are retailers’ most critical long weekends. However, it is vital to align your organic and paid search strategies. This will ensure that your customers have the best omnichannel experience.
Paid search campaigns like your SEO strategy should be built using historical ad performance data combined with new keywords.
These are some things to remember when planning a holiday-PPC campaign.
- Budget-conscious budgets may need help to bid on BFCM ads. Pay attention to the target keywords you choose for your paid ads.
- When there is less competition, run sponsored promotional ads before the busy Black Friday-Christmas season. Holiday shopping will begin earlier this year than usual.
- When running paid social campaigns, it is vital to match your campaign goals with the right stage of the funnel.
- You should also set aside a portion of your budget to test ads. You can use Tiktok or Google Ads to sponsor posts.
4. Optimize your Google Business Profile
Turn your Google Business Profile into an income-generating channel. I discussed the importance of having a Google Business Profile as part of your SEO strategy.
If optimized correctly, GBP can provide significant revenue for small businesses or large brands.
These are some ways to increase your revenue during the Black Friday-Christmas season.
- Create a new category section for each season. You could create a Black Friday category section, delete it, and start a Christmas category.
- Be sure to include all information about delivery during the holiday season. This is important as bad reviews can result from a lack of knowledge.
- Create GBP Posts to keep your audience updated about new offers, delivery times, or other essential aspects of your business and products.
- Encourage customers to leave reviews and answer all their questions.
5. Digital PR and links: Get involved
Many articles will be written in the days leading to Black Friday and during Black Friday. These articles will use the terms “Black Friday,” “deal,” and “offer.” This is just one example of how hungry journalists are for Black Friday sales material.
Your company should promote Black Friday deals to all relevant media in the next few weeks.
These are some ways you can gain links before and during the holiday season.
- Send journalists covering Black Friday or Christmas specials a list of your top products, with prices and photos.
- Black Friday will bring a flood of Black Friday requests to journalists. Be careful how you pitch your pitch and who it is for. This is an old article, but it’s still very relevant to pitching journalists. Gisele Navarro also has a great resource on how you pitch journalists.
- Monitor media requests concerning Black Friday and Christmas.
- Get together with your team to plan a great piece of content you can promote during and before the holiday season. This could be a report you can upgrade to the media, a collaboration or PR stunt with an influencer, or even an event.
What happens if we lose revenue despite an excellent SEO strategy?
This is what you can imagine – for your team or yourself.
- Prepare months in advance for Black Friday and Christmas.
- Excellent links gained in national media and great engagement on social media
- A good SEO strategy is essential.
You will notice that traffic and rankings are excellent and were not affected by any algorithm updates.
Despite all this, revenue continues to decline.
It is crucial to assess all external events and determine what might affect consumer confidence.
In 2022, the trend towards declining consumer confidence is becoming more common due to the current global economic crisis and general pessimism.
Nevertheless, you’re not the only one in this. Brands and agencies are in greater demand to gain customer trust. Despite widespread pessimism, consumer behavior shows signs that it is optimistic.
You might be tempted to think that SEO for Black Friday is a great subject. Of all the aspects of SEOs’ interest, what about the economy and economic drivers? Not SEO.
Well.
- Stakeholders will need to be made aware of the ROI perspective by you. This is why, despite substantial SEO investment and high levels of engagement, revenue has declined.
- When brainstorming content or link campaigns, it is essential to be sensitive about what affects consumers’ confidence. An insensitive/controversial content, PR, or social movement will get you links, but it can also destroy your brand’s reputation in a snap.
Our job is to assess all factors affecting SEO results and propose solutions.
These solutions may be outside your daily work.
What do we do when circumstances beyond our control affect us?
Communication with stakeholders is the most critical aspect.
To build trust with your customers and increase their purchase confidence, you should focus on these things:
- Special offers (seasonal, gift cards, subscriptions)
- Delivery costs (costs)
- Digital PR campaigns and sensitive and creative content.
- You can work with paid teams.
As an SEO, seasonal sales are my favorite type of work. Planning as far ahead as possible is essential to ensure a successful Black Friday/festive season.
