6 SEO tips for Black Friday 

SEO is a long-term strategy which means it can take time for you to start seeing results. However, once you’ve put the time and effort into the below activities and you get them right, you’ll find that you will benefit every year. 

1. Check your site speed and performance 

If you’re going to be driving extra traffic to your website over the last two months of the year, you’re going to want to make sure it’s performing as well as it should be. This should be part of your regular technical SEO strategy anyway but it’s particularly important to check when you’re expecting higher volumes of traffic. 

A website that is slow to load, hard to use and which does not properly communicate your offering isn’t likely to result in good conversion rates. 

In addition, Google penalises sites that don’t offer a good user experience which could mean that your site ranks below your competitors and means you could miss out on potential customers. 

Here are a few of the key factors to consider when checking the performance of your site: 

• Loading speed on desktop and mobile 
• Mobile-friendliness
• Broken URLs 
• Any duplicate content 
• Indexing issues 
• Any issues at checkout

Getting these issues sorted prior to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend will prevent you from having to make last-minute changes to your website and ensure that you capitalise as much as possible on the extra traffic and sales available to you.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for free to check for any issues and fixes you can make to your website. 

2. Find the right keywords for your business and the season 

Keyword research is essential to your Black Friday/Cyber Monday SEO strategy. Avoid high-competition keywords, as these can be hard to rank well for, and ensure you’re targeting the keywords that are most relevant to your business and to your customers. 

Use Google Trends to look for data from last year. Which keywords were shoppers using the most to find your products, services and deals? If you have historical data, have a look at your Google Search Console data, too and see what keywords drove the most traffic to your website last year. 

Use a keyword research tool to find more similar keywords to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

Create landing pages and content 

Once you know what keywords you need to target, we recommend creating separate landing pages and blog content to target them. Once these pages are live, you can just update them year after year. If you can get them ranking highly, the hard work will pay off every year with just a few small updates to ensure the pages are still relevant. 

Create blog content around gift guides or the long-tail keywords your customers are using. You can link to your own products in the gift guides to help guide customers who are still in the early research stages of their journey. 

Optimise your product pages 

If your Black Friday sales and Cyber Monday sales are going to focus on particular products, optimise those product pages and make sure everything customers need is on there. Are they easy to use? Do they provide enough information about the product? Are they optimised for the right search terms? 

All of these elements can have an impact on whether your products are found by shoppers and whether or not they convert with you. 

3. Check your local SEO 

If you have a physical location for your business, consider updating your local SEO efforts too. Many holiday shoppers will go online, but some may want to visit your store too, so it’s worth catering to them.

Here are a few of the checks you can perform to help ensure your business is visible locally: 

• Update and optimise your Google My Business profile 
• Create local content 
• Make sure your site is optimised for the right location terms

4. Check your reviews 

When it comes to sales, customers are not only looking for the best price, they’re also looking for a business they can trust. 

Reviews have a huge impact on consumer’s buying decisions so get as many on your website as you can throughout the rest of the year. If you have plenty of good reviews on your website, a customer is more likely to choose you over a competitor who doesn’t have any.  

Collecting as many reviews as you can throughout the rest of the year will really help you to stand out when Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend rolls around. 

5. Boost your SEO efforts with Paid Ads 

One of the best ways to get more traffic to your Black Friday landing pages and seasonal content is by advertising them on social media and with Google Ads. This will help to give your organic efforts a bit of a boost alongside driving more potential customers to your business.

You can also retarget customers who have visited your website in the past and haven’t bought yet or people who have purchased before. 

For more information on utilising PPC for Black Friday weekend, read our blog: PPC strategies to boost your sales on Black Friday: The Ultimate Guide. 

6. Build relevant links

Try and build links between other relevant sites and your landing pages and content. This will help to build authority for your website and hopefully help you to rank above your competition over the Black Friday weekend when customers are actively searching. 

See if you can find relevant publications or bloggers who will link to your site too. You want to try and reach as many people with your content as possible. 

Key takeaways…

SEO is a longer-term strategy than your paid campaigns which you can turn on and off when the festive seasons starts and ends or when sales start to die off. SEO takes longer to build momentum so you’ll need to start planning and actioning your strategy in advance. 

However, once you’ve managed to get your content and landing pages to rank for relevant terms, they will continue to pay dividends over the next few years too. All you’ll need to do is update them with new Black Friday deals and stats every year to make sure they stay relevant. 

There are no quick fixes in SEO, so if you haven’t made a start earlier in the year, you can start now, but you might find you won’t see the real rewards until next year! 

If you’d like more advice or help with your SEO strategy, please request a free digital marketing audit from our team.