Prepare your holiday season SEO for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

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Oct 21, 2022 / by
Prepare your holiday season SEO for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Black Friday was once seen as a bit of a fluke – a date on the retail calendar for people to mock and avoid at all costs. But once the trend moved online, retailers of all sizes started to take it incredibly seriously.

For droves of people, Black Friday and the so-called Cyber Monday that follows it (November 25th and 28th this year) have become the days when they get the vast majority of their Christmas shopping done and while it might still be a month away, retailers must start preparing for it as soon as possible.

Last year, online sales over the period racked up an eye-watering $204 billion and if you want to ensure your online store is set up to take advantage of those Black Friday dollars, you need to start preparing now. Here are a few things to take into consideration.

Create a plan of attack

Start planning at least a month in advance, posting any promotions you’re planning for the weekend to your site calendar and posting a “save-the-date” on social media and via your holiday season newsletters. Closer to the date, just one week before the event, post again and encourage other small businesses to share it. Then, the day before, post reminders on your social media profiles.

Set up bespoke pages

Setting up a landing page for your Black Friday deals is an absolute necessity. These should focus on topics such as “the best gifts for” or “latest deal for” and should use page titles and meta descriptions based around the upcoming holiday season. Remember, the majority of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers will be looking for Christmas gifts. So why not take advantage of that?

Introduce new products

With so many fresh eyes on your site, this is the ideal period to introduce new products and services. Start creating content about these products right now as the more you feature now, the more likely their sales pages will be to rank on the big weekend.

Reuse old content

There is nothing wrong with serving up something old in a new guise if it is relevant. If you created, for example, a Black Friday Guide for 2021, simply update the year and some of the brands and products and repackage it as a Black Friday Guide for 2022, also remembering to redirect the old URL to the new one. This is true of all seasonal content but always remember to make small adjustments or Google will figure out what you’re doing and penalise you for it.

Optimise for mobile

While this might not have been the case years ago, most Black Friday purchases will now be made via smartphones. So, in the lead-up to the big weekend, ensure that your pages are optimised for mobile-first.

Analyse your success

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are annual occurrences, so you want to make sure your analytics game is strong. Go over your Google Analytics with a fine tooth comb in the days following the weekend to figure out what went wrong and what went right so you can adjust your approach accordingly in 2023.

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