Black Friday SEO Tips For Luxury Websites
As one of, if not the biggest retail event of the year, it’s critical for brands to prepare their online strategies for Black Friday. It’s not surprising that almost a third of all retail sales from the year occur between Black Friday and Cyber Monday when there’s a perfect storm of promotional offers and festive gift buying.
We’ve already covered why luxury brands don’t have to discount their products to have a successful Black Friday period. There are plenty of other ways to engage your customers besides having a large sale, but it’s not enough to just have a Black Friday event on your website.
Of course, you’ll need a well-thought-out campaign of some kind, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you want a truly successful Black Friday period, your campaign will need to be visible.
Only a small fraction of customers will come directly to your brand’s website looking for exclusive offers, incentives, or limited edition items. A large cohort of shoppers will be searching the internet for gifts — for others or for themselves — and you need them to find your website.
If your competitors have prioritized their SEO game and you haven’t, you risk losing out. That’s why optimizing your website for search engines needs to be one of your top priorities for Black Friday. Here’s how to get your SEO Black Friday-ready.
12 SEO Black Friday Tips to Prepare For Cyber Week
Below is your to-do list for optimizing your website in time for Black Friday. Get through them all and, come November, your luxury brand’s bottom line will be thanking you.
1. START PREPARING NOW
SEO should be one of the first things you do in preparation for Black Friday. Not only do you need ample time to implement any necessary changes and ensure that your website is performing at its best, but it also takes time for the effects to kick in.
According to Google, it can take at least 4 months for SEO strategies to work and for search engines to start ranking your website for keywords. Add to that the fact that shoppers start researching their Black Friday purchases in October, and you’ll realize how little time you have left to put your SEO plan in motion. By getting to work now, you can ensure that search engines have enough time to crawl, index, and rank your content, which can significantly improve your visibility during the shopping season. So, the sooner you get started, the better.
2. RUN A TECHNICAL AUDIT
Carry out a technical health check of your website to see where improvements need to be made. Keep an eye out for any broken links or 404 redirects, which can confuse and frustrate shoppers.
There are plenty of free tools out there that you can use for this, including Google Search Console, SEOptimer, Ahrefs, and more. These audits can get quite technical, so it might be worth getting the help of a Black Friday SEO specialist here.
3. REVIEW YOUR SERVER’S CAPACITY
There is nothing worse than spending months working tirelessly on a campaign, just for the website to crash at the critical moment. If your brand or retailer’s website isn’t functioning properly — or even optimally — during Black Friday events, you’ll struggle to meet your targets.
Your website might be working fine at the moment, but that’s with a normal amount of traffic. If your SEO and promotional campaigns are up to scratch, you can almost guarantee a huge uplift in search engine traffic. Can your site handle that? Make sure that your platform is reliable and that your servers are able to withstand your forecasted levels of traffic.
4. CHECK YOUR PAGE SPEED
Beyond just staying live, you want your website to load quickly. Slow page speed won’t just penalize you in Google rankings but annoy your customers — and it might cost you in sales.
Run your website’s URL through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see where your developers can make improvements.
5. OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE
Because we spend a lot of time working from desktops, marketers can sometimes make the mistake of forgetting about the mobile experience. But shoppers are often browsing on their phones.
During Cyber Five 2023 — the five-day promotional period starting from Thanksgiving and ending on Cyber Monday — 57% of retail web sessions came from mobile devices. The key to Black Friday SEO success? Never neglect the user experience on mobile!
6. UPDATE YOUR NAVIGATION
Your customers want what they want, when they want it. Not everyone wants to leisurely scroll through a brand’s website. Many want to go straight to the goods, especially during Black Friday sales when there’s a risk that items might sell out quickly.
Your job is to make it as easy and seamless as possible for them to find what they’re looking for. This involves improving your website’s search functionality and implementing intuitive, familiar navigation designs.
Predictive or fuzzy search helps to suggest what your customers might be searching for before they’ve even typed it or if they’ve made a spelling mistake. Using a good search tool that shares analytics with you is also useful for understanding your customer behaviors.
You may wish to embed an Instagram feed at the bottom of your homepage, which showcases your products in a UGC light. If a customer has seen a product they like on your socials and come to your website, it’s an easy way for them to find the right product and make a swift purchase.
7. CREATE A DEDICATED BLACK FRIDAY AND CYBER MONDAY LANDING PAGE
Creating optimized landing pages for the promotional period is a strategic way to rank more highly for Cyber Week-related searches and capture traffic for these sales events. It can also direct customers straight to the relevant promotions, providing them with a better user experience.
Optimize these pages with relevant keywords, compelling copy, and clear calls-to-action. Make sure they’re easily accessible from your homepage and that they provide all the information customers need, such as special deals, product availability, and sale durations. Be sure to optimize the meta data too, so it’s clear from the SERPs that these are your Black Friday pages.
8. WRITE NEW BLOG CONTENT
Helpful content in the form of blogs is one of the best ways to rank on search engine results pages. So, besides searching specifically for luxury products or services, what else might your customers be searching for around that time of year? What questions might they have, or what problems might they be facing?
Use your keyword research to find out what topics your customers are searching for, then write from there. Gift guides and best buys are a great starting point. You can also add extra filters for gifting to your navigation to help customers find these guides faster.
9. OR REUSE OLD CONTENT
Remember how we said that SEO content can take a while to rank? Updating old content to make it more relevant is an excellent way to harness the SEO points you’ve already gained from outdated content and bring them forward to this year.
For instance, if you had a Black Friday Guide 2023, you can transform it into a Black Friday Guide 2024. Just don’t forget to update:
The content to make it relevant
The year
The URL slug, if it contains the year (and redirect the old slug to the new one)
The title and description, if it contains the year
10. COLLECT PRODUCT REVIEWS
Google loves product reviews. Not only are they helpful to users, but they’re also jam-packed with keywords that can help your products rank organically. Plus, they can help to sway your customers to make a purchase, especially on those bigger ticket luxury items.
Don’t be too afraid of not getting five stars all around. As it turns out, customers take into account the occasional negative review and trust three or four stars more than a five-star review. In fact, they’re most likely to make a purchase when reviews are between 4 and 4.7 stars.
11. ADD STRUCTURED DATA TO YOUR PRODUCT PAGES
When you add or update your products to align with the season, don’t forget to update the structured data, also known as the schema markup.
When you do this, it provides rich snippets to search engines, which show ratings and prices for your products in the search results. Not only does this get you favorable positioning on SERPs, it also makes your results more clickable than your competitors who neglected their Black Friday SEO.
12. TRACK PERFORMANCE IN THE LEAD UP
As Black Friday approaches, keep monitoring your SEO and making adjustments as needed. Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Search Console to track keyword rankings, monitor organic traffic, and identify any potential issues. Don’t forget to keep an eye on your website’s performance metrics, such as page speed and uptime, using Google Analytics and other monitoring tools.
By keeping on top of your SEO, you can quickly identify and address any problems, ensuring that your site is fully optimized when the big day (or week) arrives.
We Can Help Get Your SEO Black Friday-Ready
Black Friday can be a pretty crowded space online, but a refined and targeted SEO strategy will help your brand stand out. By starting your preparations early, optimizing your website’s technical performance, and following these twelve SEO tips, you can position your brand for success during the busiest shopping event of the year.
Want to ensure that your brand comes out on top during Cyber Week? Partner with our expert SEO team at Block & Tam to optimize your strategy and maximize your Black Friday performance.
