If you’ve missed Black Friday, don’t worry! Google has provided a list of last minute SEO fixes to ensure your site is still at the top of search results for 2018. You can also use this article as reference for planning ahead in 2019!
The “seo for bfcm” is a last minute SEO fix that can ensure success for Black Friday. The SEO fixes are easy to implement and will help your website rank well in search results.
Make sure your website is up to the task of dealing with the extra traffic.
You should have been upgrading your site speed anyhow in the previous few months as a result of Google’s page experience change, but now you’ll need to make sure your servers and site are ready to manage the extra traffic. Otherwise, all of that effort would have been for nothing.
If you don’t provide a fantastic user experience during these hectic sales, you’ll not only lose organic rankings, but you’ll also see greater bounce rates and cart abandonment.
According to a Google research, increasing your page load time from 1 to 3 seconds raises your bounce rate by 32%.
Website load time data may be found at https://websitesetup.org/news/website-load-time-statistics/.
According to John Mueller, a website should load in less than 2-3 seconds in the ideal case, and less than 2 seconds in the case of ecommerce sites. Here are some ideas about how to do it:
- Check to see whether your CDN can handle it. One of the first things you should do is contact your CDN provider (if you have one) to ensure that they are prepared for the extra traffic. If you don’t have one, you may contact your hosting provider to see how much traffic your server can manage and how much it would cost to switch to a server that can handle the extra traffic. Examine your error logs to determine if there’s anything you can do to prevent the traffic increase.
- Examine your photographs. When it comes to ecommerce performance, visuals are one of the biggest culprits. Make sure the photos on your homepage, Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages, and your most popular product pages are compressed and scaled appropriately for desktop and mobile.
- Reduce the size of your material. This will help you reduce page load times and is also reasonably easy to apply, so double-check that your server supports it. Brotli is my preferred compression method because of its effectiveness and browser compatibility.
- Third-party scripts should be minimized wherever feasible. Installing many plugins or third-party scripts such as user reviews or AB testing slows down your site (particularly because you have no control over how third-party scripts work). Make sure you’ve only installed the plugins that are absolutely required at busy times, and that third-party scripts are only activated on sites where they’re required. Make sure those resources aren’t requested when the page loads if they’re not going to be utilized during the Black Friday season (for example, if you’re not going to be conducting your AB sampling campaigns at that time).
- Make a note of it and send it to Google. Even if you reduce your third-party scripts as described above, your sites will still need externally hosted resources like the CDN for images, font loaders, and measurement platforms. All of these lookups will slow down your website, but you can use Preconnect to tell the browser that your page plans to connect to another origin and that you want the process to begin as soon as feasible.
- Activate HTTP caching. This may also reduce the time it takes for your pages to load on subsequent visits, since it prevents your pages from rendering again and over. Ensure that all static assets used internally are cached.
Obviously, the effect of these changes differs per site, so you should do a few speed tests using Google’s Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse tools to see where your fastest wins are. In this study, be sure to include your Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages, as well as the homepage and any pages in your check-out process.
If performance improvements aren’t possible, or while you’re working on them, be more communicative through your interface so users are aware of what’s going on, since this will also assist to minimize your bounce rate:
Give your consumers the checkout experience they’ve come to expect.
Aside from speeding up your cart pages, there are a few additional things you can do to optimize your checkout experience, reduce cart abandonment, and increase online sales during peak season:
- Allow clients to shop without registering in or establishing a store account by offering guest checkouts; many people dislike being compelled to register before making a purchase.
- If feasible, make the checkout procedure as simple as possible by using a single-page checkout. It’s also crucial to eliminate any potential distractions from your checkout process, such as navigation bars or sidebars. After all, you want your customers to stay focused on making a purchase.
- If you can’t have a single-page checkout, at the very least, include a progress bar to keep your customers informed about the checkout process.
- Allow clients to establish ‘wishlists’ or’save for later’ options if they aren’t ready to purchase right now.
- Request less sensitive information first (such as the customer’s name and email address), then shipping information before asking for payment card numbers.
- For a short period following Black Friday, give your consumers an upsell or discount on things that are related to what they’re buying.
- Finally, try sending abandonment emails or giving incentives as a way to entice them to return.
When you place an order with Mixbook, for example, you have a limited amount of time to alter or improve your purchase before it ships:
With a dedicated (optimized) landing page, you can dominate the SERPs.
To successfully target competitive phrases surrounding competitive holiday sales, you should have a specific landing page that is optimized ahead of time.
To guarantee that the pages keep ranking value, they should be kept indexable all year and present evergreen material for clients, such as additional related bargains or offers. It also means you won’t have to start from scratch next year (though you’ll still need to maintain the page on sitemaps, make sure it’s crawlable, and retain some internal links to keep link equity flowing to it).
You’ll only need to edit the page content next year to target relevant phrases, such as include the relevant year on some of these sections to convince buyers that your deals are current, but avoid using years in URLs if you want to reuse them (e.g. www.example.com/black-friday-2021). This is especially crucial if you’ve been using a Digital PR campaign to generate connections to your Black Friday page, since you’ll be able to reap the advantages of the backlinks you’ve accumulated year after year.
This article goes through how to deal with seasonal items, categories, and recurrent events in further depth.
Encouragement, encouragement, encouragement
You need to make sure you market your holiday deals on your site now that you’ve established and optimized special landing pages for them. Visitors will notice your forthcoming deals as soon as they arrive thanks to a banner for your landing pages on the homepage and across the site.
You might also utilize a countdown to create a feeling of urgency, and this is a good moment to start marketing your unique selling propositions (USPs) more prominently, such as memberships, samples, trials, next-day delivery, free returns, and so on.
Take a look at the following sample from Lookfantastic:
Have clear and conspicuous delivery and return policies.
In addition to providing this information on your USP banners, you should make your shipping and return policies prominent and well-explained on your product pages. Cost, shipping time, and location are all factors that might stymie your sales. A good delivery message, on the other hand, may aid your customer’s decision-making and enhance website conversion rates, and a decent return policy, on the other hand, can be a significant trust influencer when it comes to purchase choices.
Here are a few things to think about:
- When will the merchandise be sent and when will it arrive?
- There are many delivery choices available (e.g. same day delivery, weekend delivery, free shipping, speedy delivery, etc.)
- Options for delivery locations (e.g. home delivery, local post office, Click & Collect, etc.)
- Postage rates that are relevant
- Order tracking and notifications through email or SMS
Make sure they’re all visible on the homepage, product pages, checkout pages, and basket pages. Boohoo.com is a good example of this, offering advice on how to return a goods based on where you are in Europe:
Use holiday-specific and transactional keywords to boost sales.
Make sure your keyword targeting plan for the sales season includes terms with commercial purpose. These are the phrases that clients who are likely to purchase are searching for, and you can identify them by using Google’s Keyword Planner’s ‘competition’ tab, which shows how many people have bid on that keyword in Google Ads.
When many brands compete for a term, it’s usually a hint that there’s money to be made. When feasible, optimize your transactional seasonal pages for’medium’ and ‘high’ competition keywords, since these searches will help you capitalize on the demand peak and have a greater ROI.
This may also be done using Keyword Planner’s’suggested bid’ column, with transactional phrases having a larger amount. However, since they will be more competitive, you must be mindful of your limits.
For example, the recommended price for the keyword ‘Japanese green tea’ shown below is £0.50 since not everyone searching for this query is ready to buy; others may only be seeking for a definition or related health advantages. Even though the search volume is substantially smaller, the query ‘purchase black tea’ has a recommended offer of £2.02.
Here’s some more information on how to adjust to seasonality in order to take advantage of period increases.
Use gift guides to draw attention to your items.
According to Google, more than 70% of shoppers began their Christmas shopping experience unsure of what they would purchase. It’s a fantastic use of time to create gift recommendations to reach out to uncertain consumers, particularly if you categorize them by product category, buyer profiles, occasion, pricing ranges, and so on.
Popsugar and Allure are wonderful examples of this, and don’t forget to include them in your Black Friday Digital PR campaign so you can use the link equity gained from external backlinks to promote the items advertised.
With effective PPC ad wording, you can boost your organic CTRs.
Collaborate with your PPC team to gather data on the best-performing ad text variants from their paid search campaigns, and use this information to improve your organic CTRs.
Prioritize your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sites, but don’t forget to apply what you’ve learned to your reduced items as well. You’ll need to prioritize your efforts, so start with the ones that bring in the greatest money and work your way down.
How to maintain a high level of customer service
Live chat widgets have been a crucial customer support tool in recent years, and they have been shown to enhance conversions, since customers who are given the opportunity to ask questions are more likely to complete a transaction than those who are not. If you haven’t already, get one.
Use the questions raised by prospective consumers to enhance the content on your site and add the answers in your marketing materials if you already have this capability.
Finally, make sure your Dev and SEO teams have an emergency point of contact in case any concerns happen over the Christmas season. Nothing should be left to chance!
Now what?
These last-minute strategies might help you escape a possible catastrophe in terms of missed revenue by allowing you to appear at the top of SERPs rather than languishing on page 2. These strategies may also be applied to other sales seasons and added to your general SEO strategy outside of those periods.
Check out this post for additional fast wins to increase the organic performance of your ecommerce website all year long, or scroll down to read more related articles.
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