SEO Tips to Get Found This Black Friday and Cyber Monday
The 2024 holiday selling season is upon us. It’s time for online stores to capitalize on the impending holiday traffic—that’s where you come in.
As your clients prepare for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and more, SEO should be at the top of their to-do list. However, it’s absolutely critical to ensure a website is ready for the holiday surge. Your clients will certainly thank you for it.
To help you re-engage commerce clients for the holiday sales season, here are seven tips for holiday SEO.
1. Start planning early
SEO isn’t an overnight process, and holiday preparation is no exception. Every new landing page or website change needs time to account for planning, executing, publishing, and indexing.
Plan your holiday strategies early and give search engines plenty of time to discover and index any new landing pages. If you’re helping clients launch new Black Friday or Cyber Monday landing pages in late November, it might be too late for meaningful returns from organic search. Remember: it takes time for content to rank. However, you do still have time to help them earn traffic for the rest of the holiday season.
Try to publish any new holiday URLs at least a month before they’re needed, even if you’re still tweaking and adding content as you get closer to showtime. This is a good rule of thumb for any holiday, so keep these best practices in mind for other holiday sales, such as Valentine’s Day.
2. Re-use the same pages each year
Search engines don’t always give direct instructions, but this guidance is clear: use a recurring URL for main holiday pages.
When you’re creating a Black Friday landing page or even a gift guide blog, keep the URL more evergreen. If you post content at website.com/black-friday, your client can continue to build on the historical value and links that have accrued over time. There’s plenty of room in title tags, headers, and copy to specifically mention “2024” and keep pages current.
If there’s already a /black-friday-2023 landing page from last year, use a 301 redirect to a new, more evergreen URL and get on track for seasons to come.
3. Get creative with keyword research for new pages
Keyword research can be tricky for smaller businesses competing against big-box stores. After all, there are only a few spots on the search engine result pages (SERP) for “best gifts for dad,” and outranking major news outlets or retailers is no small task.
Instead, lean into your client’s target audience. They’ll get more site visits by ranking for less competitive keywords by not ranking for the high-volume ones. Visitors from these more hyper-specific searches are also more likely to convert since their search intent is narrowed down.
For example, a sporting goods store could curate a list of gift ideas for baseball players. Or, if your client sells cameras, prints, and lenses, you might suggest a category page of gifts specifically for photography beginners to get started.
4. Don’t forget about internal linking
Planning these pages is a great way to help visitors find the perfect gifts, but it won’t mean much if search engines can’t find them. Anything that makes these pages more discoverable will help search engines recognize and prioritize these pages, while also helping visitors navigate the site more quickly.
Consider adding holiday pages to the main navigation throughout the season and linking them from relevant blogs, category pages, and other areas on the site. Depending on your client’s overall strategy, it can be a good idea to place a link to your Black Friday or Cyber Monday landing page on the homepage as well.
You can also use Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages to link to the most relevant pages on your site, helping buyers go from promo code to product page without getting lost along the way.
5. Promote pages on social and email
While your client waits to earn organic traffic, help them take advantage of Email Campaigns and social media sharing to promote their holiday content. Not only will these channels provide more immediate returns, any backlinks earned from sharing these pages can improve your client’s SEO standing.
You can also suggest sending holiday deals or product bundles to relevant third-party publications that put together gift guides or other holiday round-ups. If your client’s business has a physical location, have them contact their local newspaper or similar websites that cover the area for potential inclusion in local gifting guides. If your client runs a curated online shop, suggest that they target niche blogs their audience may be visiting.
This strategy is called “barnacle SEO,” essentially leveraging another site’s rankings. Your client’s website may not be able to compete with content aggregators, but you can use their top positions to get eyes on your client’s brand indirectly.
6. Take advantage of structured data
Structured data helps search engines learn more about website pages and display useful information right on the SERP. For an ecommerce website, product schema can help search engines better understand prices, ratings, and if the product is in stock.
Squarespace automatically generates product structured data to help your client’s listings stand out.
7. Lean into local SEO
If your client has a brick and mortar storefront, double-check the Google Business fundamentals: name, address, and phone number. You client can also set special hours that can reflect their temporary holiday schedule.
Maybe your client’s shop opens early on Black Friday or has extended hours in December. If they manage a restaurant, confirm their hours on key dates like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. These small details appear in search and keep your client’s audience informed as they plan their shopping.
Additionally, encouraging customer reviews is key for local SEO. These reviews and ratings stand out as customers decide where to spend their holiday budgets.
8. Look back when the season ends
After all that preparation, eventually the holiday season will come to a close. So, what are you to do with all of this hard work?
First, measure the performance, benchmark any data you have access to, and make notes. Consider putting together a retrospective report or presentation that shows the impact of your SEO support for the client. This will help you and your client compare next year’s performance and give you a jump start on what did or didn’t work before you get into planning.
Otherwise, it’s mostly a matter of packing up these pages until next year. Remove holiday pages from the main navigation and remove any key internal links, but definitely don’t delete any URLs. Not only will it save you time next year, those pages will have that much more historical value and authority for the next season.
After all, the 2025 holiday season will be here before you know it.
Related content:
How Professional Web Designers Prepare for the Holiday Season
How to Prepare Your Client’s Ecommerce Website for the Holidays
*This post was originally published on October 28, 2021. It has since been updated.
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
