SEO Tips to Get Found This Black Friday and Cyber Monday

It’s that time of year again! The holiday selling season is right around the corner. 

As your clients prepare for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the like, 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. 

As you re-engage your 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 be sure to give Google 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, too.

2. Re-use the same pages each year

Google doesn’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 “2021” 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 the big box stores. After all, there are only a few spots on the search engine result page (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 than you will 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. If your client sells cameras, prints, and lenses, you might suggest a category page of gifts specifically for photography beginners to get started. 

And as always, consult the Squarespace SEO checklist before adding to a site.

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 Google 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 Landing page on the homepage as well. 

You can also use Black Friday landing pages to link to the most relevant pages on your site, helping your users 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, social media sharing, and newsletters 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 that their audience might be visiting. 

This strategy is called “barnacle SEO,” essentially leveraging another site’s rankings. Your website may not be able to compete with content aggregators, but you can use their top positions to get eyes on your 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 Google better understand prices, ratings, and if the product is in stock. 

Squarespace automatically generates product structured data to help your listings stand out. 

7. Lean into local SEO

If you have a brick and mortar storefront, double-check the Google Business fundamentals: name, address, and phone number. Google Business also allows for “special hours” that can reflect your temporary holiday schedule.

Maybe your client’s shop opens early on Black Friday or has extended hours late in December. If they manage a restaurant, confirm their hours on key dates like Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve. Either way, 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 in Local Packs and even for branded search 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 2022 holiday season will be here before you know it. 

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