Here’s what Google recommends for your Black Friday campaigns…

Black Friday is just around the corner and this year, Google has published some recommendations for merchants that will help their campaigns be as visible as possible, especially on search engines. 

Follow SEO Best Practices

This one goes without saying, but if you’re creating landing pages to promote your Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales, it is vital that they are thoroughly optimised from an SEO perspective. 

Make sure your pages have fully optimised title tags, descriptions and plenty of content that takes into account what your potential customers might be searching for. 

If you want your promotion to be found amongst the noise of Black Friday, best practices like this will make sure it has the best possible chance of being found.

Consider internal linking & hierarchy

Make sure your promotional pages are prominent from a navigational perspective. Linking to them from your homepage will indicate to Google their prominence, and will ultimately lead to more efficient crawling. 

And of course, this is a no brainer from a UX perspective. Any user that goes direct to your site is probably on the hunt for a Black Friday deal…

Keep the same URL

Removing your Black Friday / Cyber Monday landing pages as soon as the offer is over may seem like the logical thing to do, but Google actually recommends you use recurring URLs each year. As these are events you’re likely to be participating in on an annual basis, using the same URL each time will actually have a positive effect in the long run. 

This makes perfect sense in terms of SEO. The older a page gets, the more link equity it’s likely to gain, which basically means the amount of external links pointing back to your page. A brand new page is going to have far less authority than one you’ve been using for years. 

So this is one to think about when creating your Black Friday landing pages – go for something generic like ‘/black-friday-deals’ as opposed to time sensitive ones (something like ‘/black-friday-2020-deals’). This means you can use them year on year and ultimately reap the organic search benefits. 

Think about your imagery

Image quality is something that Google considers when crawling your pages. Ensure any imagery you use is up to date, optimised, high quality and visually engaging. Google recommends your images are an “up to date representation” of your sale, and that any white space is trimmed. 

Request a recrawl

Google’s ‘request indexing’ tool is currently undergoing maintenance (due to go live again soon), but once you’re happy with your page and have tested it’s structured data for validity, it’s a good idea to hurry things along a little by requesting a recrawl / indexing via Google’s Search Console. 

For a brand new page, make sure it’s added to your XML sitemap and submit the page to be indexed. If it’s a recurring page (as Google recommends), request a recrawl via the inspection tool to make sure Google is aware of any updates. 

If you’re looking to implement any of these recommendations but don’t know where to start, our SEO experts are here to help. Just get in touch with us today.