Optimise Page Speed for Peak Traffic
Tactic: Leading up to BFCM, focus on improving your website’s load time, especially on mobile devices. Ensure that product pages, checkout, and other high-traffic sections of your site load within 2-3 seconds.
Why: Page speed is a significant factor for both SEO rankings and user experience. Google’s Core Web Vitals update heavily penalises slow-loading websites, especially on mobile. Faster sites perform better in search results and provide a smoother shopping experience, reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions.
Tools: Use Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix to diagnose speed issues, compress images, enable browser caching, and reduce server response time.
Long-Term Benefits:
A faster website leads to improved organic rankings, driving consistent, non-paid traffic even beyond BFCM.
Better user experience and reduced bounce rates contribute to higher retention and repeat visitors, which boosts your long-term revenue.
Enhance Mobile Usability and Responsiveness
Tactic: Test your website across various devices and screen sizes to ensure mobile responsiveness. Fix issues like clickable elements being too close together, text size too small, and slow mobile load times.
Why: Over 50% of global traffic comes from mobile devices, especially during BFCM when shoppers are browsing deals on the go. Mobile usability also directly affects Google’s ranking signals.
Tools: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool and Lighthouse in Chrome Dev Tools to test and improve mobile usability.
Long-Term Benefits:
Optimised mobile performance leads to better rankings on Google’s mobile-first index, driving consistent mobile traffic.
Mobile responsiveness leads to better user engagement and conversion rates, enhancing your overall sales beyond BFCM.
Optimise Site Structure and Internal Linking
Tactic: Streamline your website’s architecture by ensuring a clear, logical structure that helps both users and search engines navigate easily. Implement breadcrumbs, optimise navigation menus, and improve internal linking to key product and category pages.
Why: A clean site structure improves crawlability for search engines, leading to better indexation of your pages. Proper internal linking also distributes link equity across your site, helping critical pages (e.g., best-selling products) rank higher.
Tools: Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to identify any crawl errors, broken links, or orphan pages.
Long-Term Benefits:
A well-structured site ensures that your important pages are easily discoverable by search engines, improving rankings over time.
Enhancing internal linking boosts user experience, encourages deeper site exploration, and drives organic traffic long after BFCM.
Implement Schema Markup
Tactic: Add schema markup (structured data) to your product pages, review pages, and promotions. This could include product schema, price, availability, and even specific Black Friday deals.
Why: Schema markup enhances your search engine results with rich snippets, which increases click-through rates (CTR). Marking up BFCM deals specifically can make your listings stand out in Google during competitive times.
Tools: Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and test with Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool.
Long-Term Benefits:
Structured data increases the visibility and attractiveness of your organic search results, driving higher CTR and potentially better rankings.
Long-term, this creates a more engaging search presence that attracts high-intent traffic beyond the holiday period.
Tactic: Perform a site audit to identify crawl errors, broken links, and redirect issues. Fix 404 errors and ensure that all pages linked internally and externally are working correctly.
Why: Crawl errors and broken links negatively impact both SEO and user experience, leading to lower rankings and higher bounce rates. Ensuring a seamless user journey improves your site’s performance, especially during high-traffic periods like BFCM.
Tools: Use Google Search Console and Screaming Frog to identify and resolve these issues.
Long-Term Benefits: Maintaining a clean, error-free site improves overall SEO performance and user satisfaction. Regularly fixing crawl errors ensures that your website remains competitive in the SERPs post-BFCM.
Tactic: Address Google’s Core Web Vitals, focusing on improving metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This involves optimising images, deferring non-critical JavaScript, and improving server response times.
Why: Core Web Vitals are essential ranking factors, and optimising them can lead to better search engine visibility. These improvements also enhance the user experience, which can directly boost conversions during BFCM.
Tools: Use Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals Report and Lighthouse in Chrome to monitor and improve these metrics.
Long-Term Benefits: By optimising for Core Web Vitals, your website remains competitive in search rankings beyond the BFCM period, ensuring ongoing organic traffic growth.
Tactic: Ensure that all pages on your site are served via HTTPS, including images and other assets. If not done already, move from HTTP to HTTPS to enhance security.
Why: HTTPS is a ranking signal for Google, and customers are more likely to trust and transact on a secure site. With many transactions happening during BFCM, ensuring your site is secure is critical.
Tools: Use SSL Labs’ SSL test to verify the security of your site.
Long-Term Benefits: having a secure HTTPS site boosts both user trust and rankings, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates beyond the holiday season.
Summary of Long-Term Benefits Beyond BFCM:
By implementing these technical SEO strategies, you can set your site up for success not just during BFCM but also for sustained growth and profitability afterward.
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