Ask any owner about the pluses and minuses of Black Friday and they will tell you the same thing: SO MUCH TRAFFIC! But we all want traffic, right?! And then why is too much traffic a problem?

I will answer your question with a Romanian proverb: What a waste! … in our case, it breaks the connection to the server or spoils the pleasure of browsing because it makes the speed of your site difficult.

So, this year I want you to avoid (almost) ALL the problems you could face during the „golden minute” or any other regular or promotional day.

1. Website Performance

The most common problems during days with above-average online traffic in Romania are:

• 5xx Errors – Server Related Issues: These problems occur due to server overload, often on shared hosting, caused by the number of users trying to access the site simultaneously.
• Slow Loading Speed or „Forever Loading Syndrome”: These are pages that continue to load indefinitely, always displaying new ads or additional JavaScript elements, or taking over 2-3 seconds to fully load a page.
  In short, a poorly performing or non-performing website will lose precious time, during which other stores will sell hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of products.

Black Friday has developed a unique metric known as the „golden minute,” the minute with the highest number of products purchased. In 2019, in Romania, on Black Friday, the golden minute was at 07:27-07:28 when 2,140 online payments were recorded, nearly double compared to the previous year. Imagine that! Orders for several months in just one minute!

But what do we do if during that minute, or 15 minutes, or even longer, our e-commerce platform isn’t working?

That’s what I want to prevent through this article! So let’s find out together what we need to focus on to prevent and successfully overcome the challenges of Black Friday.

SEO Performance and On-Page Recommendations:

• Prepare your landing pages in advance, index them properly, and create some links to them.
  Whether it’s a banner or a page with discounted products, you need to structure them, select the images, set the discount percentage, and ensure that the page is SEO-friendly. You can index it a week or 10 days before the event.
• Notify in advance about the expected traffic increases – pick up the phone, as November will be busy. Most hosting providers will have various issues to resolve, tasks to complete, and may not be able to give you the same importance as now. Call ahead and discuss an extended service package for BF. Adding a second or even third VPS to divert traffic to avoid „site crashes” is a very good idea because you’ll gain orders and traffic like never before!
• Analyze your site for loading issues – recently, Google introduced 4 Core Web Vitals metrics that measure the speed, responsiveness, visual stability, and user experience of a web page.
• Make sure the site runs on the latest installed CMS version and that plugins are up to date. Especially the WooCommerce module can be troublesome if it’s not running the latest version, with updated databases.
• Discuss with the IT/Dev team to address any major security issues and ensure that all pages are 100% HTTPS secure, with an SSL certificate.
• Run the latest version of PHP on the server and platform used. It often happens that the PHP version used by the server is newer (7.4/7.3), but the platform uses an older version (5.4/5.5). It’s a simple and effective update but can cause problems if you have a web property that hasn’t been updated for several years. Backup before making changes that could temporarily close the platform.
• Check the site on GTMetrix and GiftOfSpeed to see the real performance of your e-commerce site or platform. We recommend a score of 90+ and a YSlow grade of A-. Keep the page size below 1 megabyte, use next-gen image formats, and minimize and compile CSS and JS code into a single file.

2.Meta Tags (SEO) for Black Friday 2023 Pages

We all know how important meta tags are for SEO in Black Friday 2023 campaigns, so I’ll share with you some secrets to increase click-through rates and have 100% optimized meta tags.

• Use all available space for creating meta tags: Titles have around 55-60 to 65-70 characters depending on the size of the characters used. Descriptions can be from 150 to 165 characters. To understand how large your meta property is, you can check it online and see if it displays correctly without ellipses and complete. A very important factor is the size in pixels, and if the size exceeds the established threshold, the title or description will not be displayed correctly. This happens when we use larger letters (W, Q, K, for example) that take up more display space.
• Add emoji for improved click-through rate: Remember, users will be able to distinguish between a property with emoji or without it, instantly, directly from Google Search, and studies have shown that they are 50% more likely to click on meta tags with emoji in their body. Growth, growth, growth!
• Address a human: Write meta tags that are created for people, not for Google bots. It is crucial that the written meta properties are compelling, contain a CTA, a differentiator, and an advantage. Make sure you have these 3 elements and reformulate until it feels correct. Remember, repetition is the mother of learning.
• Manually write unique titles and descriptions for each category and subcategory: Often, due to the volume of work, we SEO specialists look for methods and solutions to make our work easier and create bulk meta tags. This practice will not help you in your case because you are competing with other brands that are also preparing and will do everything they can to gain that extra 1% of users. So don’t skimp and invest time to get the perfect result.

3. User Experience and Mobile Usability

Among the most important metrics for a website, metrics that are very difficult to evaluate are those related to UX and Mobile Usability.

It is crucial that when creating promotional pages, especially for a day of discounts like Black Friday 2020 (November 13th), the created pages are user-friendly, optimized for mobile, and have a high degree of usability.

Ensure that all buttons are „easily-tapable,” meaning they can be touched with a finger without touching other visual elements.

Test the page on all mobile browsers such as Safari, Chrome Mobile, Opera Mobile, or Firefox Mobile and see if there are any display errors in the source code, issues with elements being too close together, overlapping text, etc.

In Romania, few brands use UX techniques to optimize main pages on their websites such as the Home page or Main Service/Product Categories.

To ensure good functionality and easy navigation, it’s important to use specific colors for the event. For example, eMag uses the Black – Blue – Red scheme, incorporating Black Friday 2023’s black into eMag’s visual agenda (red-blue).

Other retailers like Altex use black – red – yellow to mark their campaigns. The key is to find a color scheme representative of the event and integrate it with your natural color palette.

Another UX tip I can offer is to leave enough space between elements/sections on the page. It’s challenging to focus on a product/service/differentiator if it’s surrounded by 100 others of the same kind. That’s why I recommend a distance of 10 – 20 px depending on the elements and the variation of differentiators.

Remember! Display clear differentiators for price, brand, availability, delivery, and order processing—put your strengths at the forefront!

Banner Blindness is a scenario to avoid as it leads to the undesirable effect of ignoring discounts. That’s why it’s recommended to create different discounts for similar products. Additionally, you can create „GIFT” or „Promotional Package” offers. Don’t forget you can also offer discounts on new products, but remember to mark them as NEW.

5. Off-Page SEO Optimization for Black Friday 2023

Many online retailers will participate in this year’s Black Friday / Cyber Monday promotional period. And everyone wants to get „a piece of the pie,” meaning a share of the high-volume online traffic occurring from November 13th to 16th.

However, the optimal period to start an off-page SEO campaign is approximately 15-20 days before Black Friday, depending on your budget.

It’s essential for people to know that your online property will have discounts and that you’re organizing a Black Friday / Cyber Monday campaign.

I recommend publishing at least 2 advertorials in Romanian online press to access their audience and promote your brand.

In addition to advertorials, you can take the following actions:

• List promotions on deal comparison websites like Compari or ShopMania.
• Register in e-commerce directories with corresponding offers and publish super deals on them.
• Collaborate with various bloggers/vloggers to create a video material that will drive traffic from both Google Search and YouTube.
• SEO Optimization Conclusion for Black Friday

If you’ve made it this far, it means you’re ready to start a serious SEO promotion campaign for your clients’ Black Friday deals. In short, I want you to understand that on Black Friday, you won’t have to do anything besides monitoring traffic in Analytics. As my colleague Stefan says: Black Friday SEO is like any other day, sit back with popcorn, laugh at your PPC colleagues, occasionally refresh Analytics, and enjoy how much money your clients are making.