Brewing up sales: AI-powered prep for Black Friday

Carolyn
Good morning, everyone. Well, it’s morning for me. I don’t know about… Alex, it’s afternoon for you, right?

Alex
3 p.m. 3 p.m. here, an hour before the rest of Europe, because we’re different.

Carolyn
Okay, so it’s 9 a.m. where I am, but we’re going to be brewing up sales today, which is our beverage non-denominational way of saying I’m having coffee and Alex is having tea. But I am, I guess we’re your host today. I’m Carolyn Shelby, Principal SEO at Yoast. Alex is Alex Moss, also Principal SEO at Yoast. We are going to be talking about prepping for Black Friday with a little bit of AI sprinkled into it because everything does these days. And I have my coffee and Alex has his tea.

Alex
I do have my tea. It’s tea. Yeah, and it’s got my pet, Henry, Henry the dog there, looking very dramatic as usual.

Carolyn
And today is that Alex and I are going to be casually discussing things. So there will not be a whole lot of slides. We thought we would just have a casual conversation with you all, which means we will be answering more questions than we normally do and not necessarily at the end. So if you do happen to have a pressing question that kind of just occurs to you as we’re talking, feel free to pop it into the Q&A section. Just because it’s in the Q&A section doesn’t mean we’re going to wait till the end to answer it. If something looks like a thing, we can work right into the conversation. We’re going to do that. This is not a structured format, friends. This is a coffee talk. And the only reason we didn’t call it coffee talk is because I’m pretty sure that it’s already trademarked. And we didn’t want to violate anyone’s trademark. So are we ready to go?

Alex
Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s chat.

Carolyn
All right. I am going to put… Let me put the screen… Let me figure out how to put the screen. Pin to corner, send to gallery. All right. And that should put… There we are.

Alex
It feels like Q&A now for a whole hour because this is what we usually do on the SEO update, don’t we? We’re usually on the slides and this is the end. But now this is the whole thing. This is good.

Carolyn
It is. So let’s get into it because I feel like we’ve been chatting for a few minutes. There’s been a lot of buildup to the actual coffee. So let’s spill the tea, as it were. Black Friday is coming up. So you might be saying, why? Why are you guys talking about this? It was only two days ago, August. Well, it is now September. And as anyone who has walked into Target or Michael’s or Home Depot knows, it is now fully autumn. Halloween stuff is everywhere. Christmas stuff will be out before you know it. And Black Friday is going to be on top of us in a heartbeat. The reason I wanted to make sure that we talked about all of this early is because coming from a development background, you should absolutely, under no circumstances, be making major technical changes to your website immediately before a great big event. Because that is inviting something to go tragically wrong. I like to have code freezes. You know, you get up to like, you make sure everything’s good up to like a week before and then code freeze. No one is allowed to make changes unless something is actively broken, you know, before that. And also, I feel like with SEO, well, it’s not even I feel like I know, organic SEO in particular isn’t immediate. You need to have time to, you know, your changes need to have time to percolate and establish themselves.

Alex
They kind of, I’ve always like grown up in SEO with the thing of organic is a marathon, whereas paid is a bit of a sprint. That’s how I always compared the two. It was a long, it’s a long run. And being prepared for these things is a great thing. I mean, this doesn’t just apply to just Black Friday, right? This is not, this for the whole period. This can, this can be about Christmas. This can, if you’re in the right vertical or niche, be about, say, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, rather any event, really. You should be thinking a good few days, like a week, if you say, for complete code freeze. For anyone who randomly may not know what code freeze is, it’s not doing anything technical to the site, leaving it alone. At most, you may add content. And even then, I would say it might be prepared prior to when you want to publish it. So all you have to do is hit publish for those things.

Carolyn
You know, for WordPress in particular, I know I would get very upset when it, when there would be updates to plugins and things that would get pushed during code freeze. Because I’m in particular, if I update it and it breaks something, that’s going to be bad. If I don’t update it and it breaks, that is also bad. So how do we do these things? In that situation, if you don’t have a staging website, a staging is like a direct exact copy of the production site, right? Where you can push changes and you can test them to make sure nothing’s going to catastrophically break. It doesn’t mean that nothing will break in production. So you’ve got two websites that are identical, production and staging. It doesn’t mean that production won’t break. But the likelihood is lower, I guess. Just a little bit of safety. That’s my tip number one is you should have a staging environment. You have staging environments for all of your sites, don’t you?

Alex
All of them. I mean, there’s still that.

Carolyn
I thought you were shaking your head because you’re like, no, I don’t need that.

Alex
I had my memories. I had my memories of when I was younger, I just used to upload via FTP just any old stuff live on production. I didn’t care about staging. It was a waste of time for me. But then I got more professional, right? I got more professional, realized that this wasn’t just my site I need to mess around with. This is actual important people and important clients that don’t want any of that stuff. But going to plug-in updates, I would just say if it’s stable and it’s not some massive security issue as an update, leave it. The world isn’t going to end and your site isn’t going to crash if you don’t update at that moment. If it’s running now and it’s stable now, keep it stable and do what you want the Tuesday after.

Carolyn
I just saw in the chat, there’s a question. Does Black Friday, is Black Friday relevant for like home care services? There are. Black Friday is largely, I’m not going to lie, it’s largely for companies that sell things to people, particularly things to people that people would be giving as Christmas presents. Because the idea of Black Friday is this is when people do their Christmas shopping so that the Christmas shopping is done, which means people are buying stuff they can give as gifts and not necessarily digital things, sometimes digital things, but consumables, I guess, is more of a general way to, a general category that I think would be the most applicable. Home care services, can you still do a Black Friday campaign? You can still try to piggyback on the popularity of Black Friday. I don’t know that I would necessarily expect that Black Friday is going to do anything unusual to your sales. The companies that have, we all know why it’s called Black Friday, right? Alex, you know why it’s called Black Friday.

Alex
No, I don’t. I know it’s derived from America.

Carolyn
Shut up. You don’t know?

Alex
Was it to do with power?

Carolyn
No, it has to do with, in accounting, and when you used to have, like, tape in your cash register, negative deductions were printed in red, and positive numbers were printed in black. And you sold so much on Black Friday that your profits for the year were in the black. That is the day that your company was in the black for the year. And in the black means profitable.

Alex
Oh, I did not know. Weirdly, I just didn’t even…

Carolyn
Everybody, today you learned.

Alex
I’m learning a lot as well. Like, I just, I didn’t even look, I just, it was a name. Do you know, like, I haven’t, I didn’t look into, like, why is Valentine’s Day called Valentine’s Day, for example. Like, I don’t know any of, any of those things. I just know that they exist. I mean, we had a talk before about how little I knew about history. Like, this is, this is just engulfed in, in the lack of history of some naming conventions. I just, my job wasn’t to know what it’s, what it meant, it’s what it, what it was doing, right? And, and everything. But your explanation reminds me of, you know, tourist destinations. You know, like in Europe, you’ve got, like, a Greek island, and they make all their money in July and August and a bit of September. And that just sorts them out up until the next season.

Carolyn
Honestly, not everyone’s, not everyone’s peak is, is Black Friday. But for, for people that sell things that might be given as Christmas presents, that is absolutely what’s happening. All right, so we need to get into the nitty gritty. I, sorry, I find it interesting that people are unaware. I find it interesting that Alex is unaware of where these names came from. Some of the things I wanted to talk about today, while we’re having our coffee, is there was actually a report released recently by WooCommerce. It’s their 2025 Black Friday, Cyber Monday trends report. And this is based on a survey that they ran in July of this year of about 250 merchants and agencies. And some of the, some of the findings were pretty interesting. One of the findings I found to be the most interesting is that in 2024, only 13% of the respondents prioritized website optimization as something they were going to focus on for their big Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales. This year, it’s 33%. So the number of people who are actively concerned about the optimization of their website for this sale has more than doubled. Merchants are recognizing that slow and clunky websites cost sales more than just, you know, a missing discount code. And I think that’s pretty, that’s pretty fair. We’re early enough in the process now that I would say, one of the things you need to do is not only make sure that your coupons work and your coupons work the way you want them to, but you need to be really kicking the tires of your entire site. Go through as a, come in as a user, as a, you know, make sure you’re not logged in. Try to buy stuff. Try to buy stuff in, in strange combinations. Try to, to use weird currencies. Try actively to break your website. If you don’t, if it doesn’t break, hooray. But if it does break, you now, if you’re doing it this, you know, this week, you have time to get that fixed, to make sure that when the crush of people comes, you’re not going to be dealing with a broken website on top of people that are maybe trying to buy something and getting mad and leaving, or trying to buy something and for some reason they’re able to stack coupons until it’s free, that would also be bad. You really need to be a little creative. You could, and this is, I think, where the AI stuff comes in. You could ask, like, ChantGPT or whatever your favorite, your favorite AI LLM is. If I were going to break my website, what kinds of things should I try to do to break my website? And it’ll give you a list and you can use that for QA. If any of you are in QA, I think you would know, like, generally there are, you get a little list of, these are all the things I should try to do to break the website. If you don’t have one of those lists, that’s a great way to make it. Have you ever, you do that, right? You actively try to break, you QA your own site, right, Alex?

Alex
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I call it pen testing. That’s what I’ve always, penetration testing, but that’s more for hacker stuff as well as QA stuff that we do. But yeah, there’s a number of tests. I think there’s a GitHub repo as well that can provide some automation and tests in there. I know that GitHub also do, I know that we do this within Yoast. I forgot, I don’t know if it’s just Copilot that’s connected to it. And when I say Copilot, I don’t mean Microsoft Copilot. GitHub have another product called Copilot.

Carolyn
That’s because that’s not confusing.

Alex
Of course, of course. And in there, there’s QA that it does. So when you commit anything, it will look through that code, see if there’s any conflicts, see if there’s any errors. So there’s a little bit of QA testing there. But there’s also third party. There’s probably QATesting.com, I would assume, is an existing website. Sites like that that do that. And of course, there’s real-life testing as well. User testing where you can get your great aunt to do a recording and just browse the website and see what the problem is. And you’ll be surprised at things that you overlook because it’s your own site or maybe because you’re no longer a beginner at browsing websites. So, for example, I know I can’t look at a website like a normal person anymore because of the job that I’ve done over a generation. Carolyn will be the same. We look at very specific things as naturally that’s what we do now. So there are ways of seeing a more objective, naive way of user experience, which is very handy, which is really important because they’re the customer, right? And the quicker that they can get down the funnel into the actual sale, the better.

Carolyn
So a good example of this, and I know as soon as you started saying GitHub and things like that, there might be some people whose eyes are glazing over. The easy, non-technical, non-power developer way to do some testing. Recently, I had my mother, who lives in a retirement community, buy something from one of my websites. She’s like, oh, I said, oh, mom, I’ll send it to you for free. She goes, no, no, no, I don’t want to rob you of a sale. I’ll go do it. And then she called and goes, okay, well, I tried and it didn’t work. Like, in what way did it not work, mom? You have to tell me, like, specifically, what did you do that did not work? Well, I tried to use Venmo and I couldn’t get it to go. Like, okay, well, I had just recently added Venmo as an option. So that was mildly concerning to me. I’m like, okay, all right. Well, I know I’m not going to get exact information from my mom on how Venmo was broken because she’s not going to articulate that to me. So what I did was I went through as a user and I tried to buy something with Venmo. Turns out it wasn’t broken, but the user experience is really not cool. It was confusing and I just had to, like, kind of plow through and trust that it was going to work. But because now I know that that’s a weird experience, I can kind of hide the Venmo and I can add some language in the checkout about it’s not going to look like it’s going through, but I promise you it’s going through. Wait until you see this screen and follow the prompts. You know, I can make the user experience better because now I know where it’s confusing because somebody, you know, somebody let me know, which actually goes back to the notes. There was a note here. Ah, the customer experience is the differentiator. That was another thing that came out of that report. The site performance is the customer experience. So your express checkout, your buy now, pay later, hosting upgrades, all of these things are designed to remove friction. And that’s where your competitive edge is going to lie. Like I had with the Venmo problem. It’s not that it was actually physically broken. It’s that it was a weird, it was a weird, non-smooth customer experience. And for a lot of people like my mother, she’s just going to bail because it feels weird and it’s hard and it’s unfamiliar. So she’s not going to surrender her money. All of this is about making it easy for people to part with their cash. I mean, that’s really what it boils down to.

Alex
Yeah, and it’s also worth noting that payment providers, and I think Shopify also does this directly, they can provide test credit card numbers. So you can go through the process and it doesn’t charge anything. It doesn’t count towards inventory and stuff like that. But it shows you how you can go all the way to the end and actually get a confirmation page, you know, which is also actually a little tidbit of additional information. Once they’ve completed the purchase, is there anything more you want them to do? Do you want them to join your mailing list? Do you want them to follow you on social? Do you want them to join some other community on Reddit or Slack or Discord or wherever you are? That, to me, is like an additional conversion for something, calling it a conversion, widening the definition of what a conversion is, but may not be a sale. But it’s definitely worth doing that so you can upsell, cross-sell, offer incentives and discounts in the future for next year, perhaps. But, yeah.

Carolyn
That reminds me. If you look below where Alex and I are talking, there’s like this green button that says prepare for Black Friday with Yoast. If you were to click on that, that’ll take you to a page that’s got a lot of kind of evergreen information, documentation and other just general sales tips. So if you’re like, if you’re thinking yourself, never mind Black Friday, I need to get my ship in order in general. There’s a lot of great information there. So please do feel free to click on that. And I would prefer that you didn’t click on it while we were talking. But, you know, whatever. If you want to go check that out, that’s going to be a wealth of resources. Back to what you were saying, Alex, about the upsells. Upsells were another thing that came through in that report as being really hot this year. People are looking at ways to, instead of like just throwing discounts at people, try figuring out how you can get recurring revenue from them with like subscriptions or bundling to get people to buy a little bit more than they would have before. Buy more, save more, that kind of stuff. It’s really considered to be a long-term play for loyalty and not just a single weekend kind of spike in your sales. So as far, one thing I was thinking about was how would I figure out how to do this using AI to assist me? I think what I would do is, so in WooCommerce specifically, and I know some people have Shopify, but my experience is within WooCommerce. You can look at year over year comparisons. You get marketing reports. So if you go and you look at your analysis, you can isolate to just Black Friday. So if you know what the dates for last year’s Black Friday were, you can isolate to just that. When you find a report that has information that you like, like the things that were sold, the number of things that were sold, so on and so forth, I couldn’t find a way to export that. But in your browser, you can print that page out to a PDF. So print that page to a PDF. You can then upload it into ChatGPT and say, based on my sales for last year’s Black Friday, are there any trends or patterns you see that might tell me how I could better bundle my products? Or are there opportunities for bundling? Or are there opportunities for subscriptions? What advice can you give me to maximize my sales for Black Friday based on this report or these reports? Because you can upload several different PDFs or Excel spreadsheets or documents into ChatGPT in a single prompt window and ask it for advice. Explain to it, you know, information about your store and see what it says. If you’re if you don’t trust yourself necessarily to be able to look at that data and find those patterns for yourself.

Alex
Mm hmm. Yeah. And I would also say maybe flip that on the list. What didn’t work and analyze why? Like decide, actually, should I be concentrating in the same way? What doesn’t work? Or can I improve it? And if so, how? And again, that’s a conversation that you can have with the LLM. It also may be worth now saying that for the next three months, what is it, three months from now? Wait, September, October, November, right? Yeah.

Carolyn
All of September, all of October, most of November. Yeah. So you’ve got you’ve got.

Alex
I would I would probably recommend to people. And if we’ve got no affiliate links, don’t worry, to join up with a pro account of whatever your choice of AI based LLM is. Right. So get Claude Pro, get Perplexity or ChatGPT. Cancel it on December the 1st if you need to and you no longer need it. But it’s worth having the extra pro so you can upload more documents. Because let me tell you now, once you upload one document, you’re going to have more. That answer is going to only make you think a bit more and it’s going to want you to upload more. And you don’t want those limits that all of the free versions are going to give. So even just for three months, it’s worth the investment, you know. And then you can even calculate that to the extra sales that will probably generate. And as well as that, sorry, it was you can’t you don’t need to just do PDF exports, for example. You can go with other data things. So I don’t know if anyone’s heard of MCPs out there. You can say yes or no on the chat. I’m happy to explain what they are in more detail. But in a TLDR, they’re a way of connecting data sources right into your LLMs. And Claude does it and Perplexity does it. Both, again, need pro accounts. But you can connect MCP. You can have an MCP for, say, Search Console. Once you connect it, it takes about three minutes to do. Once I’ve stopped waffling, I’ll share the link. Richard Baxter, who explains it really well. You can ask questions about the data. So you can say, OK, based on my Search Console data, what, again, what did well last year? What actually didn’t do well and why? Can you connect that with keywords and pages? You can also connect Google Analytics as an MCP. Shopify have an MCP, although they don’t do data analytics. I am also aware that Ahrefs and Sistrix do. I don’t think Semrush does at the moment. But you can connect all of them together. And it’s like having a USB-C stick into the hard drive or server of the dialogue that you’re having. You can ask any question about all four sources. And it will bring all of that context together to provide an answer.

Carolyn
So I use… I’m not going to say that I find the MCPs too complicated to use because I would never admit that. But I’ve found that with like a ChatGPT Pro kind of account, you can make a single project and name it like MyStore. And within that single project, you can upload, I think it’s up to 20 documents. And the documents don’t necessarily have to be PDF. However, if you have a lot of PDFs that are like one page or two pages, you can stitch them together into what Adobe calls a binder, which qualifies as one document. So if… Like I did this with my blog. I took every single blog post and I exported it into a single page PDF. And then I stitched all of them together into one binder and uploaded that one binder, which counted as one document, into a project. So now that project has access to everything I’ve ever written for that blog. And it can refer to that whenever it needs to. So when you ask questions within that project, it’s got all of that context to look at when it’s making decisions. For your sales, that could be really interesting because you can use that to tighten up your product descriptions, tighten up your alt text, tighten everything up. Because another one of the things that came out of this report is how important it is to be mentioned in the AI overviews and have your product feed in Google’s shopping. Because shopping is one of those things that doesn’t trigger an AI overview, right? You want to make sure that your products are available in those carousels. You have to have all of that done well in advance of Black Friday. That is not a thing you can start at the last minute. That is a thing that you have to do right now if you’re going to make sure that you’re there. But you can ask for all kinds of things. If I were a user, and maybe you could describe your typical user, what kinds of questions would I have about my product that I should be answering in the product description or on the product page? And the AIs can give you a lot of that information if you’re feeling stuck or like you’re not able to brainstorm that. I think another place to look for product questions, if you have a product that would be discussed there, places like Reddit are where people go to complain about products. So let’s say you sell super automatic espresso makers. There are entire subreddits about super automatic espresso makers. And people will tell you all the things they like about them, all the things they don’t, the things they wish were different. So anything that you can do to address those specific complaints or concerns or questions in the body copy of your product page is going to be helpful for you to get into the AI layer. And then also just in general organic search because people have questions.

Alex
Yeah. And again, you can ask that with the chat dialogue as well. Well, you know, here’s my product page. Figure out what it, don’t give it any information. Let it figure out everything it needs to know because that’s what, you know, a user is going to do and that’s what it needs to bring out. And then ask it what it’s missing based on third party perspectives. Maybe even mention Reddit. Well, actually, there’s a subreddit of espresso makers, right? What inside this subreddit are people asking or complaining about that I’ve not covered as a frequently asked question or part of the product information and then answer it, you know, and then that sort of knowledge will be synthesized and be found useful and people will go and journey into your journey further into your site.

Carolyn
I think one of the other things I wanted to mention while we’re talking about getting into those AI, into that AI information layer. If you have information that is hidden behind tabs, and I have several tabs on my product pages, anything that’s not visible on initial load for the AIs is not going to be read. Google can see things that are on the tabs that aren’t visible. But depending on how the information is accessed and this close to the event, you’re not going to be in the training data. You’re going to be at the inference layer. The inference layer, I don’t know how many of you guys have seen Mission Impossible, but, you know, Tom Cruise, he comes down on the wire, right? And then grabs stuff and then comes right back up. That’s what the LLM does when it’s getting information off of your page directly. It swoops in, it grabs all the text, basically, and then it jumps right back up. It doesn’t crawl. It doesn’t, it fans out, but it doesn’t fan out at that level. And it also can’t do anything that a human can do, like untoggle a toggle or change a tab. So if it requires a toggling of a toggle or a changing of a tab to see that text, that text will not get read. So if it’s very, very important, please make sure that you have, you have that visible on first load, especially if you anticipate anyone coming through with an AI or LLM, which we should all sort of assume is going to happen, even if it doesn’t.

Alex
Yeah, it might eventually. But do you want to wait for that? No, I wouldn’t want to wait for that now. It’s better to scroll. I’d rather let an LLM scroll more than it may need to than just glance over something and miss something else. And let’s face it, things like FAQs and product reviews, which again, your third-party perspectives aren’t going to be visible, and therefore it won’t bring that back into the synthesized answer, which is something you definitely want to cover. We should talk about bundles very quickly as well, because that seems to be more of a thing that’s a lot more successful, especially this year. And not just like you said, throwing out discount codes. Here’s a discount code for product A, B, and C. But this is, again, something you could maybe ask the LLM. Like, is there a good relationship between these two that aren’t bundles, that people are buying certain two specific products or services? And that’s something I could potentially bundle into something that’s more valuable for them and a bit more of a saving, and potentially an upsell from someone who would have just bought one thing. You know, if a person buys product A, what’s the likelihood that they’ll buy any other products and what that may be? Who knows? And again, that can be put into the funnel after purchase as well. And through email, which is something else we need to discuss soon as well.

Carolyn
You know what? When you’re thinking about bundles, I think people have a tendency… So, like, I was looking at this really… It’s a men’s soap company. So, it’s called, like, Dr. Squatch or something like that. It’s got a big Sasquatch on it. It’s manly smells, you know, right? They tend to bundle… If you get, like, the Minecraft soap, they’ll offer you the Minecraft deodorant and the Minecraft cologne in a bundle. Some things, though, don’t necessarily bundle… And I’m sorry if I jumped into this in a weird spot, but, like, that’s where my brain goes. Some things don’t have natural bundles like that. If you have a product that doesn’t have a… Okay, let’s say it smells like jujubes. You have jujube soap, but you don’t have jujube deodorant or you don’t have jujube cologne. That doesn’t mean that you can’t bundle that together. Think about what is going to smell good with that particular soap. Hopefully, it’s something that doesn’t have an analog product, right? So, if you have jujube soap, but you have unicorn deodorant and there’s no corresponding unicorn soap, you could bundle those two things together, assuming it’s not going to smell horrible, and say… And just call it a package rather than relying on everything to be matchy-matchy. So, come up with suggestions for people to sort of make their own bundles to get them to buy more stuff. Some people will see, okay, I want the soap, but I don’t see a matching deodorant. I don’t see a matching cologne. So, I’ll just get the soap. Instead, tell them, our soap sommelier has said that this soap smells good with this deodorant. Why don’t you get these together? And then, oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll try it. And then, now you’ve got an extra sale. Another thing that I do, rather than just throw discount codes at people, is I will point out that I have flat rate shipping. So, shipping is going to be $5. It’s $5 whether you buy one thing or you buy 20 things, as long as those 20 things don’t exceed 4 pounds of weight. So, I’ll say, you’re already paying $5 for shipping. Why don’t you buy this, this, and this? You might as well. You’re still only paying $5 for shipping. Or, if you get to $50, the shipping’s free. So, why don’t you throw this in your basket? And then, you don’t have to pay any shipping at all. So, just little things like that, as they’re going through the process, can help encourage people to add more stuff to their cart. Especially since all these things make great Christmas presents, which presumably is what Black Friday is about.

Alex
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it may also be worth noting that that may make you have to think a bit more about inventory. And that you need to be prepared for that, right? You don’t want, and what to do if something actually sells out, right? So, let’s say you have 100 of whatever. And it goes by, you know, midday, that day. And you’ve still got the whole day. And you’re like, oh no. I could have done more. Well, maybe there is a solution for that. Maybe you can still, for example, promise today’s price. Despite it not being in stock, you can still get the order that day. And worry about it in December once it’s all calmed down. Or you can get an email. You can get their email address. I’m really sorry about it. But we promise you, if you put your email in here, right? We’ll get the inventory in the next week. And we’ll honor today’s price, perhaps.

Carolyn
Like, whatever you guys want to do. And you can absolutely do that in WooCommerce. WooCommerce has a couple different options for you. Where you can either continue to take orders for something. And just specify a delivery date at a later time. Which I believe means that you can actually charge the money for it. Or at least record the sale price. So if you run out, it will give them the sale price. But it’ll say, but we can’t ship this until whatever date it is that we think we’re going to get this next shipment. You can also ask for their email address and notify them when it’s back in stock. But then they’re going to lose the special price. Or you can just notify them that it’s not available and take it off the site entirely. Now, because we are three months out, I would go back and look at last year’s best sellers. See how much you sold. Did anything run out? Did anything get low? Did you have way too much of something that didn’t sell at all? And figure out what you need to order now to make sure that you have proper stock levels for the big day to ensure that you’re not going to run out between Black Friday and Christmas for any of these items that you think you have a potential to sell or that you plan on promoting heavily. Nothing, literally nothing is worse than promising or having a big rollout for something and then selling out in the first 15 minutes. People are like, oh, no, that’s great. That means everybody wants it. People might want it then. It doesn’t mean they’re going to want it next week. So, you know, I’d sell while the selling’s good. Strike while the iron’s hot. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I’m just, I’m not finding it at the moment.

Alex
And again, you can probably flip that. And let’s say there’s something you just can’t shift. You really want to shift it. You can maybe make vape incentive, perhaps. Like maybe you’ve got 90. You bought 100 of this stock and only 10 have sold in the last 10 months. You want to get rid of the 90. Maybe on the front end, it says that there’s only four left in stock. Provides fake urgency, for example, to get rid of something if that’s what you want to do. And again, you can do that with any product, right? The amount of times that I’ve been on an airline flight. Like I don’t know, you won’t use EasyJet much in America, but in Europe, it’s like only three seats left. And you’re like, are there though? Are there? I mean, but it still influences me to look at that box and the options. And maybe I will get it. And it says three left at this price. That’s also an interesting one because you’re like, oh, right. Well, it’s not going to go down, is it? Even though it might. But here in this instance, it won’t. There’s only three left. And once we’re sold out, it will be back in stock next week. But it will be not with the discount. And that, again, will make people go, oh, well, maybe let’s get it. There’s only three or four left.

Carolyn
I think one of the things I also want to mention since I think sometimes, especially when we have a lot of products on our site, there’s sometimes things that we skip or miss when we’re adding the products into the store in the beginning. Now is a really good time not only to worry about, well, make sure that you have enough stock. Make sure that your coupons work correctly in the way you want and that you’ve got the products bundled and sorted and you’re making recommendations. People who bought this also bought this, those kinds of things. Just go through, if nothing else, and make sure that you’ve got all of the fields filled in. You’ve got your long product description, your short product description. You’ve got your item attributes. There are attributes that you are required to have to be in the Google product feed. If you haven’t logged into your Google shopping product feed account dashboard at Google to look to see if you’ve got errors or warnings, you should do that now, too. Because if you’re missing a SKU or you’re missing some code that’s required or a size, I got dinged on not having sizes specified. And it’s a lapel pin. They don’t come in sizes and they fit everyone. I know you have to have a size or you cannot be shown in France. I’m like, oh, okay. Well, so I had to go back in and I had to add a size. But I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t logged in and checked. So I would say log into, if you’re not in Google shopping and you want to be, you need to get on that right now. If you are, log into the dashboard and make sure that your feed is functioning 100% correctly and see if there’s any warnings or errors that you should be fixing. And then go through the back end of your setup, especially, well, like I said, I’m more familiar with WooCommerce. Make sure all the fields are filled in. You should be doing this with your Yoast settings, with your general blog settings. You should not have things that are not configured. If I had a nickel, honestly, for every time I saw something say, well, I installed Yoast and I’m not sure if it’s helping. Did you configure it? What? Yes, you have to configure it. If I had a nickel, I could have a really, really nice Frappuccino right now. Now is the time when you want to make sure that everything is buttoned up and in tip-top shape before we get into the really crazy part of the shopping season.

Alex
And they should all be connected, right? I mean, I’ve always had the thought of nothing should be completely siloed away, especially if you’ve got quite a few products. There should always be a recommendation. Go back to Carolyn’s mention of a sommelier, right? It’s actually a good thing of a pairing. But also, in a restaurant and you’ve got some fish and there’s a pairing of a wine that’s ran out, they’ll have a backup recommendation, right? So if you go back to the out-of-stock stuff, maybe there is something else that’s quite similar that, again, can get the sale. And, you know, so what? Maybe they got in too late. They snoozed and they loosed. You can’t say lost. Snoozed and lost. But then at least there’s something still there for them to potentially convert on or get some data capture from. So that’s definitely helpful to do because it never ends, right?

Carolyn
And at least in WooCommerce, you would do that with tags. So you can, there’s the categories, but then there’s also tagging. So I have a lot of products that are green. I can tag my products with green. And even if they’re very, one’s a puppy and one is a rock, if they’re both green, they will both show up. Did I lose my…

Alex
Branding. It’s just the branding around has gone from purple. I still see everything else.

Carolyn
Okay.

Alex
We’re still purple, guys. We’re still, oh, it’s back. We’re still purple.

Carolyn
It’s back. Okay. I’m like, something changed and I don’t know what changed. So, oh, here’s a good question. I’m working on product descriptions, meta description. Would you recommend linking Google Shopping before it’s finished or wait? I think Google Shopping will be a little picky about what you don’t have completed. The descriptions, I don’t think it will care about necessarily, but it does care about shipping in a big way. Like, it’s very particular about how you ship and you have to do a lot of work to set up. These are the countries I ship to and this is what our shipping policies are and this is what our shipping costs are. And then it’s also really uptight about making sure that you have a policy where you promise to ship within a certain amount of time. And I’m not 100% sure what that’s about, but I usually just go and it’s like you have to ship between seven and ten days. I’m like, all right, that’s not actually going to happen, but okay, I’ll say that. I shouldn’t have admitted that out loud. You have to make sure that you’re at least meeting all the requirements to be included in Google Shopping or it’s not going to matter. So I would, you know, even if you haven’t completed everything, maybe go try and see what it complains about. So at least you know what to do first so that you can get it, you can get in there quickly. I think that’s what I would do there.

Alex
Yeah. And you don’t want to like fill out all 100 products and then you submit and then you find out there’s an area you have to go all the way back to the beginning and go, like not all the way back, but like do stuff, but maybe do five and then upload it. It’ll tell you what the problem is and then you’ll learn that lesson and make sure that that stuff’s populated. There’s another question from Aaron here. With regards to filling out everything in Yoast SEO Premium, if my SEO preview is okay, do I really need to fill out the social info tab too? Is it significant?

Carolyn
Well, if you look at it and you think it’s okay, then it’s okay.

Alex
Yeah. I would only say the only way to optimize for social is if you want a bit of clickbait. I always use the, I always use the example of those back in the day, back in the day, a few years ago. Do you remember those clickbaity things that all ended up on X and Facebook of these two people met and you’ll never guess what happened. Like that’s not the, that’s not the title of the post. That’s not the title. That’s not the meta title or even the meta description that’s been purposely put in to Facebook and X as the social, social structured data. And that’s to lure people into the site. And you can do that too. It depends how granular you really want to get, but maybe Facebook is a huge audience for you. And in that case, I may say, yeah, have a look at it at least. Maybe get an optimal Facebook image. I would say if you’re going to do anything, get the image sorted instead of letting it pull from the site. If that doesn’t look good. And Facebook and X, they all have their own weird pixel, optimal pixel thing. I think if you say it changes every six months, so it’s worth, it’s worth just looking out there and seeing what, what the proportion ratio is. But yes, I would say again, it kind of depends, doesn’t it? But yes, if you are so, if you are focused on social, then you should, which is actually something we haven’t even, we’ve only got 15 minutes left and already we haven’t even discussed social, but we can do that quickly. Do content, do shorts, make sure they’re annotated, make sure it has that text, you know, that annoying text as people speak. It just updates their like subtitles. Do that, link to something, tag it with analytical data so you can actually understand how many people are coming in from that one TikTok video, for example. Or maybe you’ll do a month’s worth of TikTok video uploads and realize you’re getting absolutely nothing from it. And again, you can go and ask an LLM, what’s going on here? How can I improve it? And actually, if you wanted to add another layer, if you’ve got something like ChatGPT Pro, where you can work with agents, or you’re using something like Comet Browser, you can actually ask it on page how to make these improvements and what’s missing, instead of like exporting something, which is good for some things. But if you want something right on the page right now, it’s very good to look at those things and see what can potentially convert someone a bit more.

Carolyn
I wanted to clarify. When Aaron asked if the preview looks okay, do you need to fill out the social tab info too? I think he’s talking about on the page, on a specific post. There are, so in your sidebar, there are settings and configurations that are not at the page level. They’re at the plugin level. And you can set, there’s a whole bunch of configurations there that I see people not using. They’ll do the ones that are on the page because they see those more often. But the ones in the settings are where I think a lot of people miss an opportunity. The things that you can set there are often defaults or catch-alls. So you can set a default social media image if you don’t have a good social media image on the page. And on the page, it’ll grab the main image, right? Or you can change it to be something custom. What I want you to do is make sure that you have the default settings in the settings. So left-hand your screen. I hope you guys see left when I do that. Left-hand your screen, down where the Yoast plugin stuff is, there’s settings. There’s general. It goes through all of these different things. There’s a social tab there where you can define your default social media image and your default headline. And you can be picky about what you use. It can either use the post title. You can use the post title but write a little thing in front or a little thing in the end. For the description, you can use the excerpt. If you define the excerpt or the excerpt will take the first couple lines of text from the article. There are all these things that you can set up to make sure that nothing goes out blank. And it gives you a little bit of control so you don’t necessarily have to do everything manually on the page. So I guess my advice there is if you have not gone through or looked at the settings, not at the page level, but at the plugin level in a while, go back through that and make sure that everything is the way you like it and ready for the coming shopping season.

Alex
Oh, yeah. Do we talk about emails?

Carolyn
I don’t even think we talked about emails yet.

Alex
We haven’t talked about emails. Yeah. Emails are really, really useful. I mean, for me, it’s free data. Well, you say free. I mean, it may cost to send something like MailJet or MailBlue or whatever your email handler is. But retain those emails. Go through them. Make sure that they’re not just churn or fake emails. Like, clean it up and segment them. You know, you can do that inside Shopify and Woo or the external. If you have an external mail provider and CRM and so on, they can make clever ways. Some of them have AI built into their solutions now where they can tell you about ways to segment, best ways, automation. We should start again engaging now because I’m telling – I don’t know what it’s like in whatever country everyone’s in, but I know that I’m only weeks away from seeing Christmas ads already. And I think it’s early, but now in my professional life, I understand that, you know, everyone’s been – everyone’s already had their meetings in June about what’s going to happen in Christmas. Their strategy should be done by today, you know. And if not, at the very most, when Q4 starts in four weeks from now, I would even say from a Black Friday point of view, if you haven’t got everything sorted by the end of this month, hence why we’re brewing up sales now and not, you know, in a month from now, then you may be too – not too late, but too late to make as much impact as you could if you just concentrate in these first few weeks of it.

Carolyn
Well, you know, some of the things we talked about earlier, making sure you have enough stock. If you need to reorder stock, you need to do that today. Or it may not come in in time. If you want to offer anything new, you need to do that. You need to be on it and know what you’re doing today because you have to get it into the site and let it organically have time to kind of take root and Google to be aware of it in time for the Black Friday things. One of the other things that came out of that survey was that companies that sell more than a million products annually have started in June, like you said. Small merchants often wait until October, but the big players are already running everything by then. They’ve already got their sales, you know, their campaigns, their PPC campaigns, their email campaigns. Everything has already started by then. So if you’re thinking, I can wait until Halloween, you cannot wait until Halloween. You have to have the plans ready.

Alex
Yeah, and it’s also worth noting that Black Friday isn’t just one day. Not only is it that weekend and the whole weekend, so that’s something to think about as well because some people have Cyber Monday. Is Cyber Monday even a thing or has it just been engulfed by Black Friday? So it’s still a thing. So if you sell digital products, that’s something definitely to look into. But there’s two other dates that may be of interest to some, depending on what shop you are and what you do. The 11th of November is called Singles Day. And I think it’s China that have a big thing about Singles Day. I don’t know if it’s about being single, but the 1111 is very important in some Asian culture. And some people do marketing around that day. That’s one thing to know. Another one was in an interview with, I think it was the head of consumer retail of Google in Europe. She did a great interview. And in that, she told me about Fake Friday. Have you heard of Fake Friday?

Carolyn
No.

Alex
I hadn’t heard of it. And she was talking from a PPC point of view. But we can talk about organic as well. But if you’re doing paid, this is, again, something that’s quite important. Fake Friday is the Friday before Black Friday because some people don’t know exactly when Black Friday is. Right? And they said that people who put budget into paid activity for the Friday before Black Friday found that their CPA was cheaper because it’s not Black Friday, is it? It’s the week before. Right? And I’ll tell you now. And I’ll tell you now. I’m searching for Black Friday stuff the week before Black Friday in preparation because all of you kind people over here have already done your homework and they’ve already, the information’s already out. Some people may start buying then. Some may decide, actually, I’m going to apply a different discount then. Maybe I’m going to apply a bigger discount than Black Friday because you’re just so observant and well-prepared. And that’s just one thing. That’s from an organic point of view. But from a paid point of view, you can get a bigger bang for your buck, pound, euro, whatever it is. So those two are the dates of, like, just little extra things of the people get confused. Well, accommodate for those people. That’s no problem.

Carolyn
So I’m looking at the time. We have one question in the Q&A that I want to make sure that we answer. But then let’s talk about we’ve got some discounts for you guys since you were so kind to join us for our inaugural coffee chat. Let’s start answering this question. So is everything we’re talking about also valid in other languages? So German, Italian, French. And that sometimes the results are different in AI tools, in particular for scraping text, which I know you can’t see because it was a long question. I would say generally, yes. The AIs, AIs in particular, are very good at translating. So if you are scraping, let’s say, questions and answers out of Reddit and looking for insights out of that, my experience has been that they’re very good at translating. And they’ll pick up the nuance of the questions or the sentiment and be able to translate that well for you into German or Italian or French. I use ChatGPT in particular to write Swedish. And I’ve shown what I’ve written to my native Swedish speaking friends. And they are amazed. Like, when did you get so good? I’m like, well, yesterday, actually. My Swedish is awful. But ChatGPT is very, very good. And it’s very, very convincing. And they’ve gotten to the point where they’re good with natural sounding idioms and colloquialisms and just understanding the slang and not necessarily the formal book. You know.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
The high German. You know, they’re good at low German, too.

Alex
Oh, do you know what I’m going to do? Because we’re nearing the end. I’m going to bring up your slides back. Well, the slide. We’re going to shove a discount code. Because we have a discount for you, which I believe is extremely generous. It should be the next slide, shouldn’t it?

Carolyn
I’m getting to it. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

Alex
You’re killing me.

Carolyn
Don’t do this.

Alex
Stupid technology.

Carolyn
I know. Stupid technology.

Alex
Is it the last one?

Carolyn
Oh, why is it?

Alex
It’s loading.

Carolyn
Why should it be slow now?

Alex
Oh, well, we’re in the middle of Q&A. But the next one.

Carolyn
I got it.

Alex
So here, hopefully you can scan a QR code or you can print screen this or something. And maybe if Neringa’s listening, I don’t know, maybe it’ll be in the email afterwards to thank you for coming. But yes, if you enter this voucher, you’ll get 30% off. And I think with WooCommerce, it’s already entered. And yes, Neringa’s confirming this will be in the mail. So you don’t need to get your phone out quickly and take photos of the QRs.

Carolyn
Although you can if you are really lucky if you want to do it early. Get your phone out quickly and do this if you want.

Alex
Yes. And this is a great example of us offering some Black Friday deal in September, at the beginning of September. Right? See, you can do things at any time to get other incentives.

Carolyn
So we have like four minutes left. If you get around, if you’re interested in reading, there’s a really good, there’s some good marketing books that are old. I think they’re from like the early 80s, maybe by Al Rees and Jack Trout. One of them is called Marketing Warfare. That one might only be by Al Rees. It talks about doing ad campaigns off peak season because the ads themselves are cheaper for you to run. So if you’re running Black Friday campaigns outside of the traditional Black Friday timeframe, it’s going to cost you less to run more ads. If you’re running Black Friday, if you’re running Black Friday, you’re going to cost you less to run more ads. If you’re running the dollar goes a lot farther in terms of buying those ads and getting that message out.

Alex
Yeah. There’s half a question here by Mad Marsu. Or is asking to do so AI could help? This is with translations. I would say if you wanted to do a translation, I’ve not done much translating. I’ve done it. You’ve done a bit more, Carolyn. You mentioned that perhaps making it translate in one LLM and then taking that translation into a different LLM and asking it to translate back into whatever language you’re using. So if we were doing English to Swedish, you ask it to do Swedish. You take the Swedish. You take it into a second LLM and ask it to just translate that back and see how close it is because it’s not perfect yet, is it?

Carolyn
I use Google Translate. I will ask ChatGPT to write it for me and then I take it and I put it into Google Translate because Google Translate tends to be a little bit more literal and less flexible. And if it translates well back to me from that, I feel like it’s pretty good. There are still, depending on the language, nuances that only natives are going to be sensitive to. And you do want to be aware of those nuances because much like I can tell someone who’s native British versus who’s trying to write for Americans because they do weird little things. Like they’ll say, you’ll say up and down the country instead of from coast to coast because your country is taller than it is wide and my country is wider than it is tall. Like it’s weird little things that will translate perfectly either way. But I know that that’s weird for an American. Just like if I said coast to coast, you would go like, like you would just sound off. So if you’re really concerned about sounding slightly off, you have to make sure that a native, a native reads it for you. But if it’s just general translations or you tell it to stick to things that will translate well, it should be pretty good with making those, making, making texts that works for everybody.

Alex
Oh, 100%. And look, if it is that important, so let’s say, for example, you’re a native English speaker and yet you have a lot of sales with Spanish speaking people, then it might be worth making the investment to just get, do the translations, but then maybe get that person who’s Spanish to read over them to figure out if there are those nuances of up and down the country, coast to coast.

Carolyn
Especially with Spanish because there’s like Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish.

Alex
Oh yeah.

Carolyn
Not entirely the same Spanish.

Alex
No, they’re not. And I think they even go as far as in hreflang. They’re two different languages of ES, SP and I don’t know what the other one is. I think it’s all Latin America.

Carolyn
It’s MXES.

Alex
Well, I know that, for example, my brother-in-law’s wife is Colombian and she also has nuances that are very much different to Spain, for example. But yeah, double translation is the best. Okay. We’ve only got a minute. Do we have any, do we have any quick tips? Get your hosting, get your hosting looked at if it’s not very strong. That’s what I would say.

Carolyn
Oh yeah. Your hosting. Hosting is big. If you’re having speed problems with your server, now would be the time to make any hosting changes or work with your host to get that stuff squared away. Because by the time our next talk, which is November 2nd, I think, we’re going to be in really tight and that’s not a good time to be making major hosting changes. So get your technical things pinned in, get, try to do as much as you can now because we don’t want to be scrambling come November 2nd. But November 2nd.

Alex
Fourth, November 4th. But, but.

Carolyn
Oh shit.

Alex
Sorry, I think it was, I think I did. No, I, look, we all travel in ships. It’s okay.

Carolyn
Yes, we do travel in ships. Correct.

Alex
If you look at the CTA at the bottom, that’s the one for the next one where you can register there for the next coffee chat. But, but yeah, I think also we’ll provide a link maybe to Bluehost that will maybe do a deal. Let’s ask them to see what they can do in the next day and add something in. But they have very, very good WordPress hosting solutions, don’t they?

Carolyn
I, I agree. And my ship is, is getting ready to sail, I think. So it’s November 4th. That was my bad. Yeah. If you enjoyed this format and you like just having a casual coffee chat with Alex and I, we will be back on November 4th to catch up, make sure that there’s, you know, see what we can do to help out with any last minute queries. Hopefully by then you’ll be properly stocked. You’ll have everything into Google product feed and you’ll be basically coasting right into the sales season. But we’re one minute after. Should we call it?

Alex
Yeah, we’ll wrap it up. Yeah. And if you guys have any questions that you want us to answer in the next one or answer personally, feel free to connect with us on X or LinkedIn. Send us a DM. We’re very happy to answer your questions. And we hope you’ve learned some stuff today and you’ve got some actionable things to do for the next month or two ahead. And hopefully a bunch of people on November the 4th will come in and say, I’ve done all those things. And hopefully already seen improvements on, on visibility, which would be really cool. But yeah, thank you. Thank you for being here. And we’ll see you actually before that. There’s the SEO Update as well before the next coffee talk. I forgot what date it is. It’s at the end of September, but Neringa will give you another link.

Carolyn
I feel like it’s the 22nd.

Alex
No, that’s October. No, 30th. Thank you, Neringa. Neringa’s great in this little chat over here that we’ve got. 30th of November. We’ll give you a link in the email tomorrow as a thank you as well. But yes, we’ll see you all soon. Bye.

Carolyn
Bye-bye, everyone.