Brewing up sales: last-minute optimizations for Black Friday
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Milk & Sugar Finishing Touches
You’ve brewed the base. Now let’s perfect the cup.
If you joined Part 1 of Brewing Up Sales, you know we’ve already set the groundwork for a successful Black Friday season. For Part 2, we’re adding the milk and sugar, the last-minute tweaks, overlooked details, and quick-wins that transform an average weekend into a record-setter.
Watch an interactive coffee chat with Alex Moss and Carolyn Shelby (Principal SEOs at Yoast), packed with practical advice tailored for the final countdown to Black Friday. Expect fast, actionable tips that help you maximize every moment, from shop usability and product page tweaks to quick ecommerce SEO wins, checkout conversion optimizations, and more.
This is your chance to:
- Learn what really matters in the final days (from two hands-on experts)
- Ask questions or bring your own “fire drill” problems for immediate answers (yes, real Q&A throughout!)
Transcript
Carolyn
Welcome to Brewing Up Sales. These are our last-minute optimizations for Black Friday, brought to you by Yoast. I’m Carolyn Shelby. I’m a principal SEO at Yoast, and I am joined by Alex Moss, also a principal SEO at Yoast. And we’re going to be talking with you for the next hour about Black Friday preparations and what we’re doing to get ready, and what you can do too. I’ve got my coffee. This is a coffee chat.
Alex
I’ve got a cup of tea. I’ve got sitting in an Ice Kermit the Frog mug as well. My wife has got a matching Miss Piggy one as well. It’s all good. Classy.
Carolyn
It is classy. Very classy. You ready to get rocking and rolling? This is a follow-up to our previous coffee chat. Oh, and we can discuss our other webinars briefly if you’re interested. The coffee chat is a very casual chat. We don’t always do coffee chats. We do have a more formal, structured guide on how to start with SEO that’s available. I think every other week is a great time to join if you’re looking for information or have questions about getting started, especially if you’re new to SEO and need help setting up the product. Additionally, we have the SEO update by Yoast, which Alex and I conduct every month, usually on the last Tuesday of the month, although not always. During this update, we review SEO and AI news, as well as other factors that impact how your website performs online. We’ll read everything and share our opinions, so you don’t have to read it all. It’s a good time. Lots of slides. You can also scan those QR codes if you’d like to get there. And if you have…
Alex
Yeah, we’ve got questions. You can do Q&A. There’s like a chat. You can chat on the right-hand side. But just beneath that, there’s one with a question mark. You can submit any questions. And then in the final 15 minutes or so, we’ll be able to answer any that you have. Or along the way as well. I recall that in our first chat, we would answer them as they came in. So that’s one quite useful thing to do. And maybe if you’re in the LinkedIn live feed, there is a Wistia link somewhere in there. So if you want to get involved, I know that Neringa, our producer, will also be checking out LinkedIn comments. So we can try to answer some then, but no slides for now. So we might as well remove them from the stage and just have our pretty faces, right?
Carolyn
Absolutely. Um, so let’s see, today is November 4th. Black Friday is, we’re probably what, three weeks out from Black Friday. I feel like at this point, you should probably have everything done that you’re going to do. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t make minor last-minute adjustments and tweaks to ensure everything is dialed in. I would caution you against making radical technical changes to your website this close to Black Friday. This is not a time to replatform. This is not the time to test out new plugins unless you think it will really make a difference. Because what you’re dealing with at this point is anything you break, you have a very small window of time to fix it. So, my vote would be to not break things.
Alex
I would also say that if you’re going to use it, you can install Yoast; of course, in these three weeks, nothing will be wrong there. But we also assume that you will have Yoast installed. So again, we’re good, right?
Carolyn
Yeah. And that goes for WooCommerce and Shopify. So I think our plugin doesn’t have a high likelihood of breaking things, but switching payment processors right now is probably not the best thing to do. I think the things that you can do are going through and making sure that you’ve got alignment in the language that you use. If you’re interested in seeing, I would ask one of the dilemmas like ChatGPT or something to go find products for you and make sure it goes to your site to find them just to see what it comes back with. See if anything weird comes back. And the reason I bring this up is because I had a situation a couple weeks ago. I saw on Facebook ads, naturally, a dress at Donna Karan that was it was an ivory looking dress. It was a style that I was interested in. So I went to ChatGPT and I said, ChatGPT, find me, find me ivory or white midi dresses from Donna Karen in size 10. Right. And it said, OK. And it brought back like five different five different dresses that match that description. But it didn’t bring back the dress I wanted. And I thought that was weird because I had already been on their website and I checked. The dress was there and it was in the size and, and it should have, it should have been returned. So this made me think, all right, well, what’s going on here? So I double checked and it turns out that there is a brand, you know how sometimes brands get creative and they make up names for colors, like lipsticks and makeup do this all the time. I don’t know, like, you know, it’s like Porsche. What color is Porsche? Is it the color of a car? Is it the color of, you know, I don’t know what, what shade, what shade is that color, right? It doesn’t say red. It’s not readily identifiable to, to machines as being another word for red, right? So it turns out that Donna Karan had named this particular shade of ivory pristine. There’s no dictionary on the planet that says that pristine means ivory or white. So that particular dress didn’t come back when I requested white or ivory dresses because there was nothing in the text that indicated that color meant white or ivory.
So the reason I tell you this is because sometimes we think we’re being clever and we’ve gotten so clever that we’ve not made it possible for the machines or even the search engines to understand that that’s what we’re offering. So my suggestion in a situation like that would be if you’ve got a very custom color, maybe in parentheses after the color, provide a more generic term that people and the machines are going to understand. Or if there’s other things that are being missed, figure out why the search terms you’re using that, in your mind, should absolutely return that product aren’t returning the products that they’re supposed to. Because I feel like it’s probably a situation where there’s text that either isn’t available to be read or the language that you used isn’t quite right. It’s that language alignment that we really want to focus on.
Alex
It’s funny how you describe colors like that, because I was thinking of branded versus non-branded, like pristine is a branded color, like it’s quite specific to you and that website and that color. Whereas white and ivory, your non-branded targets, you kind of have to do a bit of both to cover that. But it’s also interesting the way in which you try to test the search. So I guess for a store owner, it’d be think about a question or a conversation you would have in an LLM that were in an LLM platform that you would like to hope the answer would bring it out. So like what best gifts under 50 quid for dads who love sports. And whilst I would maybe call that a long-term query rather than a conversation, it’s kind of the same thing, right? That in that you would want the answer to involve all of those things, the word gift, the value that may be under 50 pounds. So it brings that out and knowing that it’s geared towards dads and also geared towards sports lovers, just ensuring that all of those things are answered, whether that’s in what the description or the FAQ maybe, because the FAQs could be scaled, perhaps.
Carolyn
Well, I know in WooCommerce specifically, you’ve got the short description and you’ve got the long description. And depending on your theme, one shows up higher on the page than the other. So I think doing some tests to see which one is getting read, the easiest is where you would want to try to wedge that in. And you can be very clever in those descriptions. I know when I was selling, when everyone had to wear face masks, we were selling face masks. And they’re absolutely not medical grade. So I made a joke out of that. It’s like medical grade? Question mark. Ha ha ha ha. No. So, but I was getting those keywords into the description in a humorous way that was consistent with our brand profile. I think that’s a great point, though. The other thing I think you could do, especially for things like best gifts under $50 or 50 quid, is that what you said? Your dad loves sports. If you were to also do some kind of blog post or, I mean, if you could get a press release picked up, but that’s hard. Publish somewhere a post that specifically talks about best gifts under 50 quid for dads who love sports and link to your products from there. That can help seed awareness of those products to not only the LMs, but also just the regular search engines. Any direct links that you can get into your specific products with surrounding context that describes what they are, what they’re good for, you know, the kind of people you want to target. I think that’s a great thing that you can be doing right now in advance of Black Friday.
Alex
Yeah. Another good thing that some people can do, depending on how much time they have and how much they want to concentrate, is maybe make some PLPs instead of PDPs, you know, like category pages, bundle pages, where you can have a group of different products that are geared towards dads.
Carolyn
Do you want to explain what a PDP and a PLP are?
Alex
Sure. So a PDP is a product description page, which in English is a singular item. And a PLP is a product landing page, which at the beginning, you might think that’s the same as a PDP, but a product landing page can be multiple products. So that’s like just looking at men’s T-shirts and clicking on that. And then now everything you see there, it’s technically a PLP. But what you can do instead of just listing those products, you can have some text at the beginning before all of them are listed, which answers the question that we were asking before. Hey, does your dad love sport? Do you have under 50 pounds to spend? Well, these are the potential gifts that you could buy under here. And there you go. And that’s about it. So doing them, I would say do a little research if you can. And again, have time looking analytics and search console and see if there’s anything that’s actually been performing well or you want to perform better. And maybe there’s a handful of things you can concentrate on whilst we have these three weeks left. Maybe not do your whole site, but maybe there’s 10% of your products or even 1% of your products that you can just do a little tweaking and optimization to.
Carolyn
You know, maybe another thing you could do in these remaining weeks up until Black Friday, if you have particular products that you want to really, like it’s your most popular product or it’s your biggest moneymaker, something that you really want to push, take some time to, you know, I don’t want to do it in the honest and ethical way, but get some reviews, preferably from actual users on those pages, just to add some additional trust signals to the pages and give a little bit more context for the engines and for the LLMs to grab onto when they’re looking for things to say about that product. It’s one thing to specifically ask it to go get, go find me this specific kind of product. It’s another thing when you’re asking it, what’s the best, you know, what’s the best lady’s shoe for hiking? What is the quietest super automatic espresso maker? Those kinds of qualifiers and descriptors are going to be things that could be in those reviews that you can have on the page. You could have someone say, this is the best shoe I’ve ever gotten for hiking. I’m a lady with an exceptionally tiny foot and it’s hard for me to find good walking shoes. You know, I’m not saying that you have to write them yourself because that would be wrong, but encourage people to write descriptive stories about the product that they’re reviewing than just say, I like it. Because I like it is great. And the stars are great. But that extra, this is me. This is how I use it. This is why I love it. This is why I hate it. This is why I feel tepid about it. Those kinds of things are better for providing that context that the machines are looking for.
Alex
See, I feel like I can relate now because I’ve got an unusually wide foot. And I actually find it you know. I know it’s weird have like a stay it looks like a piece of steak on the floor it’s weird. I don’t know what it is but either way it’s i found it very hard through life to find comfortable trainers that didn’t like squeeze the side and I actually found some called royal elastics which their whole brand thing was they use elastic rather than laces and therefore things could stretch it was very wide-footed friendly it was very nice. I literally didn’t buy them for years and years. I just only bought them for years and years and years until they kind of went bumping a bit and are very expensive. But it stuck with me and I still use them now. And some old pairs that I kind of kept because I knew they were going under. But it’s that I wouldn’t have found that on the web without doing research into wide-footed people’s problems and that’s it. But Adidas also works.
Carolyn
Yeah. Those trust cues for the humans and AI’s in your bios, the reviews, all of that’s going to add to your authority. And I think I would, if I’m sitting around with, I’ve done everything I can do, I don’t know what else to do. I would work on that because those aren’t, those aren’t things that you can just whip out. And I mean, whip up quickly, I guess would be a better phrase. You do need to find some actual users to write those because we don’t want to be liars. Nobody likes a liar. That’s true.
Alex
But also it might be maybe not on a product level where you can go to that specific shoe and get someone to review that, which might take a little bit of work again now that it’s a bit last minute towards Black Friday. But again, if you had a little bit of time and you already have it set up, maybe G2 reviews, things like that, which I know do get picked up quite well by LLMs at the moment, G2 specifically. I forgot who wrote a little article on it in the last couple of weeks. But you can review the brand as a whole. How do I like Royal Elastics compared to the shoe I bought from Royal Elastics as that example. And that way you can get more aggregated reviews about the
Carolyn
brand as a whole rather than the product. And as a small shop, I frequently lean on relatives to write. If I really need a review done and I don’t have any actual random users to choose from, you know, hey, mom, I’m going to send you a product. I need you to write a review because she’s a real person and I’m not telling her exactly what to write, but you know, you would hope that she’s not going to demolish me in the review.
Alex
Well, I don’t know. You might get like a spot. You might get them on a bad day and they give you two stars for, you know, at least it’s real, right? True, true. Okay. So that’s quite a bit, well, that’s quite a bit with talks already on like optimizing a bit of content that you can do, getting some reviews and third party perspectives. Tell us more about fraudulent attacks, Carolyn, because you’ve experienced some recently, haven’t you, which I’m sure will be
Carolyn
ongoing. People can think about. So I’ve been, I was pleasantly surprised because I have a WooCommerce store and I have PayPal as my processor. And I noticed that I was selling a lot of these stickers. I have a sticker. The sticker was priced at $3. The shipping was $2, or no, the sticker was priced at $2.50. The shipping was listed at $2. So the total was $4.50. cents. And I was selling a lot of them all of a sudden, like I would go from one or two a month to I’m selling, according to this, I’ve got 10 orders an hour coming in. A lot of the orders are failing. So I looked at it and like, this seems weird to me. It turns out that this is a particular kind of attack that fraudsters use when they’re trying to validate whether these stolen cards that they’ve gotten are functional, that they work. So they find a web shop that has a less than $5 item, because apparently once you go over $5, it triggers more checks at the credit card processor’s end. And they just try to buy things. And they’ll run a ton of them. There’s a pattern to it. So once you recognize the pattern, you know which ones are fake and which ones are are not fake, but some of them go through. Now, it concerns me because we are coming up on Black Friday. I do sell things on Black Friday. I don’t want to be in trouble with my credit card processor in a way that it causes them to shut me down or lock my account so I no longer have access to it and can’t sell anything. So that would be a problem. And that’s the largest concern. The other concern is just analytics. It’s clogging up my database with failed orders. It’s throwing off my analytics because it looks like I’m getting a lot more traffic and a lot more business than I am. And in like a radical amount, it’s enough to skew decisions. I’m not actually selling that many stickers. I don’t have to order more. There’s like all of these things that are not happening because they’re not real sales. So I went, I did some research to try to figure out how to fix it. There are things you can block, I think, at Cloudflare. I believe Stripe has a service or a thing that you can turn on that will be extra scrutiny on these things going through. And this is specific, I believe, to WooCommerce. I don’t know that this affects Shopify owners. I believe, I got to hope, that Shopify as a sales platform has this kind of straightened out. But in my case, WooCommerce, very small site. I’ve got PayPal as my processor. One of the recommendations was make sure you don’t have any products that are total less than $5 because that will reduce the amount of attempts that you get because they’ll see that the attempts are unlikely to succeed just because it’s over that $5 threshold. So I said, okay, I changed the price of the sticker. Now you have to buy two stickers at the same time. The total is more like $6. It’s way over $5. And that worked for like a week. And as of today, I’m still getting 10 orders an hour. They are almost all of them failing. Every now and then one will go through. The problem with one going through is I think that there’s an order that’s gone through because it triggers all of the, yes, you have a real order. But at PayPal’s end, the money never appears. And they reject it. But the way in which they reject it doesn’t trigger any cancellations in my end. So I’m still working on that. The reason I bring this up is because it can, there’s things that you can do to slow it down. Like you can add a CAPTCHA to your payment forms. You can, there’s a thing called velocity checks. Stripe has a thing called radar. You can turn off guest checkout if possible. I can’t. Because then I would get zillions of people setting up accounts just to have customer accounts in my system. And that’s a whole different vector of attack. So I still have to have guest checkout turned on. I’m going to reach out to my processor and let them know and say, hey, this is a problem for me. Please don’t turn me off and see what they can do to help. But if you’ve noticed that all of a sudden this one teeny tiny cheap thing that you sell, you’re selling a lot of just that one thing. It’s highly probable that you’re being used as a validator for stolen credit cards. So I would recommend taking care of that sooner rather than later because you don’t want to show up on Black Friday and go, hey, why are none of my payments processing? Why can’t I get at the money? Why aren’t these orders going through? And have that be the reason. That would be very sad.
Alex
Yeah, and you don’t want it messing up your inventory as well.
Carolyn
No, it’s confusing because I don’t stock that much. Like I’ll do an order of 200 stickers maybe. And at the rate that they’re selling, I would have been out a week ago. And it takes time to get them reprinted. So it’s just recognizing early that these aren’t valid has saved a lot of money. It’s also saved me money in like postage. It’s not, if the money doesn’t ever show up and I fulfill that order anyway, not only am I out the cost of the product, I’m out the cost of the postage and the packing materials and my time and energy and gas going to the post office. It’s costing me money and it’s theft really. So that’s something I wanted to bring up because.
Alex
Very annoying. Very annoying. And some other store owners might want to limit, even just for this period, like access from specific countries. So let’s say, for example, you only sell in the US. There’s technically no point in opening the site to non-US as much. Or maybe there’s a few countries that may be high in the list of attackers. You know, like let’s use, I’m just going to say Russia because sometimes there’s a lot of Russian attacks during Black Friday.
Carolyn
They’re rotating IP addresses. They’re using VPNs and the address, they figured out that I, that my shipping costs are high enough outside of the US that it would automatically get turned off or denied because I would put them over the $5 threshold. So they knew enough to only give addresses that were the U S I’m not sure. I’m not sure it’s that easy to, to stop this, which is part of the extra annoying part.
Alex
And that might be even harder as time moves forward as well, when you’ve got agents doing straight transactions inside, because I don’t know how that would even be inside analytics if an agent purchases something on your behalf inside ChatGPT, for example, because technically it would be happening from a server of OpenAIs, right?
Carolyn
And with WooCommerce, I think they’re coming in through an API connection point because they’re not even hitting a lot of the pages. They’re like, you know, if you look at your source or your referral, it’ll come up as being direct or organic, you know, whatever. This doesn’t have anything there, which means they’re bypassing all of those normal routes and they’re going straight into. It’s a sneaky attack and it’s a difficult. I haven’t spent enough time trying to fix it, but I wanted to warn people that if you see a spike in those kinds of weird sales, definitely verify that the money actually ended up in your account before you fulfill it and talk to your processor and say, hey, this isn’t me. I don’t know what’s going on. Please help me fix this. Don’t turn me off.
Alex
I guess one other thing that you can do because you can have more than one option on how to pay. So you use PayPal. Maybe some people who really are either paranoid or have a very busy site and they can’t afford for something to go down even for an hour is to have a secondary one and maybe not even enable it. So in your instance, you may want to set up a Stripe account and test it all out, but not actually enable it. And it’s there for a backup if PayPal just shut you down on the day. And then at least, yeah, maybe there’s a bit more commission and I might lose a bit more, but I’d rather have 80% of a sale than no sale at all. So maybe there’s a little thing to do as a intro.
Carolyn
No, that’s a good idea.
Alex
So yeah. For sure. Cool. Well, that’s paranoia out the way and potential attacks. Again, look at Cloudflare stuff because they offer WAF and stuff like that, web application firewalls, and they have different rules based on different things that may happen. You just might want to be a bit more wary. So what’s the last section? We’ve got section three, the last section we can discuss for like 10, 15 minutes on smart content tweaks that we did. I know I alluded to, you know, adding a couple of FAQs that answer a question that could be asked inside a conversation on a dialogue. But what else could we do that you can do last minute while your coffee’s still warm?
Carolyn
Well, I would say look at your product pages. So, you know, do they start with the things that people actually want? Are you leading with all of the good stuff? The one thing that we know about, we know a couple things about the search engines and about the LLMs and their agents. We know that they have a short attention span. We know that they don’t try real hard to read. So anything that you make too complicated to access, they just won’t look at it. And they’re looking for quick answers. They don’t want to have to look too far down the page. They don’t want to have to dig for things. So make everything easy for them to see. The things that we know are easy are visible text on the page, language that matches the language your users are searching for. So if you know that your particular, I’m trying to come up with a good example. If you know the people that really, really love your product, have a particular pet name for it, try to work that pet name into, if not the title, into that description that’s really high up on the page. You have to make sure that you’re matching their intent, particularly in like the first hundred words. If you can wedge it into the meta description of the title, that’s great too. Plain language always beats clever prose. If you can use an exact phrase, a bullet list at the beginning of articles where what you’re going to find here so people can jump right to it. They like that too. I would say, what do you think? Useful information. Are you into the pruning of the distractions?
Alex
Yes, but I’m a technical bee in SEO who can’t look at a website or read things normally like a normal person anymore. But I guess it falls into what we’ve been saying in SEO updates and what we’ve been doing in our writing, which is use good formatting, use good structure, make sure, I don’t know, today’s word is chunking well together. Where you would say chunking is making sense of a phrase so it all relates to each other and the next sentence relates to the one before it and is it formatted well does it read well. I guess it’s part of our readability test I get that’s that’s the new term is chunking over readability. Our readability analysis stuff really helps with that when you’re populating content through words and as well do it through imagery because that all helps now schema population so make sure your attributes and your variables are all correct. Don’t make colors like pristine, make them pristine. And then maybe in brackets, put white or ivory just to, so you’ve got it both knuckled down. What else? What videos as well is technically content. If there’s a walkthrough of a product or, you know, one of those like 3D views where you have a rotation of a product, all of that kind of stuff, all great stuff to add now, if you have it and you have time to add it.
Carolyn
I do know that WooCommerce has the ability, at least in some of the themes, to let you drop videos in on those product pages as like how to’s or walkthroughs or, oh, you can even put them, I think, in the gallery. So instead of having just product shots, you can have a couple of product shots, but then you can have a little video that’ll play where someone’s actually like moving the product around, which I found is very nice for jewelry because you can have a pretty little spotlight on it and glitters and sparkles. But anything, oh, planners. I saw it for planners too. They showed someone, they would like flip through the planner so you could see all the different pages, which was really, I thought, a cool idea. Now, if you have Yoast SEO Premium, you do automatically get our video add-on as part of the Premium bundle. So if you’re going to do videos, please make sure that you’ve added on that video add-on. So you’ve got the Premium bundle. The video thing is a separate download, so you’re going to have to add that in, but it’s part of your license, so you don’t have to pay anything extra for it. That will be very helpful. If you have the WooCommerce SEO bundle, that does also include, it’s got Premium, it’s got the WooCommerce portion, and then it does have the video that you can add on too. I think you should be all set, especially if you’ve got the WooCommerce bundle. And I did see in the chat that someone asked if our WooCommerce add-on includes FAQs that support schema. And the answer is yes. That being said, I would make sure that if you want the LLMs to see your FAQs, don’t put them in toggles. Because they’re only going to look at the things that are available on the page when they come through the first time. I don’t know that a lot of people, when we talk about those agents, so the LLMs have two different states for these agents. The state that goes through and grabs the initial products and decides what they want to buy is a, it’s not a visual browser. It’s a text-based browser. It’s not, it can’t execute JavaScript. It’s not that it can’t, it won’t. It’s not going to see anything that isn’t visible on the page. It’s not going to untoggle your toggles. It’s not going to flip your tabs. And it doesn’t really look at pictures. It just doesn’t. It doesn’t switch over to a visual browser until it’s made the decision that this is the thing I’m going to buy. So it’s saving its energy for executing the purchase. To get it to the point where it wants to make the purchase, you have to make sure everything is in readable text so that it can see it. So I would keep that in mind. But the short answer to that question is, yes, we do support FAQs that support schema. And I think we’ve got that in actually all of the products, just from premium up to the WooCommerce add-on and the other add-ons. So you should be locked in and good with that.
Alex
Yeah. And in WordPress, I mean, the FAQ block doesn’t necessarily just have to be with products. It can be a FAQ about shipping or something about the company, or it can be put anywhere
Carolyn
in the website, then it would be pulled up in that way. Shipping, payments, return policies, frequently asked questions about the product. Like, I can’t turn it on. How do I fix it? You know, there’s all kinds of things that you can add FAQs for. People have questions about everything.
Alex
Yeah. Especially if you’re a site that sells a lot of different things by a lot of different brands and product A may be $20 with a 30-day refund policy. This one may be $5,000 with a 14-day refund policy or zero refund policy, but you can watch the shipping on both. One of them weighs more than the other. It can get quite complex. I know that Shopify have quite a few different things in there as well in core that also output in a structured data really nice way, If that’s a word, probably isn’t. But yes, it outputs it in a nice way for LLMs to ingest. So definitely think about FAQs. So thanks, Robin, for that question. What else can you do? I would say maybe looking at underdog items. So when I say that, like stuff that sells all right, but maybe you’ve been focused throughout the year on like, this is my top three selling products, but what about four, five, six, and seven? What about 12, 13, and 14? What about the ones that actually make you more profit, but just haven’t been selling as much? So selling 100 of these is better than selling 200 of that. And optimizing for those things might be a good way of doing that. To find out what they are, you can go obviously into your sales reports. But you can also look at maybe Search Console by looking at keywords and pages. And now I know they’re doing topic clustering inside of Search Console, which may group a bit of that together. that’s definitely something to do and add them to a bundle with your more popular products, if it can be bundled or, you know, upsell or cross-sell.
Carolyn
Well, the cross-sells and the upsells, make sure that you’re taking advantage of those, because that’s a function that I can’t think of a theme that can’t accommodate it. And I know WooCommerce can do it. I assume Shopify can. You’re more of the Shopify expert than I am. But yeah, like think, think a little outside the box. Maybe there’s more opportunities for those cross-sells than, than you’re really thinking about. If you can look at what, look at what people have bought when they buy more than one thing, see if there’s any pattern to it or if there’s any logic. Yeah. Anything, anything you can do to encourage them to buy a little bit more. Like what if you had flat rate shipping? What if you decided to do a special where if you sell, if you buy a minimum of $100 or $150, shipping is completely free. Shipping is still not free, but if the difference is I’ve sold four products and then they have to pay for shipping or I’ve sold eight products and I’ll eat the shipping, I think I’m going to want to go with the eight products. You really want, shipping costs are deductible on your taxes in the U.S. So I want to move that product. I can write off my shipping costs. I want to move product. And that’s what I’m going to focus on.
Alex
And if you’re a bit more technical and you want a bit more fun, maybe using the Google Search Console MCP, that’s Model Context Protocol, I’m going to put in inside the chat here a link to someone called Richard Baxter, who is an old school SEO. and he’s done a super easy walkthrough onto how to use the MCP of Google Search Console. And what it can do is it connects to the data and think of it like a USB stick that shoves in to Claude or Perplexity. Here, they’re using Claude to do it. And you can ask questions about the data. So you can literally ask, just like a chat dialogue, just like you would doing all the research and finding things like, what has been selling in the last three months that I could connect to other less performing ones, for example. And you can ask it any question. It’ll analyze it as well. Shopify also have an MCP, but I haven’t got a convenient link on how to set that up. If you’re technical, you can then use both of them and you can ask questions that relate to both Search Console data and Shopify’s performance and reporting data.
Carolyn
Here’s something that… So I assume everyone’s got mailing lists, right? Make sure that you’re sending out mail to your customers, to warn them that you’ve got Black Friday sales coming up. OK, have text in there, not just an image, a pretty image and hey, Black Friday sale. Have some creative copywriting. The reason this is extra important now isn’t just to be like top of mind and make them aware of it. ChatGPT in particular has now got a thing where you can connect into your Gmail. And it will read your mail for you. What happens when something goes into ChatGPT? It remembers that you liked it. It remembered that you’re a subscriber to Bob’s Jujubee Hut and that you like Bob’s Jujubees a whole lot. So when you start asking about where can I buy purple Jujubees, it’s going to say, I’m pretty sure you can get them from Bob’s and you’ve bought from him before. Why don’t I go retrieve things from Bob’s site? So if you send out these emails and somebody happens to have their LLM connected to their email thing in a way that it can read it, you’re increasing your chances that your brand is going to be remembered and that specific links into specific sales are going to be remembered for that user. I know personally, I use it to read through my Gmail and tell me about things that I might be interested in so I don’t have to wade through it. Or I’ll tell it to go find, you know, I remember last week I saw there was a sale email from Brooks Brothers and I can’t find it. Can you go find it for me? And we’ll say, oh, sure, I’ll go find it. And then it does. So making sure that you’re taking care, taking advantage of the fact that you have these mailing lists and you’ve got the opportunity to reach out to customers is not a thing you should sleep on. I would make sure that you’re getting at least one out before Black Friday starts.
Alex
Oh, 100%. Usually it would be done between now and like in the next 10 days.
Carolyn
There are people that are starting their Black Friday sales like already. Like it’s a whole month of Black Friday sales. It’s Black November, basically.
Alex
Yeah. And if you’re not shy, tell them what the percentage is, you know, as well. That can, unless of course you have different percentages for different things.
Carolyn
Maybe you’ve got different sales, different specials, you know, it’s, Tell them about it and make sure that you use your brand name, your product names, and you use language that they’re going to be interested in so that if it happens to get into their LLM, they’re going to remember it. Also, if you’re sending it to Gmail accounts, Google’s reading those too. So if you think that Google doesn’t scan those emails, I don’t know what world you’re living in because they 100% do.
Alex
Yeah. I think, what else? I’ve got another tip before we go to Q&A. Look at your cart process and your checkout process. Everything that goes between adding an item to pressing complete order, audit it just quite quickly. Not only test it, and I know that Woo and Shopify, they all have the test card numbers that you can do it, but not just test if it works, but test what the experience was like, how seamless is it, and more importantly, do you need to ask everything of that customer in order to complete it? and is it useful to you? And the example for me is a phone number. A lot of people abandon their cart when they’re asked to phone number because some people are scared that they’re going to get 100 calls a day, that kind of thing and get hassled. And a phone’s quite a personal thing. I’m like, I know email is, but it’s not as intrusive as an email. You get an email, you read it when you want and that’s kind of it. But if you would call someone, it’s a bit different. People don’t like it. So unless you really need it for some reason, I would say maybe not put it in. And I’m not talking about not just asking it for a non-requirement, just asking for it in the first place may be enough for someone to go, what are they going to do with that number?
Carolyn
I’ve noticed a lot of places if you want to get, they’ll say like, if you give us your email address, we’ll give you a 20% discount coupon. But they don’t tell you that you get 10% for surrendering your email address and then another 10% if you surrender your phone number so they can send you text messages. I draw the line at text messages. I’m sorry. I do not need my phone blowing up daily with reminders that, you know, I need to go. What’s the latest one?
Alex
I actually don’t get that many. Some are quite visible.
Carolyn
I made the mistake of signing up for some of them. I get, oh, Capital Lighting, not to name names and call people out, but it’s a lighting store. I get almost daily sale messages from them. They sell light fixtures. I don’t need light fixtures every day, honestly. But watch yourself. Ballard Design. I love you, Ballard, but daily I don’t need. Sorry.
Alex
And you just need to add stuff subliminary, right? You know, as soon as you just put in an ad like we are right now, for example, on our Black Friday that we’ve got a sale on in a couple of weeks. You just need to do a QR code. Don’t worry, it’s not going to ask for your phone number quite yet. We’ll give you an extra 10% off for that.
Carolyn
It’s a really good sale though. So if you’ve been waiting to renew your subscription, now would be a good time to do it.
Alex
Yeah, I mean, it would be the best time to do it. All we’re allowed to say is that there’s never a better discount throughout the year other than on Black Friday. So if you are the ones to really only get towards discounts and buy stuff towards discounts, this is the time to do it. And also, again, why I explained not saying a percentage sometimes is because we have different percentage savings dependent on what you get, but we’re not going to tell you because we want you, we would rather you scan the QR code and then it can be attributed to us. Thank you very much.
Carolyn
To be fair, I don’t even know. They don’t tell me because they know I can’t keep secrets.
Alex
But yeah, I think that’s pretty much everything. I think maybe post on social. I know it’s like obvious to say or non-obvious, but, you know, do some kind of activity, make them go towards an actual Black Friday landing page. For example, like this QR code does, it’s dedicated towards that and geared towards that sale.
Carolyn
But use language in your posts. I see posts still where they think they’re being clever and it’s a meme, but there really isn’t anything that mentions the product, mentions the brand or links to anything of value. It’s just them being funny. You can be funny in socials, but you can’t be funny all the time. I would use like a was it. 20% of the time you can be just random and goofy if that’s your if that’s your style but 80% of the time those posts need to have like some value. A company, a pizza place and they would tweet out pictures of their pizza with no additional context and no alt text. And it would just say: Ooh. It didn’t say pizza. It didn’t say the name of the company. It didn’t say where they were located. It didn’t say what kind of pizza it was. There was no value in those posts. Those posts are, they’re there for your followers. Social media needs to have a broader reach. That’s why you need to make sure that you use the words that people are searching for, because this is an opportunity to get in front of people that are not already you. If you’re only ever preaching to the choir, you’re not really growing your flock.
Alex
Yeah. And it needs to be to the point, right? Because remember there’s people doom scrolling in bed with one eye open as well, right? And you only have two seconds to get your attention.
Carolyn
Pretty pictures definitely help for that. Videos definitely help, but there has to be some meaning behind it and a link they can click, something that is going to connect that post that now you’ve got their interest to your brand and to that product. So make it useful. Yeah. Okay.
Alex
Well, with that, should we get to, there’s not many questions, but if anyone wants to submit them now, but let’s go to the questions. I’ll do this. So the first one was asked, but I thought we’d put it up anyway. Does Yoast WooCommerce include FAQs at Support Schema? Yes, they do. Please use them. Please populate them and please answer as many questions because the more questions you answer, the more that answer is going to be ingested by some LLM and then bring it back as an answer. And of course, cite you for it.
Carolyn
You know what? If you go into Google Trends, and I don’t know how many of you use Google Trends, but it’s trends.google.com. You can look for. If you’re a small brand and there aren’t a lot of queries around your specific products, you can look for lookalike products or lookalike brands. Something that is analogous to you, but maybe bigger. So let’s just for an example, let’s say I make cell phones and they look an awful lot like a fruit cell phone, but mine is called an orange and it’s not definitely an apple. I might go in and ask Google Trends. I’d give it my brand name. I’d give it my product. I’d give it my product category. I’d look to see what’s trending and you can find really long tail questions people are typing in about that. So do some research. You can figure out what people are asking now around those products and then write FAQs for that. Even if they’re not specifically asking about my orange phone, I can extrapolate that it’s probably a question I can modify to make fit my product and answer that question. Even if you’re stuck for questions to answer, I bet you can come up with some that are going to be useful and going to help you be visible in the search engines and in the LLMs.
Alex
Cool. That’s good to know. So hopefully that helped Robin. Next question from Damian. Aside from SEO benefits, is it true that widgets increase the odds of exposing a website owner to ADA and WCAG compliance lawsuits from people looking to sue companies for not having a compliant website? I think maybe in short, it depends. I would say it depends where you are and how compliant one needs to be. And I guess the other it depends variable is whether you have, you know, your cookie consent, i.e. a disclaimer to say that that’s what’s happening inside the website before you accept continue. And people can reject or accept whether they want to go in. I guess it just depends what the widget is and what it’s doing, what it’s offering.
Carolyn
I don’t know that there’s a lot of SEO benefits in widgets if we’re talking about widgets the way I think we’re talking about widgets. But at least in the U.S., when it comes to ADA compliance, widgets don’t tend to be things that are required. They’re like extras. They’re the doodads and the gadgets and the ads and the things that aren’t really the thing on the site that you came to do. As long as the thing that the customer needs to know or the action they need to complete can be completed, | I don’t think those widgets are going to be a problem because they’re usually just fun little extras. They’re not the thing that they came to do. If you have anything locked up in any necessary function locked up in a widget like that, then yes, probably. If someone is looking to sue you, you either have very deep pockets or you’ve offended them personally. So my advice there would be if you have very deep pockets, you really need to be addressing that and make sure that you’re not locking up necessary tasks in those widgets. And if you’re not a very deep pocket person, try very hard not to personally offend anyone that might be litigious.
Alex
Yeah, hopefully that helps, Damian. Okay, next question is from Carolyn. What are your tips for optimizing the local Yoast SEO plugin after a move to another state or country? Do nothing until next year. I would say no, update it now because it’s only text. I’m going to assume that you already have had local SEO installed and that it, I don’t know, say you were in Georgia and now you’ve moved to Michigan or something, right? You can just change it from one to the other. That should be simple enough. And all that’s getting changed is text. I would also maybe think about going outside the local SEO plugin and updating Google business profiles or Bing places and profiles, which, by the way, have got a new UI. So you should be looking in there anyway to double check all of that. And even if you haven’t moved to everyone, if you have got bricks and mortar physical location, You should be checking to make sure everything’s there, everything’s open at the times you want it to be. all of that good stuff. Anything I’ve missed, Carolyn, maybe?
Carolyn
No, that sounds right. Make sure that you’ve also updated like your Google Business Profile. And like, if you physically moved, like the local part is really The local part is really important if you’ve moved, because your business isn’t in the same spot. I would make sure that you update that as quickly as possible. Plus, I feel like that is an opportunity to send out a press release. And that, I mean, they’re a big move like that for a local business or a regional, a regionalized business. One that’s not one that’s limited to a locality. I feel like that’s press release material, especially to the newspaper where you used to live and the newspaper where you live now. I would, I would take advantage of that. I would do it quickly and I would broadcast it all over the place. Yeah. I’m sure there’ll be a
Alex
story behind it for Carolyn anyway, which is quite a good thing. And lastly, there are some places that have local chamber of commerces or local council websites that have local businesses, just updating it on the place you have moved to as well, even more so than updating the old one. Weirdly enough, I’ve moved offices in the past from more central places to the outskirts, and I’ve actually purposely not updated the physical address because I would then show up in a more popular map location if I was doing a local search, but then that’s not proper white hat. Depends what you want to pay for. I paid for postal forwarding. So the only thing that was different was my postal address. So nothing would get lost there. You didn’t have like a shop where
Carolyn
people came to visit you. I think you have an office that people come to that’s different than if you’re kind of a virtual, a virtual shop. You know, join the chamber of commerce, join civic organizations, make it known and be loud about it that, hey, I’ve arrived, there’ll be chatter, people will post about it, especially if you’re not in a huge market. Those local papers are looking for things to write about. Drop an ad in, if you really want to be nice, drop an ad in the high school newspaper. They will love you for 100 years.
Alex
Now I really want to know what this business is. So Carolyn, please add it to the chat if you can.
Carolyn
She said she’s a web designer.
Alex
Oh, cool. Right. Okay. Well, yeah, no, that’s cool. And then, yeah, maybe in the local area, like getting involved in some charitable things. So you can just like put your foot through the door, even if it’s pro bono work. I know that’s what I’ve done as a web designer in the past, helped out some charity I cared about, and they can do a PR about how someone helped them and they talk about you. So there’s a bit more of a story. So I think we’ve got one, maybe two more questions, and we still have time. Annette asks, what are your thoughts on Trustindex to collect reviews, and should I wait until after Black Friday to install it? So there’s two questions. Trust Index, I don’t think I’ve used them specifically, but I’ve heard them. I’ve heard of them. I would say look at Trustindex reviews from webmasters and see the reviews of the review people and the review platform. But if you’ve already collected a load on there, there’s no reason why you can’t maybe install. That’s what I was thinking of when someone else asked about a widget earlier. My immediate thing was, well, there may be aggregated reviews from a third party. If you’ve already got like 2,000 reviews on a 4.7 or whatever it is, then yeah, if you can install it. I know that, again, with Shopify, you’ll have staging areas. And if you have a WooCommerce site, maybe you have a staging area with your hosting provider. You can do some tests there. If you can, then it shouldn’t be too intrusive. We would say, hopefully you’ve done it already, but if you’ve got a lot of time and you can afford it and you like the adventure of maybe a mishap and fixing that mishap in this time, then go for it. But yeah, it shouldn’t be too hard to install those things. And again, it depends how deep Trustindex goes. Does it go just for the brand or does it go per product? Because that’s a different conversation of implementing it on your site. But yeah, go for it if you can. And if you can afford to, I would say do it. Which I think leaves us to the last question, which is Robin. She’s back. Thanks for the answer. I just checked with Gemini. Yes, modern search engines like Google bots absolutely see an indexed content within toggles, accordions. Where did you hear they can’t?
Carolyn
No, no, no, no, no, no. Search engines can see the toggles. Gemini can see the toggles because Google can see it. I’m saying that there are LLMs that do not read it. Because what they do is they fetch it, they parse it, and when they parse it, they’re basically rendering it without any of the HTML prettiness. And they’re looking at it as though you were looking at it in a Lynx browser. It’s very simple. So when I say that, I am not talking about Google. I am specifically talking about the things that are not Google. Gemini is part of Google. The LLMs that use Google results are just getting a list of SERPs that they’re going to go check those URLs. Once they start grabbing those pages, I’m telling you, they’re parsing them and they are not reading them. I got it straight from someone at Anthropic, which is the company that does Claude, I think. They don’t even see H1s and H2s. They see the order that the words appear in and spaces. That’s pretty much it. I promise you, they’re not executing JavaScript. They’re not looking at things that aren’t on the page. If it’s Google, that’s different. If it’s Bing, probably also different. But if it’s not one of those two, they’re not seeing it. So you have to make sure that it’s in plain text. We had things they gave us new stuff then they took it away then they gave it back and sometimes they took it away again. The one thing that they’ve never taken away from us is plain text that’s visible on the page. So if you want to be the most friendly and the most compliant with absolutely everyone I would start moving towards things that are not hidden that just reminded me of the FAQ
Alex
snippet they brought it back took it away brought it back. Yeah, you can you never know but the
Carolyn
one thing they’ve never taken away is visible text on the page yep so. I hope that answers your
Alex
question again Robin and i think that’s time that literally. Oh my gosh, we’re on time and we don’t even rush. Well, that’s because we’re not doing the update and then the update you’ve got like two hours of news to do in 45 minutes. So yeah, I hope you’ve enjoyed everyone. And yeah, check us out later in the month for the SEO update. And I forget which one it is. Let’s add it back on in stage just before we go. How to start is the 20th of November and the SEO update on the 24th. So with that, thank you very much for coming and having coffee with us. And good luck for your Black Friday sales. And we’ll see you soon.