Looking for some Black Friday SEO tips to boost your holiday sales?
As the holiday season approaches, businesses across the globe gear up for one of the most significant shopping events of the year—Black Friday. This day, marked by massive sales and discounts, presents a golden opportunity for businesses to boost their sales and enhance brand visibility.
However, with consumers increasingly shifting their shopping habits online, effective SEO strategies are crucial for capitalizing on this trend.
In this blog post, I’ll show you some of the most impactful Black Friday SEO tips I’ve seen work in my 5+ years as an SEO and content writer for various brands. These tips will help ensure your business stands out during this competitive period.
In This Article
Why Black Friday is a Golden Opportunity for Sales and Business Growth
As one of the most anticipated shopping events of the year, Black Friday presents a golden opportunity for businesses to skyrocket their sales and brand visibility. It’s not just about slashing prices but making sure your audience can actually find you when they are ready to spend.
Here are some other reasons this holiday is a golden opportunity you shouldn’t miss out on:
High Consumer Demand
Consumer behavior shifts dramatically in the weeks leading up to Black Friday. People actively search for deals and discounts, often holding off on purchases until they know they can get the best price. The anticipation drives more consumers online, looking for deals across various platforms and devices. This heightened demand creates a lucrative window for businesses to attract shoppers with targeted marketing efforts.
According to recent trends analytics, online sales in the USA during the holiday season are expected to reach a staggering $75 billion, indicating a growing trend toward eCommerce shopping.
Increased Online Traffic
The surge in online shopping during Black Friday means that businesses can capitalize on increased web traffic. Shoppers often begin their search weeks in advance, making it essential for businesses to optimize their online presence early. By implementing effective SEO strategies, brands can attract more visitors to their websites during this critical shopping period.
Brand Awareness
Participating in Black Friday is not just about sales. It's a prime time to increase brand visibility and attract new customers. Even if a consumer doesn’t make a purchase, having them visit your site during this high-traffic period means you’re on their radar. This can result in future sales, better brand recognition, and a more extensive customer base.
Ready to dive into our top Black Friday SEO tips?
1. Start Planning Early
Early preparation is key when it comes to Black Friday. While the event falls in late November, it’s essential to start your planning much earlier—ideally in October or even sooner.
Why?
Because search engines need time to crawl, index, and rank your content, the earlier you prepare, the more time you'll have to optimize your Black Friday page, improve your keyword strategy, and resolve technical issues.
One of the best ways to prepare early is to ensure you have the right SEO tools. Those we highly recommend include:
All In One SEO (AIOSEO)
One of the first SEO tools to have in your toolbox for Black Friday marketing is All In One SEO (AIOSEO).
AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin that boasts over 3 million active users. Millions of smart bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. That’s because the plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. Examples include:
- Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
- Author SEO: Boost your Google E-E-A-T signals right in WordPress, giving you an edge over competitors.
- SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
- Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing.
- Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
- Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
- And more.
AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO.
Plus, if you’re a WooCommerce user, AIOSEO has a tailor-made WooCommerce SEO module to help you rank your online store higher in search rankings. It also has a powerful breadcrumbs navigation feature to help your visitors easily find their way around your site.
For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.
SEOBoost
SEOBoost is an excellent content management platform that can help you create and manage Black Friday content. This is a full-suite content management platform that can be used to:
- Create content briefs and outlines
- Create topic reports
- Conduct content audits
- Use AI to speed up content optimization
It also gives recommendations on how to better optimize your content.
For example, you can use SEOBoost to:
- Audit the previous year’s assets and discover ways to improve them for better performance.
- Create optimized topic reports for new content.
Check out the full power of SEOBoost here.
Planning your Black Friday campaigns early is important as it gives you a head start. It also helps ensure that your content is indexed and ranked well by the time the holiday season starts. The advantage of this is that when customers start searching for deals, your pages are already ranking. A last-minute launch could delay indexing and leave you scrambling to gain visibility.
2. Optimize Your Landing Pages
Another Black Friday SEO tip is to optimize your landing pages.
A landing page is a standalone web page specifically designed for a marketing or advertising campaign. It is the destination where potential customers “land” after clicking on a link from an email, advertisement, or other digital sources. The primary purpose of a landing page is to guide visitors toward a specific action, in this case, participating in your Black Friday campaign.
A few Black Friday SEO tips you can implement in your landing pages include:
Use the Same URL
Using the same URL for your Black Friday page year after year can retain SEO value. This allows you to build authority over time, making it easier for your page to rank higher each year. Create a page like yoursite.com/black-friday and simply update the content as needed annually.
This strategy ensures that your landing pages are evergreen and retain their SEOI gains over the years.
Update Your Content
SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy. Search engines value relevant and timely content, meaning your Black Friday landing pages should be updated yearly. Refresh your meta titles, descriptions, and H1 tags to reflect the current year and offers. For example, “Black Friday 2024: Biggest Discounts on [Your Product]” is both relevant and keyword-optimized.
Check out our guideto optimizing existing content for more tips.
Technical SEO
Don’t forget to look at your landing page’s technical SEO. Technical aspects such as page load time and mobile optimization are more critical than ever. Slow-loading pages or poorly optimized mobile experiences can lead to high bounce rates, especially during periods of high traffic like Black Friday.
Ensure your page speed is optimized using tools like AIOSEO’s SEO Audit Checklist tool.
Other factors to consider include:
- Security
- Mobile-friendliness
- Schema markup
- And more
Check out our comprehensive guide to technical SEO audits for other technical elements you need to work on.
3. Keyword Strategy
One of the Black Friday SEO tips that can’t be overstated is the need for a keyword strategy. This is a plan of action that helps you optimize web content to improve search engine visibility and attract a target audience. It involves selecting the right keywords to target in an SEO campaign and prioritizing them to maximize efficiency.
Some tips I find invaluable here include:
Keyword Research is Crucial
Understanding what your audience is searching for is key to getting your site to rank. Sure, you did keyword research last year, but what your audience was looking for last Black Friday isn’t necessarily what they’ll be looking for this year.
So, yeah. Keyword research is still important.
One of the tools I highly recommend for this is LowFruits.
Lowfruits is highly recommended because, as the name suggests, it helps you find low-hanging fruit (keywords) that your competitors are probably not targeting. The tool analyzes search engine results pages (SERPs) and finds weak spots you can target. As a result, not only do you rank higher, but you also drive targeted organic traffic to your Black Friday offers.
Another reason I prefer Lowfruits is that it’s super affordable, with paid plans starting as low as $25. If you want more options, check out our list of the best keyword research tools.
Target Long-Tail Keywords
While it’s tempting to go after the most popular keywords, you’ll have a better chance of ranking for long-tail keywords. These are more specific search terms that align with your products and audience, like “affordable eco-friendly gifts for Black Friday.”
These keywords may have lower search volume but usually have higher conversion rates because they reflect search intent. Another advantage is that they’re also low-competition keywords, giving you better chances of ranking higher on SERPs. It’s a great way to get quick SEO wins, especially since holiday marketing is time-sensitive.
Don’t Forget Seasonal Keywords
When it comes to maximizing your Black Friday SEO strategy, seasonal keywords are an often overlooked but powerful tool. These are keywords that experience a surge in popularity around specific times of the year—like “Black Friday deals,” “holiday gift ideas,” or “Cyber Monday discounts.” Leveraging these seasonal terms can help you tap into heightened search activity and attract more traffic when consumer interest is at its peak.
Why Seasonal Keywords Matter
Seasonal keywords directly align with user intent during peak shopping periods. Around Black Friday, people actively search for discounts, special offers, and holiday gift guides, meaning they’re in buying mode. If your content is optimized to target these time-sensitive searches, you stand a much better chance of capturing high-quality, ready-to-buy traffic.
How do you discover these seasonal keywords?
One of the best tools for finding trending seasonal keywords is Google Trends. This free tool provides valuable insights into the popularity of specific search terms over time, helping you discover seasonal keyword patterns.
With Google Trends, you can analyze how search interest fluctuates throughout the year and predict when certain keywords are likely to spike. This can help you create timely and relevant content.
Have a Way of Tracking Keyword Performance
Keyword research and implementation are only part of the strategy. You also need to have a way to monitor how you’re performing for your chosen keywords. This is where a tool like AIOSEO’s Keyword Rank Tracker comes in handy.
This is a powerful tool that lets you add important keywords and enables you to track their performance right from your WordPress dashboard.
Knowing your keyword positions is important as it can help you pivot your strategy to improve your search rankings.
Check out our tutorial on tracking SEO keyword rankings in WordPress for more detailed instructions.
So, don’t just jump into your Black Friday marketing without developing a keyword strategy first. Doing so is a recipe for disaster. Know what keywords you want to target and have a way of tracking them.
4. Internal and External Linking
Link building is another Black Friday SEO tip you need to invest time and resources into. The 2 main types of links you should build are internal links and backlinks. Both have been proven to be important Google ranking factors.
Building Internal Links
As Black Friday approaches, start increasing internal links pointing to your Black Friday landing page from other parts of your website. For example, you could link to it from your homepage, blog posts, or even product pages. This strategy helps search engines understand the importance of your Black Friday page and can boost its ranking power.
However, don’t just blindly create internal links. Be strategic about your internal links and ensure the pages are related. While this may seem daunting, you can automate most of the process using AIOSEO’s Link Assistant.
Internal links are the links you build between pages on your website. They have many SEO benefits, including:
- Distributing link juice across your pages
- Improving crawling and indexing
- Enhancing user experience
This means building internal links to your important Black Friday assets makes them more discoverable by search engines and people.
Building Backlinks
A strong backlink profile can greatly impact your page's authority and ranking. FYI, backlinks are links from external sites to your site. Search engines value them because they serve as a vote of confidence in your site and content. A few ways of building backlinks to your Black Friday assets include:
- Guest posting
- Listing on business directories
- Press releases
- Running outreach campaigns
- Getting listed on partner pages
Check out our link building guide for tips on building backlinks and external links.
5. Black Friday Content Creation
One of the most important Black Friday SEO tips revolves around content creation. This is because high-quality content is a crucial ranking factor, particularly after Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU). A few tips for creating quality content include:
- Conduct in-depth keyword and topic research
- Cover the topic thoroughly
- Meet user intent/search intent
- Create scannable content
- Include statistics and facts
For your Black Friday marketing, you can also build social proof by incorporating customer reviews or case studies into your marketing assets. Encourage your satisfied customers to leave positive reviews. These reviews not only boost your site's credibility but also play a significant role in your SEO efforts. Google considers customer reviews to be one of its ranking factors, especially for local SEO and brands in the YMYL niches.
High-quality content helps build your credibility and online authority, elements that help improve your rankings on search engines. As a result, you’ll get a boost in traffic and sales.
Here are some effective content creation strategies to consider for Black Friday:
Pre-Black Friday Teasers
Build anticipation by developing a series of pre-Black Friday teasers. Use social media or email marketing platforms to share sneak peeks of upcoming deals, exclusive products, or limited-time offers. Countdown posts can create a sense of urgency and excitement among your audience, encouraging them to keep an eye on your brand as the day approaches.
Holiday Gift Guides
Create holiday gift guides that showcase your products in a curated format. These guides can help customers find the perfect gifts while highlighting your offerings.
Consider segmenting the guides based on different demographics or interests (e.g., gifts for tech lovers, gifts for kids, etc) to make it easier for shoppers to navigate.
Use Engaging Visual Content
Utilize high-quality images and videos to showcase your products effectively. Visual content is more engaging and can capture attention quickly. Consider creating product demonstration videos or user-generated images showing how your products can benefit users.
However, as much as visual content is fantastic for engagement, you need to make sure it’s implemented in an SEO-friendly way. This means you should:
- Use the right image SEO tool
- Compress your files
- Use proper file naming
- Disable attachment pages
For more, check out our ultimate guide to image SEO.
6. Monitor Website Performance
Before Black Friday, perform regular technical health checks on your website. Ensure your site is fast, mobile-friendly, and secure. Run audits using tools like AIOSEO’s Site Audit Checklist, Google Search Console (GSC) or other SEO checkers.
These will help you identify any errors that could harm your SEO performance.
Besides this, I suggest checking Search Statistics for content that has performed well during the year. This can be found under the Content Performance tab.
Look for content with a good number of Clicks. This is helpful because you can base your Black Friday content around themes that resonate the most with your audience. As a result, you can expect better engagement and conversions.
Analytics Review
To make the most out of your Black Friday efforts, it’s important to learn from past performance. Analyzing your data from last year can provide valuable insights into what worked, what didn’t, and where you can make improvements. Here are some key areas to consider:
Identify Top-Performing Pages
Using tools like MonsterInsights or Google Analytics (GA4), you can easily see which of your Black Friday pages brought in the most traffic last year.
Did a specific category page perform well?
Were users more interested in a particular type of promotion or discount?
By identifying the pages that generated the most traffic and conversions, you can double down on those areas for this year’s sale.
For example, if your top-performing page last year was a “Top 10 Black Friday Deals” blog post, consider updating that content for this year with fresh deals and offers. By building on what worked, you can increase traffic and sales.
Review Keyword Performance
It’s also important to review which keywords performed well and brought in the most traffic during last year’s Black Friday. You can use Google Search Console (GSC) to analyze the queries that drove visitors to your site.
Did long-tail keywords perform better than general keywords?
Were there seasonal terms that attracted the most traffic?
If you found that long-tail keywords like “affordable eco-friendly gifts for Black Friday” brought in more traffic than shorter, more competitive terms, consider focusing your SEO efforts on long-tail keywords again this year. These specific queries are often less competitive but bring in higher-converting traffic.
Check out our guide on SEO monitoring for tips on identifying top performing keywords and pages right in your WordPress dashboard.
7. Post-sale Strategy
Once the holiday season is over, don’t make the mistake of abandoning all your marketing assets. Instead, have a post-sale strategy that helps you continue benefiting from them. Here are a couple of things to include:
Redirects: Keep Traffic Flowing Post-Black Friday
When Black Friday ends, many businesses make the mistake of abandoning their Black Friday landing pages. However, just because the sale is over doesn’t mean the traffic should stop. Instead of letting that page go to waste, you can leverage it by setting up redirects. In this case, use 302 redirects to guide users to other relevant content. This ensures that you don’t lose the traffic or SEO value you've built during the sale.
A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect that sends users and search engines to a new page without permanently removing the original URL from the search index. This is ideal for seasonal events like Black Friday, where you may want to reuse the page in the future.
Setting up redirects is super easy with AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager.
This powerful tool makes adding any type of redirect easy, even if you don’t have any coding or technical knowledge.
Why Use 302 Redirects After Black Friday?
- Maintain SEO gains: Using a 302 redirect ensures that the SEO equity gained by your Black Friday pages isn't lost.
- Keep visitors engaged: Even after Black Friday, visitors might still land on your Black Friday page from bookmarks, backlinks, or old search engine results. Rather than showing them outdated information or deals that have expired, you can seamlessly direct them to content that is still relevant.
- Smooth user experience (UX): A 302 redirect ensures users are not met with a disappointing “Black Friday is over” message or 404 error. Instead, they are automatically guided to fresh, exciting content that continues to offer value.
Implementing redirects on crucial Black Friday assets is one of the most overlooked Black Friday SEO tips. But it can be one of the most beneficial as it helps you compound your SEO gains year after year.
Content Maintenance: Post-Black Friday Cleanup
Once Black Friday is over, cleaning up your internal links and other references to the Black Friday page is important. If left unchecked, these can confuse both visitors and search engines, leading to a poor user experience and diminished SEO performance.
So, what content maintenance tasks do you need to perform post Black Friday?
- Audit internal links: Use tools like AIOSEO’s Link Assistant to crawl your website and identify all the internal links pointing to your Black Friday landing page. This will give you a clear overview of where updates are needed.
- Update footer links: If you added temporary Black Friday links to your website’s footer, make sure to either remove them or replace them with links to ongoing sales or promotions. This ensures consistency and avoids confusing users.
- Update product and blog pages: If your Black Friday deals were heavily featured on specific product pages or blog posts, go back and update the content, CTAs, and links. This will help keep them evergreen.
Content maintenance helps keep your site organized, ensuring users find relevant content without confusion.
Black Friday SEO Tips: Your FAQs Answered
When should I start my Black Friday SEO preparations?
Start at least 45 days before Black Friday to allow ample time for optimization and indexing.
How can I measure my success post-Black Friday?
Set clear goals before the event and use analytics tools to track performance against those goals after the sale concludes.
What is the best SEO tool for Black Friday campaigns?
The best SEO tool to help you run impactful Black Friday campaigns is All In One SEO (AIOSEO). It has many features and modules to help you with pre and post Black Friday strategies.
We hope this post has helped you get some Black Friday SEO tips to help power your strategy. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our guide to common SEO mistakes to avoid or our article on the benefits of SEO for small businesses.
If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.
Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.