The summer is in full swing, but should you already start preparing for Black Friday? Yes! It’s the biggest sales of the year, and ranking in Google is something you take time to do. It’s never too early to start getting your deals ready. So, if you are a merchant with an online store or another type of ecommerce business, it’s time to start working on your Black Friday SEO immediately!
Don’t forget that Black Friday (November 28, 2025) and Cyber Monday (December 1, 2024) are kicking off this year’s holiday shopping season. You can set up a lot of content for all occasions. In this post, we’ll review some things you can do to prepare!
Black Friday shopping in 2025
Today, people are used to shopping online. It’s easy and convenient. You don’t have to travel only to find something out of stock. Plus, online stores often offer payment plans. Shopping online is so popular that online sales during the Black Friday weekend keep hitting new highs every year. And the numbers will only continue to rise. That’s why it’s safe to assume that people will buy many (if not most) holiday gifts online this year.
It’s good to stay on top of trends to prepare for the holiday season. E-commerce is still growing, and consumers expect more every year. Here are some actionable tips to improve your SEO for the upcoming Black Friday and holiday season.
Online is where it’s at
Of course, in-store or curbside pick-up will still prove popular. However, most people research their ecommerce purchases online, sometimes weeks in advance! So don’t be surprised when the holiday shopping season starts well before Black Friday and continues for weeks.
Extending Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday season online deals for a few days or weeks can be a good idea. This is especially true if you want to prevent huge crowds from gathering at your store on a specific day. That won’t be a good shopping experience for anyone involved, so spreading these deals over an extended time is probably better.
Start preparing in time
Dive into the data you amassed during previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, and see if you can come up with improvements for your e-commerce SEO strategy. Bear in mind that it takes a while for content to rank. So, to keep up with the competition, try to get your content in gear at least 45 days ahead. That’s often recommended for most merchants. Of course, you can always start preparing earlier if that works better for you. Your schedule could look something like this:
- 45 Days in advance: Post your promotion to your website calendar and post a save-the-date post on social media and in your email newsletter.
- 7 Days in advance: Post upcoming events/promotions on social media and via email. Try to encourage other (small) businesses to share it with their followers.
- 1 Day in advance: Post an event reminder on social media.
It’s a good rule to remember these steps and time frames. However, you can do much more than set up new pages and renew old ones. Let’s look at a few practical tips.
1. Do Black Friday keyword research
Keyword research is important all year, but especially during the season when your online store starts having big sales. You have probably worked on this research previously, but now is the time to dive in again. There are always things to learn, like developments in industries, changes in consumer behavior, or new trends and topics to discuss for you as a merchant.
Start early with your research to give yourself enough time to produce high-quality, helpful content that helps reach those new audiences. While using generative AI tools to generate Black Friday SEO content for your e-commerce business is enticing, please be careful with that. Generative AI can help you do your job, but it can’t replace your valuable insights and opinions.
Do look into using Yoast SEO to optimize your content for LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini.
2. Set up Black Friday gift pages
First, we must consider what category or particular landing pages make sense for the upcoming holidays. You can always set up pages like ‘Best gifts for parents/millennials/teens’, ‘Newest deals for your 6/10/12-year-old’, and ‘Best friend/grandparents/coworker discounts’. You could also think of ‘Top 10 gifts for outdoor/skiing/parasailing enthusiasts’ and ‘Top 3 deals for stay-at-home parents’, etcetera.
Make sure the page titles and meta descriptions of these gift landing– or category pages fit the upcoming holiday season. You can reuse these gift pages for Hanukkah or your summer sale. Find (old) content that fits the holidays, rewrite titles and meta descriptions to match the upcoming season, and chances are you won’t have to do that much work to get them up to date. Be sure to write proper product descriptions and improve the product images. Learn how to write great product descriptions using our product-specific analysis in WooCommerce SEO and Yoast SEO for Shopify.
To increase the chances of your gift pages ranking, boost their internal linking structure. You can also link the previous all-year holiday season pages, such as specific Christmas landing pages (‘Top 7/10/25 gifts for under the Christmas tree’), to boost these when the time comes. That could be around the 45-day mark, but we would be okay with stretching that to 60 days. You’ll need to give Google and other search engines enough time to follow your links and find your specific holiday season SEO landing pages with deals.
3. Promote on social media and in your newsletter
Social media like X and Instagram can play a massive role in the success of your (online) Black Friday sale. Take Pinterest, for instance. Many people have a Pinterest Christmas wish list. As a merchant, it would be amazing to get your products on people’s wish lists, which can positively impact your reach and maybe even your sales.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to share your Black Friday gift pages on Facebook and other social media. Maybe even make short videos to post on TikTok. In the previous section, we mentioned the top ten lists. We all know these still work pretty well on social media. Yoast SEO can help you optimize your social media posts before you share them.
Email marketing
Last but not least, remember your email marketing! For many companies and merchants, newsletters provide a steady stream of income. Be sure to plan a good campaign for your newsletters.
For example, we recommend setting up holiday gift guides and sharing these. You can create an excellent overview of many gifts that many people will enjoy. ELLE and Target have pages like that, and so do more companies.
4. Introduce new products
The holiday season is an excellent time to pitch new products. If you know of potential bestsellers for the upcoming holiday season, start writing content about these products now. You can compare it to tech sites writing about concept iPhones, features that Apple might add, etc.
The more you write about new products upfront, the more likely the sales pages for these products will rank when it matters. You should link all pages you made in advance to that one main page you’ll set up when the product is released and available to buy. Treat that page like cornerstone content.
5. Add structured data to your product pages
When adding or changing your product pages to fit the e-commerce holiday season, don’t forget to optimize them. Check, for instance, whether you’ve added structured data to your product pages. Rich results that show ratings and prices can give you an edge over your competitors. Our WooCommerce SEO plugin, Local SEO plugin (included in Yoast SEO Premium), or Yoast SEO for Shopify app can help you do this to improve your holiday season!
Read more: Structure data with Schema.org: the ultimate guide »
6. Check your product feeds
Don’t forget to optimize your product feeds for Black Friday SEO. This maximizes visibility and sales during this high-traffic online shopping period. Start by ensuring all product information, such as titles, descriptions, prices, and availability, is accurate and up-to-date. Check if the products that need them have relevant Black Friday keywords to enhance discoverability. Use high-quality, clear images to showcase your product.
Use the promotions feature in Google Merchant Center to prominently display special deals and discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This way, you’ll make your offers more attractive to potential buyers. Please update your feed regularly to reflect real-time inventory changes and fix errors to maintain product visibility.
7. Reuse content
There’s no shame in serving old wine in a new bottle. If you have a Black Friday or a Christmas gift guide for 2024, feel free to reuse it in 2025. Update the year and details like popular brands and products for that year. If the slug of your URL is /black-friday-guide-2024/, change it to /black-friday-guide-2025/ around August next year, and redirect the old URL to the new one. No need to create a new page. It would be a waste of nice inbound links not to reuse that old URL. Of course, this is even easier if you don’t include the year in the URL, so /black-friday-guide/ is also an excellent slug.
In the months before the holiday season, you could even update and repost popular posts from last year on social media. Valentine’s Day might even become Secret Santa. Cyber Monday might match your child’s favorite gifts for Ramadan. These are probably small adjustments; perhaps just adding ‘this Ramadan’ to a meta description or title will do.
Keep reading: Should I update or delete old content? »
8. Optimize for user and page experience
It’s a good idea to check and optimize your website for speed and mobile use. Trust us; you’ll get these recommendations from an SEO blog or consultant daily. And with good reason! Mobile, site speed, and user experience are essential to get people to spend money on your ecommerce business this Black Friday. When preparing your online store for the holiday sale season, this is as good a time as any to check your mobile website and site speed, and update or improve them if possible.
To start, look at Google’s Core Web Vitals and use these to improve your site. Here are five ways to boost your Core Web Vitals scores.
Read on: How to check site speed »
9. Local business? Focus on local SEO
Investing in local SEO for Black Friday shopping is essential for local businesses aiming to attract more customers. Begin by optimizing your Google Business Profile with accurate business information, including address, phone number, business hours, and any special Black Friday/Cyber Monday hours or promotions. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews. Use local keywords in your content, focusing on terms your community will likely search for, such as “Black Friday deals in [Your City].” Additionally, engage with your local community on social media by promoting special deals to drive more foot traffic to your store.
10. Create a measurement plan
All set? Remember to make a measurement plan to analyze your success. Write down all your plans, then think about how to track all your actions. This is key to knowing what to focus on next year. For detailed instructions on analyzing your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Cinco de Mayo shopping, read our post with five tips to measure your holiday sales success.
What should you do when the holiday season is over?
How do you handle the product pages of holiday gift sets after the holidays? Even if the gift set or product was a great success, and you want to offer it again next year, it’ll take a while for the page to be relevant again. What is the best way to deal with these pages in the meantime?
Our advice: Keep the pages up. However, you don’t necessarily want them visible to people browsing your site. So, have the page up without linking, then link to it again during the holiday season. This is better than deleting it and starting again.
Conclusion on holiday season SEO
In short, now’s the time to buckle down and start writing holiday gift pages and content for new products. Remember to plan your social media promotion and analytics. After all, you can never start too early when your online business depends on the holiday season. Be prepared; begin now with your SEO. Good luck with your holiday season sale!
Keep on reading: eCommerce usability: the ultimate guide »
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