SEO for Black Friday (and the Holiday Season)

Black Friday, once a US import we side-eyed, is now locked into the UK (and European) retail calendar for good. Since Amazon introduced it to UK shoppers in 2010, the event has only grown, becoming one of the biggest shopping moments of the year for retailers and customers alike.

The appetite for deals hasn’t dimmed either. According to Barclays’ Consumer Spend Report, shoppers are expected to spend an average of £430 each this Black Friday, £91 more than last year, adding up to over £10.2 billion across the UK. And it’s not just committed bargain-hunters: Barclays found over two in five UK adults (43%) will be on the hunt for deals, rising sharply among younger shoppers.

Not everyone’s convinced, though. PwC’s research shows interest in Black Friday has actually dipped to 46% of shoppers, down from 53% last year, even as those who do participate plan to spend more. Sale scepticism is real, but it’s not stopping the money moving.

What hasn’t changed is where that money’s being spent. PwC’s data shows four out of every five pounds spent this Black Friday will be online, whether that’s home delivery or click & collect. Queueing outside shops for a doorbuster deal is ancient history. The brands who anticipate this demand, and build their websites to handle it, are the ones who walk away with the sales.

Preparing your brand’s website for the Black Friday weekend and the festive season is essential to maximise sales and improve search visibility. Unsure where to begin? Our detailed strategy is laid out below.

• Technical foundations 
• Product Schema
• Site speed 
• Google Business Profile & Bing Places
• Ensure optimisations are live in time
• Emphasise seasonal USPs
• Research search behaviour
• Repurpose your sale page
• Steal from competitors

6 Months Before

Technical Foundations

Getting the technical foundations for SEO right should be a priority for any site, especially if you are looking to capitalise on an increase in seasonal searches. However it can also be an extremely daunting task so we’ve highlighted three of the most important things to look out for.

Internal links from category pages

Internal links are important in creating a crawlable structure for a search engine to discover and crawl all the pages and content on your website. A basic rule to follow is that an ideal site architecture has the lowest number of clicks between between the homepage and any given page. This should be managed by having a clear category and subcategory structure to the site where every page has its place in the hierarchy. More info on this can be found here.

Resolve 404s

The common 404 page not found error is the bane of many a webmaster and consumer. Links to these incorrect URLs may, over time, hurt your SEO rankings, as search engine crawlers waste resource attempting to access nonexistent pages and link equity is lost not to mention the bad user experience provided.  A scan of your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider will highlight all the broken links that need fixing. Prioritising this task over other technical fixes will set you in good stead as broken links lead to bad user experience and we know Google (and other search engines) care about user experience.

Discontinued products

When a product is discontinued the natural instinct is often to remove the product page from the site entirely. Apart from creating a 404 (see above) from all the pages linking to that product, you are also potentially missing out on an opportunity for a sale. By creating a listing that links out to related products which are in stock you you can capture and funnel traffic you know has purchase intent to products that they can convert on.  Much better than a missing page and a 404 error.

Product Schema

Ensure product schema is valid and accurate

Add markup to your product pages so Google, and increasingly AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, can pull accurate product detail into their results. Clean structured data is your entry ticket to every searchable platform now, including the LLMs shoppers use to compare and shortlist before they ever reach your site. Test yours with Google’s Rich Results Test, or the Schema Markup Validator for broader schema.org checks.

Utilise “Offer” markup to push discounted prices on product pages

Tag your offers and discounts properly in the schema. Get this right and Google lists them correctly in rich results, and AI platforms pulling live product data surface the deal accurately too, often putting you a step ahead of competitors who skipped this step.

Site speed

Site speed matters all year round, so watch out for Christmas gimmicks like falling snow or clunky festive banners dragging your load times down. A slow site costs you rankings, user experience, conversions, and increasingly, visibility with AI crawlers too. Test your page speed before pushing anything live, using Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse.

Prepare your server for the traffic spike as well. Most hosting providers can scale performance ahead of a big sale launch, so make sure yours can handle the volume before you flip the switch. Nothing kills a Black Friday sale faster than a page that won’t load.

Google Business Profile & Bing Places

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) supports “Offer” posts, a genuinely useful tool for businesses with physical stores. Use it to highlight your key offers right below your business info and lift the CTR of your listing.

This data feeds AI Overviews and other generative search results too, so keeping your profile accurate isn’t just about click-through, it shapes how AI platforms describe your offers to shoppers.

Update your store description while you’re at it. Highlight the sale, and just remember to change it back once it’s over.

Ensure optimisations are ready in time

Search demand increases significantly in the run up to Black Friday, and it takes time for Google to crawl and re-index your freshly optimised title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure you get your optimisations in well ahead of time to ensure they have taken effect by the time the crucial sales period begins!

1 month before

Emphasise seasonal USPs

Shopping is an emotional process and SEO can help you to influence the process with a few simple tweaks. It’s vital to emphasise any seasonal USPs (Unique Selling Points) as it’s something shoppers look for specifically around the Black Friday and festive seasons. Delivery and guaranteed deliveries for Christmas are high on the list of priorities for many consumers. You can also create seasonal countdowns on the site with last Christmas order dates and highlight any seasonal and gifting offers, generating some shopping anticipation.  Include your USPs, whatever they may be, in your meta-descriptions, so it’s the first thing seen when you appear in Google.

Research search behaviour

Understanding how consumers search is essential to succeeding online, and no crystal ball is required. Your site’s past data and Google’s data tools do the heavy lifting.

SEO isn’t guesswork. Unless you’re a very young brand, you’ll have past campaign data to work from. Use it to sharpen the pages that have performed well, even if there’s no time to overhaul the whole site. Know what your customers want most, optimise for it, and you’re already ahead. Look at the underperforming pages too, and fix what’s dragging them down.

Google’s Keyword Planner and other keyword tools remain solid partners for Black Friday and Christmas planning, surfacing search volume, related terms, and long-tail queries worth targeting.

But search behaviour has moved on, and your research needs to move with it. Shoppers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews to compare products, summarise reviews, and recommend where to buy, not just typing into Google. Understanding what people ask AI platforms, and whether your brand shows up in the answers, matters as much as traditional keyword volume now, especially in a category as competitive as Black Friday.

Speak your audience’s language, the one they use and the one AI platforms expect, and you’ll get seen. Use your keyword data to sharpen your copy and content across every searchable platform, a small tweak with real competitive upside.

And don’t ignore your paid search data. Those insights sharpen the organic keywords you target and the messaging you use in title tags, meta descriptions and on-site copy.

1 week to go

Just like there are plenty of last-minute shoppers, there are also plenty of last-minute SEO-ers. While preparing ahead of time yields the best results, all is not lost if you’ve not yet started. There are some SEO quick wins you can implement with not much time to spare to capitalise on the Black Friday / Christmas consumer rush.

Repurpose your sale page

Google can take its sweet time to crawl, index, and give authority to a new page with a new URL. But that’s time you don’t have. What you can do is repurpose an existing sale page, most sites have one, using the data, keywords, and seasonal USPs discussed above. Update your onsite copy to include seasonal keywords.

Steal from your competitors

Predicting shoppers’ behaviour is big business and companies try to get ahead through trend monitoring and stock management. For e-commerce retailers, the concept remains tricky as sudden influxes in sales and unprecedented demand can lead to the disappearance of the ‘It’ product. This is a huge opportunity to capture the hungry shoppers with an offer of a similar or replacement product, fulfilling their Black Friday wishes. You’ll not only create an opportunity to capitalise on your competitors’ success but lure away their core customer base too.

Do your competitor research and create a map of their top-performing products against yours to have a solid idea of what shoppers are looking for. Stock optimisation is another element at play here, so ensure that you have the proverbial and literal goods ready to deliver.

You can then set up a recurring scrape of your competitors’ URLs, using a crawler like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or similar, and using RegEx, pull if they’re ‘out of stock’ or ‘not available’, tailoring it to whatever terminology the competition uses.

Should one of their products go out of stock, you’ll be ready to act – swooping in to capture a customer ready to spend with no product to spend it on, yet at least.

• Identify all backlinks into the competitor page and contact linking sites, referencing your alternative and, crucially, available product.
• Increase your paid spend (Google Shopping in particular) on that product type.

As you can see, Black Friday and festive season SEO can be as complex or simple as you need it to be, based on your business goals. While a comprehensive SEO strategy, one sensitive to seasonal fluctuations, is always the best approach, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t quick wins to be had.

Black Friday can be a chaotic time in digital marketing. Stay ahead of the competition by partnering with Found — your ecommerce SEO agency — to ensure your campaigns and product pages are optimised for maximum impact this season.