Black Friday SEO & GEO tips

When gearing up your ecommerce website for Black Friday, it is important to review your technical SEO. Google needs to be able to crawl your product pages easily to understand what deals you are offering shoppers. Carrying out website health checks will help ensure search engines and AI can find your product pages, landing pages and discount information and use this to inform results for shoppers. Below are a few technical areas you can take a closer look at.

Check your website speed

As shoppers search around on the internet and go through a dozen different websites, they want to be efficient. This includes being able to click on pages, scroll, and purchase quickly. You therefore need to check your website speed and test this for different page types (products, categories, key landing pages).

Site speed also impacts website performance in search, so having components that slow site speed affects the website all year round, not just during sale periods. For example, ecommerce sites often have lots of large images or resources that require more effort from a browser than is needed.

Have a simple, logical website architecture

Customers on your website should easily be able to find what they are looking for, using the header and footer navigation, as well as internal links like breadcrumbs.

Having a logical header navigation will help users navigate around with ease when looking for a topic, sub-topic or informational page. Breadcrumbs help to reinforce the website’s structure by showing a user where they are on the site, and allow them to click back to a sub-category or category page if needed for smooth navigation.

Schema Markup 

Make use of schema markup on product and category pages, ensuring they include key information about products and their prices. For periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you can also include Offer schema markup, which allows you to clearly show search engines and AI what products are on offer and for how much. This will also ensure Google displays the correct amount in rich results.

If you are interested in learning more about schema, read our guide to schema markup for AI search. For more on product structured data and how it helps AI understand and recommend your products, read our ecommerce GEO guide.

Another key area ecommerce sites should focus on, leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is your on-page content. It is important to ensure you have pieces of content that target different searches shoppers will be making around this sale period. Below we highlight some key areas. 

Keyword targeting

When creating content for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you need to consider the types of short- and long-tail keywords your shoppers are likely to search for. For example, if you sell knitwear, you should brainstorm different ways people may be searching for this over the sale period. Someone may be searching “knitted dog jumpers for sale”, “winter knit jumpers for sale”, or “hand knitted jumpers for sale” rather than just “knit jumpers for sale”, which is a broader and more competitive keyword. 

Once you have your list of keywords, you should include them in headings (H1s, H2s, H3s), metadata, body copy, and FAQs on target pages. But make sure you don’t stuff your content with keywords; include them naturally. 

Having rich evergreen content 

In addition to the above, it’s also a good idea for ecommerce sites to have some evergreen content on your site that helps to target sale and Black Friday keywords before this period. This will mean your pages can continue to rank for keywords in the background, building up page authority rather than releasing a new page each year. 

Ideally, this evergreen content includes basic information about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, answering common FAQs shoppers have about this period. You should build up a backlink profile to this evergreen content to build authority and use this content for internal linking so it is easy to find. Google is also more likely to discover updates to the page if it is linked well internally. 

Other evergreen content could be guides such as “how to buy X”. Most people are shopping ahead of Christmas so make sure you have resources that are going to support these searches 

Shoppers hunting for the best deal often compare prices across lots of different sites. AI shopping agents take on that legwork: they query the web, check live stock, compare prices and review products to come back with a single recommendation.

If your store is built mainly for human visitors, with little machine-readable data, you could be filtered out before a shopper knows you exist. For a sale period, that means making sure your product specifications, live pricing and stock levels are well structured so they can be picked up and recommended, which is where the schema work above comes in.

Find out more about the shift to agentic shopping.

You could also create a fun campaign leading up to or during Black Friday to increase brand awareness. This is a good tactic to get your brand in front of more customers, building trust so they are more likely to check out your deals. 

Digital PR also helps to improve your SEO and GEO by acquiring quality backlinks from trusted sources to build a backlink profile. It ensures your brand stands out in search results among competitors while being viewed as a reliable and authoritative ecommerce website. 

Shoppers are looking for the best deals. They scout out the best options in the weeks leading up to Black Friday, as well as on the day, so you need to grab their attention and make it clear your brand is taking part. In the weeks leading up to the sale, you could add a message on your key landing pages to get shoppers excited about it. You could even give them a sneak peek of items that are going to be discounted.

The last thing they want when they are frantically searching around for the best deals is to come across something that’s going to disrupt their experience. Your website needs to be accessible for a range of users, such as those using keyboard assistive technology or a screen reader to navigate around the site. Include transcripts for videos, alt text for images, and captions to help users (and search engines) understand your products. 

Another note on the shopper experience on your site: they are likely to be shopping on their mobile device. Therefore, it is important to review how your ecommerce website works on mobile, to make sure images and elements are sized correctly and you can navigate easily. The last thing you want is users leaving your site soon after they land on it, due to frustration.

If you are a local business that offers Black Friday deals, here are a few additional local SEO tips for you:

• Optimise your Google Business Profile
• Ensure there are easy directions to your store on your website
• Post about your sales on social channels like Facebook and Instagram

Finally, it is important to remember that Black Friday ties into your wider ecommerce SEO strategy, so you need to consider SEO for social channels like TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram. You need to target your audiences both on Google and across your social network to get in front of your shoppers.

At Varn, we take a search everywhere approach, so if you want some help creating a successful SEO and GEO strategy for your ecommerce business, get in touch; we would love to help.