Black Friday/Cyber Monday SEO success
It's all about the preparation
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Noble.
Paid subscribers of this newsletter will have access to all my past archives as well as upcoming playbooks that will accompany some posts.
SEO for Black Friday or any other singular shopping day is not just a two-week sprint. The actual day and the traffic leading up to it might be short, but the success of the SEO part of this needs to rest on a strong foundation built over months of planning. Whatever you build should last from year to year with improvements made over time. The last thing you want to do is throw out your efforts on December 1st. Doing so wastes the real opportunity, which isn’t just about selling stuff during the shopping frenzy but about creating a foundation and making it even better next year.
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The bedrock of good seasonal SEO is creating pages that work for years, not weeks. These aren’t promotional landing pages you delete after Cyber Monday. They’re substantial resources that get better with age. I once consulted for a company that created a new Black Friday (eg. Black Friday 2025) page every year, don’t do that. Another company I worked with 404’ed their Black Friday page as soon as it became irrelevant. Don’t do that either.
Build hubs
The key to success is building the best strategic approach and then letting it improve over time. You want to make one established hub page for every holiday event. If you are in retail, Black Friday might be your biggest day, but don’t neglect every shopping holiday, too. Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and others will also have searchers looking for them, too.
For your page to be considered authoritative and helpful, especially in an AI-first world, it can’t just be a product category page; it needs to have more. It can include historical data showing what kinds of deals happened in past years, trend analysis, or predictions for what’s coming. It should also include something helpful and relevant to your business/products, such as strategies to help people maximize their budget or packages they can buy on your site. You publish this page once and update it every year, but you never delete it.
Create product-specific hubs
In addition to the overall hub pages, consider some more specific pages like “Best Black Friday Laptop Deals”, “Black Friday TV Deals,” or the more granular Black Friday Samsung TV Deals”, but don’t overdo it. Having too many of these pages could put you in the helpful content update gray area, so only create pages that match what users will actually search for on your site. Like the hub pages, you should add material to the pages that makes them better than the generic category pages for the category. Without this, it would be too similar to other pages and could cause issues for all those pages.
Comparison pages
Create comparisons that also align with user intent for these shopping holidays. You might already have comparisons for you vs. competitors, but this could be an additional page you create specifically for the shopping event. Again, don’t go overboard with making a comparison page for everything, but if there’s true user intent, these will be valuable pages, especially in an AI-first world. As is best practice for any comparison, these pages should be honest and data-driven. Give them real information that helps them make decisions, even if that decision isn’t always buying from you.
UGC
User-generated content and proprietary data separate good seasonal SEO from great seasonal SEO. This is what competitors can’t copy because it comes from your actual business and customers. UGC is the BEST way to make your pages stand out from other sites that might be using AI to pump out thin content. UGC could consist of product feedback, images, or comments. Do whatever fits with the business.
If you ran Black Friday promotions last year, you have data that will help your page stand out. What did people actually buy? What products were most popular? At what times did traffic peak? What deals converted best? Turn that into content that enriches your pages.
Content marketing
If you are a frequent reader of my content, you know that I am not a proponent of content just for the sake of giving search users something to read on your site. If you intend to sell products, building search traffic to content will come at the expense of bringing those users to product landing pages. However, with a hyper-competitive market like deals, there could be value in creating tangential content that won’t compete with product landing pages.
Articles about avoiding Black Friday scams, strategies for dealing with limited inventory, or how to decide if a deal is actually good might draw in extra search that’s not bottom of funnel. This content will be visible where product pages wouldn't be, and you could then drive some percentage of those users to the product pages to buy.
Timing
The timing when you start building your SEO for a shopping event matters the most. You can’t just spin everything up in November and expect it to work. Start publishing your page early in the year. This gives search engines time to crawl, index, and start valuing your content, while giving you enough time to learn and improve. You won’t have very many actual searches for Black Friday in February, but you can do your own searches to ensure things are showing up the way you need them to.
This lead time will be long enough for you to identify what might be missing and then to improve it. Having the pages built will also give you plenty of lead time to create citations, which are absolutely critical if you are in a market where SEO efforts are deliberate and competitive.
As you get closer to the shopping holiday, update everything aggressively, because it’s no longer about rankings but conversions. Troubleshoot your conversion flow and ensure traffic flows as you need it to. If you were the user, would you buy? Keep things fresh and relevant because LLMs require a dynamic, up-to-date page. If applicable, offer APIs that might help you with Product-Led AEO.
After Black Friday
Black Friday and Cyber Monday might be the most important shopping days of the calendar, but they aren’t the only ones. Do a postmortem to find out what worked and what didn’t, and then immediately deploy these learnings into other holiday campaigns. This way, you don’t park any knowledge you have gained for a year while you wait for Black Friday to come around again.
Metrics
Success metrics for seasonal SEO differ from those for regular campaigns. You can’t just measure peak-week traffic. This is when you compare your traffic and success vs a previous year or a competitor. When it comes to single events, rankings (or AI prompts) absolutely do not matter; it’s all about the volume of revenue that has been created.
Don’t neglect conversions that might have started on Black Friday and converted later, even at a non-sale price, so measure the success of your SEO again at the beginning of the new year. Update your postmortem and start building your SEO again.
Compounding effect
The compounding effect is what will really drive your Black Friday success. Your learnings will help you for next year's Black Friday, but they could also drive additional brand growth throughout the year from a successful sale event.
Much of what I shared earlier about hub pages requires significant marination in search to generate visibility, so even if you are late and don’t have that, it might still be beneficial to put up a quick page with some Black Friday offerings.
Yes, we are literally days away from Black Friday, but it only comes once a year; you still have time to give it a shot. If you don’t show up, you certainly won’t drive any sales.
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