How To Do SEO for Black Friday

November 6, 2026

With Halloween in the rear view mirror, many businesses are shifting to Christmas marketing. And the biggest marketing event in the season is Black Friday.

So, how should you handle that on your website?

Here’s a story from 2020…skip to tips

I was working as a subcontractor for a marketing agency for car dealerships doing organic search marketing. I was assigned to a handful of accounts that summer and I started coming up with SEO opportunities. When I started working on deliverables for September, I brought up creating Black Friday pages on the websites.

One of the websites did have a 2018 Black Friday page still active, but the other two had nothing published.

My manager questioned why I wouldn’t do those in November and my reasoning was primarily because Google takes around 6 weeks to fully trust a new web page unless it is news content.

I launched all three websites with a Black Friday sales page on their websites with “Sales Info Coming Soon.” And they were updated before November with the regular monthly sale information. There wasn’t any special Black Friday promotion going on otherwise.

So, how did the pages perform?

Context is key here – all three websites had different backend platforms. One of the websites did not get the Black Friday page even indexed in Google by the end of November. So it had zero traffic. The second website had the 2018 page, which I unpublished and redirected to the new Black Friday sales page. This site did get picked up by Google’s index, but did not get much search traffic through the month. It might have been the 10th most popular landing page that month.

But the third website was juuuust right. Even though it did not have any past Black Friday sales pages, I published the new sales page and it was indexed right away. The Black Friday page ended up being the 2nd most popular landing page that month with lots of traffic looking for “black friday car sales” or “black friday truck sales”.

I did about the same work for all three websites, but there were wild differences in outcomes. And the difference came from how the website was created. Unfortunately, Google’s tool to request indexing was inactive at that time, so I was at the whim of the Google spiders to crawl the new pages and deem them valuable.

What are my tips for a good Black Friday page for your business?

1. Decide if you would get more value from a branded keyword Black Friday deals page or a regional keyword or a product category keyword.
   In the example above, each car dealership business could choose a different route and focus on “black friday Ford deals”, “Capitol City black friday deals”, or “black friday car deals”. For your business, decide what makes sense. An ecommerce website is probably best suited for product categories. If you own a brand that is sold on your own website as well as through retailers (like Nike), then stick with your brand. For businesses with only local customers, I probably wouldn’t only use the regional keyword, but would use both the region and a product keyword, like “black friday bakery deals near capitol city”.

2. Add additional keywords for the marketing events next to Black Friday – Small Business Saturday, Artist Sunday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday.
   Figure out which of these apply to your business and use a marketing angle to work those terms into your sales/deals page. For some small businesses, it might be most valuable to brand the page “Black Friday/Small Business Saturday [product category] deals”.

3. Publish early and keep the page evergreen.
   

   The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now – Chinese proverb
   The same principle applies to SEO, although the timeframe is more like 6 weeks instead of 20 years.

   If you publish the page in October, there isn’t going to be much time to get the page indexed and have it outrank other websites by mid-November. Avoid using the URL /black-friday-2026, instead just make it /black-friday and update the page next year.

4. Consider actual Black Friday deals.
   You don’t need special deals to GET traffic from Google for a Black Friday sale/deal page, but that only gets eyeballs on your website. In order to actually convert that traffic into sales, you still need to have something worthwhile on the page. A “deal” that is just Free In-Store Pick-up is not what customers expect from a Black Friday sale. I’ve actually used that sale tactic before in order to boost SEO – I don’t recommend it for this situation. If you are selling products, you should explain why customers should buy from you instead of Amazon. It could be price, easy returns, or expert guidance through the purchase.

5. Connect the page from the rest of your website.
   In October or November, you need to have a prominent link on your home page. The page needs to be in your sitemap file. There should be a link from your regular sales/promotions page as well. Consider adding it to the main navigation menu and the footer during November.

If you have a business that wants help implementing these SEO tactics for your Black Friday marketing promotion, contact Jim Payseur or click here to learn more about my SEO services.