Ecommerce SEO Strategies for Black Friday 2025

Black Friday remains one of the biggest shopping days of the year for retailers, with billions spent online. It marks the unofficial beginning of the festive shopping season and offers a prime opportunity for businesses to drive sales, whether they have traditional brick-and-mortar stores, an eCommerce online store, or both.

However, it would be naive to ignore the fact that, nowadays, customers are discovering (and buying) products in dramatically different ways. High-street retail is no longer the beast it once was; and to be frank, traditional eCommerce has profoundly shifted. Not only are shoppers buying more online, but they are moving beyond the parameters of standard search, using innovative, fast AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and more for personalised shopping recommendations and product comparisons.

It’s just the way the world is right now. However, that doesn’t mean that eCommerce SEO is a dying practice. If anything, it’s far from it.

Here, we’ll explore the key eCommerce SEO strategies you can use to maximise your website’s impact during this important retail period, whilst ensuring your products are discoverable across both traditional and AI search.

Optimise Your Product Pages with the Right Keywords

When optimising your site for Black Friday, selecting the right keywords and search terms is understandably important.

Start by analysing your site analytics and identifying which product and category terms resonate with your existing customers. This provides an insight into the keywords you should prioritise when optimising product and category pages.

Look for high-volume, low-competition keywords that closely align with your best-selling items or promoted deals. Include relevant seasonal keywords like “Black Friday gifts”, “[product] deals”, or “[brand] Cyber Monday”, as examples.

Combining the season or event with your promoted products and brands helps target users specifically hunting for bargains. However, simply optimising for keywords alone has become far more multifaceted, with users and now even search engines contextually relevant text and pages that match search intent.

Therefore, consider the following:

• Structure your product descriptions to answer common customer questions naturally
• Write clear, helpful content that addresses why someone would want to buy your product
• Explain clear instructions for correct usage
• Describe what makes your deal or bundle compelling
• Avoid stuffing your page and content with keywords

This approach satisfies both traditional search algorithms and the way AI tools interpret and recommend products.

Tools like Google Trends remain useful for identifying rising searches around gifts, deals, and discounts commonly used by Black Friday shoppers, but also consider how customers phrase questions to AI assistants when shopping.

Make Sure Pages Load Quickly

With Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) being very online- and eCommerce-driven events, it’s vital that your website delivers a fast, frictionless experience to every user, particularly if they’re using mobile devices.

Research consistently shows slow load times lead to higher bounce rates and lost conversions, and at times like this when traffic can be higher than average, it’s important that your site can remain stable and steady, and deliver the intended results (e.g., fast checkouts, seamless integration, and nothing obstructive.)

Conduct thorough performance checks using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights for both desktop and mobile. Look for any issues dragging down page load times, which can range from bulky and uncompressed images, unminified code, intrusive pop-ups affecting page layouts, and plugins which could be causing server lag. When shoppers are comparing multiple deals across different retailers, every millisecond matters to the customer experience.

Pages that load efficiently lead to greater engagement, higher conversion rates, and more online revenue this Black Friday season. Remember that page speed is also a ranking factor for traditional search engines and influences how AI tools assess site quality when making recommendations.

Leverage Structured Data (Schema) Markup

Implementing structured data can dramatically improve how your Black Friday deals appear in search results and how AI tools understand your offerings. Structured data provides search engines and AI platforms with clear, machine-readable information about your products, prices, and promotions.

By leveraging schema markup, specifically the Offer and Product schemas, retailers can highlight key details such as sale prices, discounts, stock availability, and review ratings, as well as key local business information. This enables search engines to create rich snippets that showcase the most appealing aspects of your deals directly in search listings, which makes for a more intuitive user experience.

More importantly for 2025, structured data helps AI-powered tools like Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, accurately understand and cite your products when users ask for shopping recommendations. When these platforms can easily parse your product information, you’re more likely to be featured in AI-generated shopping guides and comparisons.

Tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper make implementation straightforward, and the enhanced visibility across both traditional and AI-driven search makes structured data a worthwhile investment this Black Friday season.

Strategic Link Building to Build Domain Authority

Backlinks remain a pivotal ranking factor for Google and help establish your domain authority. Using the Black Friday period as an opportunity to build relevant links can provide eCommerce SEO value well beyond just the seasonal rush.

Look for guest posting opportunities on blogs and websites in your industry. Offer exclusive deals, product tutorials, or features in gift guides in exchange for backlinks, and avoid link farms at all costs. Connect with influencers on social media (particularly those in the deals, bargains or retail spaces) and ask them to share your Black Friday content if they find it valuable.

The key is securing backlinks from reputable and topically relevant sites. This builds your domain authority in ecommerce and deal-related searches, fuelling lasting rankings growth. Additionally, quality backlinks from authoritative sources signal to AI platforms that your business is trustworthy and worth recommending, particularly if your brand is mentioned by name by multiple other reputable sites.

Create Dedicated Landing Pages 

Creating dedicated landing pages remains an impactful way to promote your best Black Friday deals and products. These targeted pages make it easier to optimise for key search terms, including local keywords if you have a physical store, without disrupting your main website content.

Craft the content on these pages around specific keywords you want to rank for. Include deal details, discounts, promotional codes, and urgency messaging to entice more clicks and engagement, and use compelling page titles and meta descriptions that reaffirm your key messaging while being natural and with some keywords integrated.

However, in 2025, go beyond traditional SEO. Structure your landing pages to answer common questions shoppers might ask AI tools. Include clear sections addressing questions like “What’s the best deal on [product category]?” or “Where can I find [brand] Black Friday discounts?” This approach helps your pages appear in AI-generated answers whilst maintaining an excellent user experience.

With dedicated landing pages, you can target high-volume searches around hot deals and trending products whilst including clear CTAs (calls to action) to convert visitors into customers.

Prepare for AI-Powered Shopping Discovery

In 2025, more and more shoppers are using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to research and compare options, and find the best deals. We have seen this trend increase over the last several months and it certainly isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

Our Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) service ensures your products, services and pages are structured and written in ways that help them show up when customers search both Google and use AI tools for recommendations.

This includes:

• Structuring product content so AI tools can easily understand and cite your offerings
• Creating digestible content that positions your products favourably
• Ensuring your product information is clear, accurate, and answers common pre-purchase questions
• Building topical authority around your product categories so AI platforms recognise your expertise

Through our proprietary ARTEMIS INTELLIGENCE® methodology and LLM optimisation services, we help ecommerce businesses ensure their products are discoverable across traditional search engines and AI tools. The bridge between both is growing increasingly smaller.

Black Friday represents a huge opportunity for ecommerce businesses to drive major sales and spike revenue. But with so many retailers competing for attention across multiple discovery channels, a comprehensive approach is essential. We’re experts in all aspects of SEO and can help ensure you implement the right optimisation strategies for your business. Contact us today and speak with our knowledgeable team to find out more.