Top Tips for Driving Site Traffic on Black Friday 2025

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) is one of the biggest sale events of the year with an estimated $74.4 billion spent globally in 2024 (source: Black Friday Statistics).

The first Friday after Thanksgiving in the USA, Black Friday is now a global event that kicks off the annual Christmas shopping rush. One of the busiest shopping days of the year, Black Friday offers a massive opportunity for businesses to boost sales – and not just for physical products. Many businesses offer discounts, freebies and bundle offers as incentives for buying services, software, courses and more meaning almost any business can benefit from the Black Friday hype.

This year, Black Friday will fall on the 28th of November 2025, so there’s still time to make sure you’ve got everything ready for this year’s biggest retail event.

Here’s our top tips to drive traffic to your website for a successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday!

SEO Optimise for The Right Keywords

It goes without saying that for BFCM, your SEO needs to be on lock. In 2024, around 87.3 million people shopped online, whilst 81.7 million shopped in person, marking a shift away from physical stores. Making sure your Black Friday offers are SEO optimise and can be found easily online is a non-negotiable at this point.

During the sale season, people change the way they search, and your normal SEO strategy just won’t cut it. More people will be searching key phrases related to sales, gifting, and Christmas as the holidays draw closer. If you’re not hitting those key words, then you’re not showing up in searches, and your site is flying under the radar.

Many users will have their eye on certain high-ticket items (e.g. TVs, hoovers etc) throughout the year but will wait for Black Friday to see if they can save money, so this is the perfect time to sell your pricier items in higher volumes. Consider updating pages or creating brand-new BFCM themed landing pages to direct traffic to your best deals.

Make sure you’re getting a mix of short-tail and long tail keywords and remember your user intent. For BFCM, most users are at the transactional stage of the user journey and will be looking to buy a certain product or are shopping around for the best deal.

Some key-words to build into your searches could include phrases related to:

• Sales, deals or special offers
• Bundles or “buy more, save more” offers
• Gift Ideas by gender/age or relationship (e.g. “best gifts for dad”)

Updating your website and targeting the right keywords related to the sale season makes all the difference, especially for Cyber Monday which is associated with online shopping – this is when you’ll feel the full benefit of site optimisation. But you can’t just shove key words on a page and hope it works – that’s called key word stuffing, and it’s a bad SEO tactic that can get your page penalised, losing you traffic.

For help optimising your site to make the most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, explore our SEO services or read about SEO for small business on our blog.

Leverage Email Marketing

If you’ve ever taken a customer’s email for an order or a contact form, then you’ve got yourself a database of potential returning clients – now is the time to use it! A dedicated email marketing campaign that can drive website traffic is going to be your best friend.

Customers who’ve purchased from your business before already have a sense of loyalty and trust towards your brand. On the lead-up Black Friday, let subscribers know about deals and special offers as a reward for their loyalty. Giving returning customers first dibs on sale items or offering exclusive discounts builds brand trust.

It’s not enough to just send out impersonal blanket emails and hope for the best though. BFCM represents big opportunities, but also big competition – in 2023 Mailchimp found that November email volume increased by 18%.

So, how do you stand out against every other brand vying for attention in your customer’s inboxes?

Ways to maximise your email marketing engagement include:

• Using merge tags in the subject line to greet recipients by name
• Using audience segments to tailor campaign content and ensure relevance
• Implementing dynamic content blocks that choose personalised product recommendations for each recipient
• Setting up automatic email notifications for abandoned carts to ensure customers complete their purchase

Build Hype on Social Media

Social media is more than just a place to keep up to date with what your friends are doing, it’s also a powerful tool for shopping and product discovery. Among gen-z audiences, social media behaves as a search engine, with 61% of social users finding their next purchase on Instagram according to Sprout Social and 3 in 4 TikTok users saying that they’re more likely to buy a product if they’ve seen it on TikTok shop (source: TikTok for Business).

If you’re still seeing social media as just pretty pictures and brand promotion, it’s time to up your game – social media makes a real and tangible impact on sales.

Here’s how to make sure you’re leveraging your social media properly:

• Start building hype early – regular posting in advance means multiple exposures to your deals and your brand. When BFCM rolls around, users will have already decided what they want to buy from you!
• Mix up your content – use comedy skits, product demonstrations, aesthetic carousels and informational posts and switch things up to deduce fatigue. You’ll get bored of making the same content, and your followers will get sick of seeing it. Save the hard sell for the week of Black Friday itself and focus on the why and how to buy.
• Use shopping features if appropriate – the idea is to shorten the user journey. The more clicks a customer must take to get where they want to go, the more people get frustrated and quit. By putting your star products on TikTok or Instagram’s shop, you let customers purchase without leaving the app and reduce the number of customers dropping off along the click journey. Whilst social media based digital store fronts offer less control, for some business it’s worth the increased sales.
• Direct users with a clear, clean link-in-bio – for your BFCM strategy, it might be worth trading out your usual link in bio for a dedicated landing page to all your best offers. Again, this is all to shorten the user journey and make it easier for your users to find the exact thing they want. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding a product you like on social media, but then not being able to find it on their website. The easier you make it for customers to find what they want, the better.
• Optimise product posts for searchability – proper hashtags, product tagging and clear descriptions all help the algorithm direct users to your posts but there’s also such a thing as too much optimisation. Don’t go overboard and keep it on-topic, doing too much will only confuse the algorithm and your users, leading to your post getting lost in the sea with all the other millions of Black Friday offers. Keep it short, sweet, and simple.

Ensure a Smooth User Experience

Once you’ve made all the effort to get users on your site, you need to keep them there if you want all your hard work to pay off. But poor loading times, confusing checkout processes, or unclear offers cause frustration and will lead to users quitting out of your site without buying anything, rendering your Black Friday marketing strategy totally pointless.

To ensure ROI on your BFCM 2025 marketing strategies, your site needs to capture and convert traffic to sales.

Some simple site fixes that ensure a smooth user journey:

• Make sure your site loads quickly – it goes without saying, but if your site doesn’t load properly, users are going to go elsewhere.
• Use clear hero images – draw attention to deals on your homepage. Your offers should be the first thing visitors see – use simple, clear language that highlights percentage discounts or money saved e.g. “50% off” or “Save up to £100”
• Make sure links go to where users expect – don’t go putting special offers on hoovers on a link to your discounted fridges, this just causes confusion and frustration. Users should immediately find exactly what they expect from your link title, meta description, or social post. Create dedicated landing pages if needed.
• Make it easy to checkout – where possible, offer multiple easy payment methods such as Apple Pay, PayPal and Klarna to allow users to pay without needing to type in card details. Remove any barriers between your user and the checkout process and erase any unnecessary steps to make the experience quick and smooth.

Enlist Extra Help

If the Black Friday Cyber Monday strategy just isn’t strategy-ing or it all sounds a little bit complicated, don’t stress. We’ve got your back and we’re here to help.

Whether it’s social media strategy, SEO, a tailored email marketing campaign, or just making sure you’ve got a proper website design ready for the influx of traffic this holiday season, we’ve got it covered.

Drop us a message, give us a bell, or pop in the office for a brew and a chat.