SEO Tips For Your Seasonal Sales Pages
With the likes of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, the end of the year is a very busy shopping period for everyone – and search engines are no exception. When it comes to finding the latest seasonal sales, Google is one of the first places people will search. As a merchant, you’ll want to ensure your eCommerce website is prepared to garner this rush of shopping traffic by following these seasonal SEO tips to ensure your seasonal sales get the best exposure in the search results.
Create Dedicated Deal Pages
The first thing you need to do is ensure you are creating unique pages for each specific type of deal you are offering. For example, if you are planning deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you should create a single page for Black Friday days and another page for Cyber Monday deals. This way the page can be completely optimised for the relevant deal and will be able to reach relevant searches better.
Reuse URLs
After you have created the pages for your sales event, you need to stick with them. For this, ensure your pages are using ever-green URLs. For example: domain.com/black-friday-deals is evergreen as it can be reused every year. Whereas domain.com/black-friday-2021/ is not evergreen, as you have to change the URL every year.
For search engines like Google, a change of URL is a change of page. By keeping the same URL each year, Google understands that the page is always in use and relevant to the sales event. You can still make the page relevant to the current event by including the year in the title, description and content of the page – just ensure the URL is evergreen!
Make Sure Google Knows In Advance
You should ensure Google knows about the page in advance of the event. You can do this by creating the page early, submitting the URL in a sitemap, requesting recrawls through Google Search Console and adding some internal links from your blogs. This ensures Google has enough time and reason to crawl and index your page before the sales event takes place.
Even if you do not provide any sales until the actual day of the event, you should still take these measures to make sure Google has ample time to discover your page. You can simply include general details and information about the event in advance so Google can understand that the page is still relevant to the sales event.
Keep The Page Live
After the event you will understandably stop promoting the page and the page will lose prominence on the site itself, such as no longer in the nav bar etc. This is completely normal and fine to do. However, you should still keep the page live and indexable. If you delete the page, you are harming the page quality for the next event, as when you come to reinstate the page Google will have had a full 12 months of believing the page does not exist so it doesn’t need to crawl it frequently. The same will happen even if you keep the page live but add an noindex tag to the page robots. If Google repeatedly crawls a page and consistently finds a noindex tag, it will eventually reduce the frequency of crawling for the page – after all, why would Google use resources to crawl a page you don’t want to be indexed? Again, this can come back to harm your sales by the next event as Google may not reindex the page in time for the next sales event.
Google’s Advice
Google has given plenty of advice on how to get the most out of your deal pages on the search results. Here are just a few resources by Google to help you:
