Hooray for the holidays! Especially this year when online shopping is expected to blow estimates out of the water. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new wave of people who just recently made their first online purchase. And we all know that online shopping is like a piece of candy, one bite and you keep coming back for more.
This year, there will be more shoppers than ever scouring the web for the best deals and the hottest new products. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are going to be big this year and marketing your store’s sales should go beyond just sending out an email and posting on your Facebook page.
One way you can promote your sale is to take advantage of the deals carousel in Google Search. For example, if you search for “Black Friday deals” you’ll see the “Deals” option in your search results. It’s here where you’ll find stores using deal pages to promote their sale.
Google recommends creating specific landing pages for all your promotions, not just Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So if you’re going to be running a Labor Day sale, they recommend creating a page called just that – “Labor Day Sale” so this title will show in Google’s deal carousel. They also recommend reusing the same URL each year, so don’t trash that page after the sale is over!
In addition, Google offers up these tips for making your promotions successful:
- Create your pages early! We all know it takes time for Google to crawl your side and index new pages, so start creating promotional pages on your site well in advance of the event. This is also why they recommend re-using the same URL each year.
- Follow SEO best practices. This should be a given, but just in case you’re thinking about some ways to “trick the system,” don’t. No matter what you do on your site, following best practices for search engine optimization is a must.
- Link your sale page from your store’s homepage. Let your visitors know that you’re having a sale by using a hero image with relevant imagery and provide a link to your sale page in your store’s navigation.
- Use relevant text on your sale page. Put a few sentences of well-written, descriptive content on your sale page that describes your sale event (following SEO best practices, of course). This text can help Google correctly tag the page as being relevant to a specific sale.
So what if you’re keeping the details of your page secret until the day of the sale? Google recommends creating the page in advance and putting relevant content on it so there is enough time for it to be crawled and marked as relevant. Once your page is updated on the day of the sale, you can submit a recrawl request to have the page reindexed.
Of course, this is just one way to take advantage of Google’s tools to help you grow sales this holiday season. They also recommend that you register your promotions in Google Merchant Center.
For more information on how the deals carousel works, click here.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.