Alan Kent from the Google Search Relations team posted on the Google blog some new best practices for creating deal pages that work well in Google Search. While the advice and tips are not necessarily new, Google is saying the company now recommends the following best practices.
Here is a list of those best practices:
(1) Create a dedicated page for each promotional event. Google said the company encourages you to create deals pages for all special promotional events, not just Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
(2) Google said you should include the event description in the page title. The page title is often incorporated into the text shown in the deals carousel.
(3) Also, make sure to include an image relevant to the sale. This image should be a "prominent image that will help shoppers understand your offering," Google wrote. For example, show products on sale or include banner text highlighting special offers or discounts. While Google generally discourages banner text in images, text in images can help on deals pages. Any text in an image should be reflected in the textual content on the page and in an appropriate alt text attribute. To minimize cropping in the deals carousel, Google recommends that the aspect ratio of the image be in the range of 4:3 to 3:4.
(4) Make sure to put text describing the event in the page contents. This can help Google correctly identify the page as relevant to a specific sale.
(5) For deal pages where you reveal sales details on the day of the event, where there isn't much content to put on that page prior to the event. Google said include general information about the event in advance so Google can understand that the page is relevant, and then ask Google to recrawl your page after it is updated to increase the likelihood that your updated content gets indexed in time.
(6) On the Merchant Center side Google said you may also wish to register your promotions in Google Merchant Center to help surface your deals across more surfaces on Google.
Remember back in October Google came out with best practices for Black Friday. The irony there was one of the pieces of advice was to use the request indexing tool, which happened to be down well before Black Friday and throughout when Black Friday was over.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
