How to Optimize Promotional Pages
Promotions, seasonal discounts, and limited-time sales & events. All of these are important marketing tactics that help businesses attract a higher number of customers than they usually would. Since Black Friday is coming up, a lot of business websites are putting up promotional pages for the much-anticipated sale. The problem with having these promotional pages is, if you’re not willing to spend a decent amount of money for ads, your promotional pages won’t perform as you might expect them to. So, how exactly do webmasters and SEOs improve their promotional pages’ organic performance?
What are Promotional Pages?
Promotional pages are a type of landing page that is commonly used in limited time marketing, events, and holiday sales. They’re typically used as the landing pages for social media ads since it’s the best way to attract more users to a business’ website. One key example is promotional pages for the black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. Almost all websites that participate in this sale create promotional pages they use for ads both in social media and in search engines. As a matter of fact, the trend for the keyword “black Friday sale” has exponentially increased:
However, there’s an underlying problem in using this strategy, which is it’s a matter of spending an increasing amount of money to be able to compete with your competitors. This poses a problem for smaller businesses since they can’t really compete with bigger businesses.
But one underrated strategy business can use that won’t cost a thing is to ORGANICALLY increase their promotional page’s visibility and performance. Most webmasters and SEOs usually think that since promotional pages are only applicable for a limited time, putting in the efforts to make it more visible in organic search won’t work. But this isn’t true. As long as you sufficiently prepare in advance and properly do some strategies, organically ranking your promotional page is simple and will be effective in the long-run, especially if you keep the page up for the next time the limited event becomes applicable again. Here’s a great example of a promotional page making use of organic visibility:
Even though Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still 2-3 weeks away, they already have their promotional page live. It has complete information WHEN the sale is happening, WHAT discounts can the users enjoy, and WHY the users should sign-up for their newsletter. Is this page actually visible for a keyword related to the page? Let’s take a look at the results for “black Friday sale philippines” since the eCommerce site is based here in the Philippines:
Aside from a card and PAA section, the promotional page ranks number 1 for the keyword. You might be wondering how a page that only has an image and sign-up form above-the-fold can rank for number 1 for the keyword, but here’s the section of the page after scrolling:
The promotional page has content that talks about black friday sales and the discount that the eCommerce site is offering among other things. But notice that the year mentioned in the content is outdated, this means that the eCommerce site used this promotional page last year as well. Although the year in the content is outdated, the eCommerce site just updated the image and sign-up form above to match 2020, the year right now.
That being said, how exactly do we optimize for promotional pages?
How to Optimize for Promotional Pages
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Standard SEO Strategies
The first step to optimizing your promotional pages is through the use of standard SEO strategies. A promotional page is still a page that needs to target a keyword, properly place the keyword in important places such as the title tag, meta description, h1, and the body of the content. Links should be built to the page to improve its value and authority. Lastly, the page should be optimized in terms of UI/UX to give the users that visit a great experience.
Resources on standard SEO strategies are plentiful and easily accessible on search engines. One quick search is all that’s needed to find the strategies you can use.
The next point you have to remember is that your promotional page should be visible inside your site. This means that it should be linked from the homepage and other important pages. Additionally, the promotional page should also be included in your sitemap for it to be crawled regularly.
Having decent internal links pointing to your promotional page improves visibility and navigation for both search engines and users. Through the links, search engines can easily navigate to the promotional page and index it, while humans have the ease to get into the promotional page in just one click after entering your site’s homepage.
Most promotional pages use high-quality images to depict the specific sale or event that’s happening. That’s why for most promotional pages, it only contains images that tells that user how big of a discount they can avail, the date of the sale, and other benefits that the consumer can enjoy.
Having all the necessary details in the image is important at the same time, standard image optimization strategies should also be applied such as optimizing the alt text of the image, title, etc.
It’s highly recommended to use a highly optimized URL slug for your promotional pages. You should not use a new URL every time the event or sale happens, you can use a permanent URL slug that you can use every time you’re holding the sale or event. This not only helps you save time by not developing a new page, but it also helps in improving the authority of your promotional page in the long-run since it ages nicely.
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Page Creation Date
Lastly, it’s important for you to create your page AHEAD of the event or sale. I recommend creating the page minimum of one month before the event or sale happens. This helps give search engines time to crawl and index your page. You can’t create the promotional page just one week before the event since that’s not enough time for the search engine to properly index your page and display it in the search results.
Additionally, you’re also giving a heads-up to your customers wherein you’re telling them that they can enjoy massive discounts and price cuts on the specific date. This gives them time to prepare for the sale and even increase the chances of them making multiple purchases. Just take a look at the eCommerce site I used above. The Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale doesn’t happen in another 2-3 weeks but the eCommerce site’s promotional page is already live and they’re also encouraging their visitors to participate by signing up in the newsletter.
Key Takeaway
Promotional pages are still one of the best ways to market events, holiday sales, and limited-time discounts, but you have to be knowledgeable on the different opportunities you can take advantage of using your promotional pages. It’s not always about having the money for ads, etc.
What about you? Do you use promotional pages for your business website? Let me know in the comments below!
