Every year, countless sub-pages and landing pages are produced for seasonal offers and promotions. What should we do with these sites during the year? How can we use our SEO efforts from last year to our advantage this year and establish our SEO successes for next year? Keep reading and you’ll find out.
Seasonal offers play an important role in the life of any business. If you take only commercial promotions related to major holidays, Valentine’s Day opens the year, Easter promotions continue the line, followed by end-of-school promotions, summer offers, back-to-school campaigns, followed by Black Friday and Christmas. And these are just some of the best-known events that cause actions and campaigns.
The majority of businesses join most of these events. And one of the best means of communication is to create a separate sub-page for the event. Most people already know that the tools to optimize a new sub-page for SEO include the right key vote, the optimization of the page’s internal linking, and the acquisition of external links to that page.
However, there’s less talk about what to do with these pages after the campaign runs. Clear? Should we put a redirect on it? The answer is none of them. There’s a lot of energy invested behind the SEO optimization of every page. These things must not be lost. Instead, let’s move our achievements to our campaign next year, so we don’t have to build a new page from scratch.
Time
Whether you’re creating a new page or want to make an earlier page relevant to Google again, it’s important to start optimizing the page in time. Google Trends can help you do this by looking at which part of the year more people start searching for a keyword. The examples below show that the number of searches for ‘Black Friday’ starts to increase as early as early October, while the searching mood for Valentine’s Day is buoyed in early January.
This allows us to assess the period of the year for which we need to optimize the sub-page. This is important because Google needs time (days or even weeks) to find, crawl, and index a page. In other words, you should not leave the correct setting of the page for the last few days, because we can deprive ourselves of important traffic.
Overall optimization
It would go beyond the scope and purpose of the article to show the proper SEO optimization of a page in detail, but it is important to mention the main elements:
- The URL of the page should NOT contain a year! No items related to a specific date should be included in the URL. For example, instead of ‘/black-Friday-2020’, the URL should be ‘/black-Friday’. This way, we don’t have to create a new page every year.
- Proper in-page linking: this not only allows us to tell Google that it’s an important sub-page within the page but also makes it easier for users to find the page. That is, place links to the page in the menu, blog articles, and the most important visited subpages.
- Get external links: again, in addition to being able to “communicate” the authenticity of the page to Google, we can also use link traffic to strengthen the page’s usage. Place a link to our sub-page on our partners’ page or take the opportunity to use pr articles.
- Let’s use the keywords. In meta title, meta description, heading tags, and page wording. Not only will google’s work be made easier to interpret the content of our site, but our users will also appreciate clear consistent language.
- The site should be included a .xml sitemap! Google finds our site much easier and faster, so we can shorten the time it takes to index.
Between seasons
As long as you can find a lot of content on how to prepare our website and individual sub-pages for seasonal promotions, there’s a lot less talk about what to do with a seasonal site between seasons.
- At the end of the promotion, the site will NOT be deleted and will not be .txt robots.
- Reduce the internal linking on the site, remove it from the main linking locations (e.g. menu, footer) so that visitors are not directed there. (Linking within blog posts may remain)
- Remove the page from the .xml sitemap
- To remove the page from google’s index, place a ‘no-index’ tag on it
And why is that necessary?
This will not list the page in the Google results list in the off-season, but next year you won’t have to build the page’s authenticity (authority), external and internal linking, but just update the content within the page. However, it is important that since, for example, traffic from social posts can continue to go to that page, the site should be clearly communicated when the action is over!
And when the page is up to date again, you can:
- The ‘no-index’ tag must be removed
- Put it back .xml sitemap
- Confirm the site’s internal linking (e.g. in the menu)
- Update the content of the page
Thus, instead of a completely new page, we can put the achievements of an already established page at the service of our newly-actual content. We don’t want to build the sub-page from scratch every year if we can base our achievements in previous years and improve them further.
