The end of the year holiday season is a peak time for many merchants. Google recommends that these merchants provide landing pages with relevant content and high quality images to help highlight their sales events. Some best practices for creating these landing pages include creating the page early, following standard SEO best practices, and linking to the landing page from the home page.
Google provides the following guidelines for optimizing your website for recurring events:
- Use a recurring URL, not a new URL for each occurrence of the event. Give the landing page of recurring events a meaningful URL that reflects the event that is used each year (for example: use /sale/black-friday, not /sale/2020/black-friday).
- Include a relevant, high quality image. Provide a static image with an up-to-date representation of your sale. Trim any whitespace around the borders of the image, and ensure that the image is visually engaging and is of good quality. For additional guidance on image quality, review the Google Images best practices and Images Web Fundamentals.
- Get your page recrawled. After you've tested your structured data for validity, ask Google to recrawl your page to get your content updated more quickly. (Note: as of publication this tool is undergoing maintenance, but we hope to have it up-and-running again soon.)
The Google Search Relations team has announced that they are available to answer any questions webmasters may have on the Help forum or on Twitter. This is a great opportunity for webmasters to get their questions answered directly by the team responsible for Google Search.