Measuring KPI: Rankings for seed keywords for each sale in Google Organic

Determining KPI: Monthly search volume for the holiday/yearly event

• If a holiday or yearly event has industry-specific search volume (Ex. “black friday tire deals”), then the following strategies should be implemented:

Key Strategy Points: 

• Dedicated landing pages for all target keywords
• Separate landing pages for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Use the same landing page URLs every year (no year number in URL)
• Link to main Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages from the homepage and/or footer/header
  • Footer and/or header links are ideal b/c of number of internal links it creates (this helps Google understand the page’s purpose and crawl the URL regularly – they assume a high level of importance based on sheer number of internal links) 
    • Link to Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages one month ahead of promo date
      • “Park” the URLs with content and teasers about the sale (no product until closer to the sale date – time of product launch TBD)
• Link to sub-category landing pages from the main Black Friday and Cyber Monday URLs
  • Ex. “black friday tire sale”
• Place articles on content partner sites
  • Launch sale-specific banners on partner websites as well
• Launch 1 blog post with the publishing of each page (1 for BF, 1 separate post for CM – link the two w/ text links)
• Launch a second set of blog posts right at the start of each sale w/ details about the sale
• Update all Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages, blogs, and banners/ads on third party sites shortly after sales end
  • “Park” Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages and blogs for next year (keep published, remove header/footer links)

Key Deliverables:

(Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the example)

SEO Task: Submit each page for indexation via Google Search Console once published

Detailed Explanation: 

The reason for having both a generic “deals” / “sale” landing page and individual deals pages for specific sale events is because of how Google understands the content on these pages and ranks them based on the SEO signals each URL garners over time.

When you have one page that tries to target all relevant search terms, over time the signals Google processes and uses to help them understand the purpose of the page becomes diluted, to the point where the page eventually will not rank well for any generic deals/sales terms nor the individual event-based terms.

We have run into this with a number of websites, most notably an example where they had amassed nearly 10 years of ranking signals to their main deals/sales URLs. 

The Black Friday page would “flip” to Cyber Monday at the appropriate time, keeping the same URL. Same with other sales. 

They weren’t able to rank these pages for any deal/sale keywords, despite the rest of the site ranking extremely well for highly competitive terms. 

The following year, we built out individual pages for each sale event, sunset the legacy sale URLs completely, and had no trouble ranking 1-2 for Black Friday and Cyber Monday keywords.

What happens is Google sees backlinks and internal links pointing to a singular URL that all send conflicting information about the purpose of the page.

For instance, if you were to target BF,CM, generic “deals” “sales” “memorial day sale” etc. terms on the main deals ( /deals ) page, Google over time would see a lot of external and internal links pointing to the page with differing context. 

For example, there might be 5 backlinks all to the /deals page with the following anchor text and supporting contextual relevance:

Shop [website name]’s 2020 black Friday sale here

Their Cyber Monday sale has great discounts on ___

Get a coupon code for [website name]

[website name]’s 2021 memorial day sale starts in three days, shop now

Best deals on ___

There is a wide breadth of keywords sending signals to the /deals page from the above theoretical backlinks, all of which have varying intent and relevance in search depending on the time of year. 

This becomes confusing for search engines, and eventually, they stop ranking the page well for all terms because they see an ever-shifting focus with the URL.

To mitigate this and build up authority over time instead of diluting it, plan to create a hierarchy where the main deals page targets the highest search volume seed keywords, and when there is a sale that has a meaningful amount of search volume, an individual page should then be created and the sale URL promoted for the same sale every year.

Take the following search terms that include “tire” and “deal.”

The first two are generic “deals” terms (though “best tire deals” has a slightly different intent behind it where searchers are looking for a list of retailers in most cases and not one retailer, hence why you do not want to target that term specifically on the /deals page), and the third is black friday-specific.

What would then happen is the /deals page is built to target “tire deals” and similar terms and is part of the site navigation year-round. 

URL: 

Target Keywords (examples): tire deals, tire sale, tire rebates, [website name] coupon code 

Then, for event-based sales, you would have URLs linked to from the /deals page when they are in season. These pages would also ideally live within the /deals section of the website.

The end goal would be to have a handful of individual event-based pages with their own, unique URLs where each year authority builds up. These pages swap in and out of the site navigation during the lead up to the sale, all while building consistent authority to /deals for the main seed terms.