With the passing of various holidays and seasons, businesses will experience great fluctuations in website traffic, purchase intent, customer interests, and advertisement costs. A seasonal business must tailor its marketing strategy to get the most out of every holiday or season.
Seasonal products come and go all the time, so how does Google rank them? Google’s John Mueller provided some insight with actionable suggestions on how to get seasonal product pages indexed and ranking.
Seasonal Product Pages
Let’s say that Nancy is selling seasonal baked products that relate to various holidays through her eCommerce website. When in season, she wants to see her products indexed and ranked properly, in order to improve her sales. Her structured data requirements have missing data fields, which she thought caused her products to not be able to index or rank on the Google search engine.
During Google’s office hours, Mueller confirmed that an incomplete data structure would not prevent the seasonal product page from being indexed. He states, “The page can definitely be indexed, even if some of the structured data markup is wrong. The page can be indexed even if the HTML itself is completely broken.” Therefore, it must have been another issue that had led to Nancy’s products not being indexed or ranked correctly.
How to Rank Seasonal Products?
Mueller then provides suggestions on other issues to investigate for properly ranking seasonal products on Google.
He states, “It’s very helpful for us to understand what you would consider to be important across a website. That means when we look at a website, if you show us as visibly as possible what you think is critical here, then it’s easier for us to pick that up.”
Mueller notes that the marketer should make it clear on the main page of the website what item is most important, and link it. For instance, if the bakery is selling Saint Patrick’s day cakes, then the home page should have direct links to the specific product. He noticed that the bakery homepage did not have the seasonal cakes linked, so Google is not able to recognize that the product is important. The time-limited event makes it even more important that it is linked to the home page.
Mueller adds, “We don’t realize that actually, this is something that is really important to you and that you would like to have treated prominently in the search results. So what I would do in cases like this, where you have an especially time-limited event happening, is make sure that you’re really visibly linking to that from the home page.”
By doing this, if someone searches for the relevant search query such as “Saint Patrick’s Day cake”, then Google will know that the home page is relevant for the query. If the product is directly linked from the home page, then Google can pick up the product page since they know it’s an important product.
Mueller mentions, “We can process it a little bit faster than we could some random other product that you happen to update on a website. So essentially with internal linking, you can give us a lot of information about what you care about across a website. And for a large page, our algorithms will try to follow that.”
What you determine is important is completely up to you. But make it as clear as possible, especially on the home page, in order for it to be placed in the foreground when it comes to search.
Conclusion
Be mindful of how your site communicates to Google what is important. Some pages are more important than others. In particular, seasonal content needs to be spotlighted and directly linked so that Google can understand the importance of the page. Need more help with marketing your seasonal products? Book a discovery call with us today to get started.
