Google’s 5 Best Practices For Optimizing Deal Pages

After making deal pages free for all ecommerce stores, Google offers six best practices to optimize the pages for search results.

In case you missed it, Google announced yesterday that deal pages are now free for all retailers. This allows ecommerce stores to easily highlight promotions and discounts in search results.

Deal pages are URLs dedicated to specific sales events, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. They’re displayed in search results in a carousel when the sales events are live.

To help retailers get the most out of deal pages and the deals carousel, Google recommends five optimization tactics.

How to Optimize Google’s Deal Pages For Search Results

Based on what Google learned from Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales last year, these best practices are recommended to better reach shoppers through the deals carousel.

1. Create a dedicated page for each promotional event. Google encourages retailers to create deals pages for all special promotional events, not just Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
2. Include the event description in the page title, such as “Black Friday 2021 Deals”. The page title is often incorporated into the text shown in the deals carousel.
3. Include an image relevant to the sale. For example, show products on sale or include banner text highlighting special offers or discounts.
4. Put text describing the event in the page contents. This can help Google correctly identify the page as relevant to a specific sale.
5. If you reveal sales details on the day of the event, include general information about the event in advance so Google can understand that the page is relevant, and then ask Google to recrawl the page after it’s updated.

As it relates to using banner text in images, Google acknowledges this is usually discouraged. However, text in images can help on deal pages.

Google adds that any text in an image should be reflected in the textual content on the page and in an appropriate alt text attribute. The recommended aspect ratio for images in the deals carousel is within the range of 4:3 to 3:4.

Lastly, Google says site owners should consider to registering their promotions in Google Merchant Center to help display deals across more surfaces.

The deals carousel is currently limited to the US and operational for limited sales events.

Source: Search Engine Journal