How to Repurpose Seasonal Links

It's that time of the year again. This month it's Valentine's Day, in April you'll have a campaign around Easter and in June around Eid. And just like with every new mass celebration, you have taken part to appear relatable. But before you end the campaigns by deleting or removing seasonal links, here's an idea: don't.

When it comes to eCommerce supply chain optimization, there are three key areas to keep in mind for optimizing seasonal links:

Let Them Live

As mentioned above, don't delete the seasonal links. Remove them from your site because your target segment is no longer looking for "Valentine's Day Gift Ideas for Him" and therefore as traffic doesn't reach the site no one is visiting, there is no point associating your campaign landing page with the link. But don't kill it so to speak. Instead regularly update the page as time goes on, raising its quality and time of existence, both of which will reflect favorably with Google's algorithms assess its authority for indexing. Last week our director of client servicing shared How to Strategically Grow eCommerce Traffic on Valentines Day and mentioned the variances between when women search and when men do, on average. Set annual reminders for when the next event, like VDay 2018, rolls around and set up the links to your new landing page accordingly the week or month prior to the big day.

Discard Internal Linking

Like above, do everything in your power to remove on and off-site links to the seasonal landing page associated with the campaign. When no one is landing on the page, crawlers won't either. Remove the same from your sitemaps as well.

Safeguard UX

It's likely that long after Valentines Day is done and dusted, interested parties are still landing on the page you created for the campaign. Use a 301 to redirect to a page that allows them to backorder the product, book their order for VDay 2018 or directs them to a similar long standing page. Doing so safeguards the user experience and when one page links to the next, Google might correlate this to mean that rankings on the expiring page should be transferred to the redirected page. The latest version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol is HTTP/2, which provides a faster UX on mobile by qualifying header compression and server pushes as well as multiplexing. Improve load times and provide users the ability to browse offline with progressive web apps. It would do well to optimize for voice-based search as early on as possible as yet another measure that structures the data for search engines.

If you have questions on search optimization, performance marketing, or eCommerce product management, reach me on [email protected]