Google Invites Small e-Commerce Shops to Join the Big Boys With Deal Pages

If you’re thinking of how you’ll increase your Black Friday, Q4, and Holiday sales, this Google announcement may be welcome news to you.

On the Google Search Central Blog, there’s a new post titled Engage shoppers with deal pages in Google Search.

Let’s step back for a second.

You’ve probably entered a shopping-related query into Google, and seen shopping-oriented results: in addition to the standard search listings, you may have seen image ads, a Shopping tab, and even Deals from Stores.

The Deals from Stores section, which is featured prominently on the search results page, is exactly what its name entails: deals from merchants, such as yourself.

Well, according to this Google blog post, your deals can be seen in that prominent portion of the results page.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t entirely new. Google does imply that this was somewhat available to merchants last year. What’s new about this year is that Google has some recommendations and best practices to try to make it easier for you to get your deals featured prominently within the Deals from Stores section.

These recommendations are very similar to basic on-page search engine practices:

1. Have each promotional event on it’s own, dedicated page.
2. Describe the event in the page title. (It’s usually recommended that a standard page title is up to 60 characters long.)
3. Include a relevant image.
4. Describe the event on the page. (Point #2 mentioned the title. Here, I mean in the actual content.)
5. If any of these details change, or you make new announcements on the day of, you can ask Google (via Search Console) to recrawl the page. That way, hopefully, Google will recrawl the page soon, and will update its listing soon. (Do keep in mind that if you do this, you’re sort of at the whim of Googlebot: it may not come to recrawl your site right away, and it may not update its listing right away, so give it at least a few hours.)

Your competition is now making plans for this holiday season. If you take action on this now, you can position yourself (literally and figuratively) for success.

Source: Google Search Central Blog