You may know some examples of deal-of-the-day web sites: FunDeal.ro, Groupon.ro (details – Wikipedia), Zumzi.ro, GoldenDeals.ro.
Vlad ANDRIEȘ talked yesterday at Lumea SEO PPC (Follow-up ediția #49: SEO și PPC pentru site-urile de reduceri colective: vineri, 24 februarie 2012, 18:30, Orange Concept Store: Lumea SEO PPC) about campaigns for promotion of deal-of-the-day web sites.
Some ideas from the presentation:
- Use tags. A lot. – typical for such web sites is to have offers which expire. Today we have an offer, tomorrow this offer will be gone. This, it is difficult to rank for something, only to have that offer expire the next day. For an old offer you generally have three options: you may redirect it to a different page (homepage or a new offer), you may list the offer but mention it is not active, or you can give an error page. A much better option would be to optimize your web site for category pages (so, instead of “Specific Offer To go To Turkey in 14-27 July, 2012”, you should optimize of “Offers in Turkey”, and list there all the offers, new or old ones. Instead of optimizing for “Good prices for SPA at X saloon, only on Monday, April 25, 2012”, which is just an offer page, you should optimize for a tag/category page, which should say “Good Prices for SPA in BraÈ™ov”, and list there a lot of options). Tips for category pages:
- Always link from the offer page to the category page.
- Sometimes, you may wish to redirect old traffic from an offer page to a category page.
- You may wish to put some text in the category/tag page, not just list titles of offers.
- (obviously) Constantly update the category/tag page with new offers.
- Have a good internal linking practice to optimize the category/tag (not only the offers in that category/tag, but other pages should link to the category/tag page).
- It’s great to have this kind of pages targeted for areas / towns / cities. So, don’t say “Cheap haircuts”, but “Cheap haircuts in IaÈ™i” or “Cheap haircuts in TimiÈ™oara”. A better solution.
- Capture emails – A lot of Romanian web sites with deal-of-the-day make some big efforts to have a large database of subscribers. When they have launched their businesses in Romania, they offered big prizes just to subscribe via email to their web sites. Today, when you visit such a web site, you are presented with an overlayer (a sort of a pop-up window), which gives you little options other than entering email (even the Close button is sometimes disguised in other forms, so it’s hard to visit the web site without entering an email address). Emails are critical for such a business, since a lot of the customers only find out about the offers via email (they last for a day, and are not updated). Also note, it’s best to capture the location with the email (so, don’t send an email with offers referring to Romania, but with offers referring to Buzău, it’s a better solution).
More details: