How to Rank Seasonal Ecommerce Products

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about the difficulty of ranking seasonal products, mentioning how they suspect structured data might be the cause. John provides actionable advice on how to index and rank seasonal product pages.

seasonal product page

People asking this question relate to how their e-commerce customers sell seasonal products, such as bakery products specific to various holidays.

They describe how Google’s structured data requirements lead to yellow warnings in Google’s structured data tests, warnings that suggested structured data fields are missing.

People who deal with SEO say this results in seasonal product pages not ranking.

Google’s John Mueller explains how to rank seasonal content

The problem is summarized as:

“In other words, pages can be crawled, but not submitted, indexed, or ranked.”

John Mueller starts by confirming that incomplete structured data does not affect the ranking of seasonal product pages.

Even if the HTML is broken, it won’t be a factor in indexed pages, he said.

Mueller said:

“The page can definitely be indexed, even if some structured data markup is wrong.

The page can be indexed even if the HTML itself is completely broken. “

How to Rank Seasonal Products on Google

Next, Mueller turned his attention to providing useful advice on how to rank seasonal products on Google.

“I think the other part is useful specifically for e-commerce sites because it’s very helpful for us to understand what you think is important throughout the site.

This means that when we look at a website, it’s easier to use if you’re as obvious as possible to show us what you think is essential here.

From a practical standpoint, this means that when we look at things like the website home page or the most important pages in the website, for example… let us know what you think is important and highlight the links.

So for things like St. Patrick’s Day cakes, when we look at their home page, we should be able to see that this is actually a seasonal thing, which is really important to you, we can find from families A direct link to that particular product’s page. “

Mueller went on to say that when he looked at the specific site that was the subject of the question, he found that the seasonal pages didn’t link prominently from the home page, or even from the next level down.

Mueller commented:

“What this means to us is that when we look at the site as a whole, even though we see this particular product mentioned in the sitemap file, it looks like some product that happens to be on the e-commerce site by accident .

In fact, we didn’t realize it was very important to you and that you wanted to be featured prominently in search results.

So what I would do in this case is make sure you actually link to that link from the home page.

You also include some… in your home page so that even if we only reindex and reprocess your home page, we already know there’s some information there that we can get to.

So, for example, if you have a St. Patrick’s Day cake and you mention it on your homepage and we’re only going to update your homepage for whatever reason, then if someone searches for St. Patrick’s Day cake, we’ll at least know about you ‘s homepage may be relevant to this query.

Ideally, if it’s linked directly from their homepage, then we can pick up that product as well and see, well, it’s a really important product for this site.

Maybe we can handle it faster than any other random product you happen to update on the site.

So basically with internal linking you can give us a lot of information about what you care about throughout the site.

For huge pages, our algorithm will try to follow this.

Not that they make their own judgments. More importantly, they look at your website and realize oh, this guy says it’s very important.

So we will give it more weight.

And what you think is important is entirely up to you. This may be seasonal. This might be something you sell very well. …all of this is entirely up to you.

However, when we look at your site, especially your home page, and especially the more important pages on your site, please be as clear as possible about what you want to be in the foreground when searching. “

Tell Google what’s important

The main takeaway here is that it’s important to pay attention to how your website sends important signals to Google.

This means that some pages are less important than others. All pages usually cannot be of equal importance. Certain pages, especially seasonal content, need to be highlighted so Google understands the importance of the page.

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