(recorded October 4, 2021) - 49 minutes
Do you write email subject lines that will stop your customers dead in their tracks, while also avoiding the phrasing that will send your marketing emails directly to spam? Today we’re chomping on some evocative ideas for fantastic email subjects that shouldn’t be too difficult for you to follow, or swallow. Additionally, in this, episode 91 of the RethinkYour.com Podcast, we’re giving you plenty more food for thought with 5 different approaches for curating products for those holiday gift guides you should be setting up on your website. Let’s dig into this delicious episode.
''Repeat the importance of setting up your Holiday pages now.
Pages that have H1 phrases like these:
Holiday gifts for mom
Holiday gifts for wife
Holiday gifts for husband
Holiday gifts for girlfriend
Holiday gifts for boyfriend
Holiday gifts for dad
Each page should be curated with items that you select from your catalog. If your online catalog has the ability to tag items for each of these people, then you can just create catalog pages that filter by those tags.
A second way to curate items onto one of these pages would be to group them together into a set of similar products. Then you create a product catalog page that only displays the individual set. Your ecommerce system would need the ability to group products into sets like this.
A third way to curate items onto a single page would be to create a new category called "Holiday gifts for wife," and all the others, then add those products to those categories. What you don't want to do is remove your jewelry items from their main categories when you ad them into these temporary holiday categories. Your ecommerce system would need to allow for items to be in multiple categories for this to work.
With these three methods of creating holiday specific product pages, you should be able to utilize all the built-in meta tags that your website offers. This refers to all the hidden schema.org markup that is needed for Google to recognize that the jewelry on the page are items for sale. Employing the products schema.org markup on your pages give your site a chance to appear in product specific searches across several Google apps and services.
A fourth way to curate items onto a single page would be to create a new content page on your site. On this page you would have to manually add a product photo and description for each item. You'd also have to link each photo and description to their real product detail page within your ecommerce catalog. This will take a lot of time to set up because there's no automation. You also have to remember to remove items from this content page once they are sold out.
A fifth way to curate items together would be to write a blog post for each curated group. This would be similar to a content page, with one specific difference. A blog page usually has the date when it was posted, and the writeup can be more of an announcement of what you have available this season. You can show the individual item photos, their descriptions, and a link to the product detail page. The benefit of using a blog is that many people use their blog to announce relevant topics as of the date of the post with a caveat that these items are only available in limited quantities. Which means that you would not need to worry about going back to edit this blog post as you sell out of items. The drawback of a blog post is that I don't often see them appearing in google search results unless the blog topic is specifically matched to the phrase someone searched for.
The big drawback of using a content page or a blog page is that you can't use the hidden meta tags for schema.org products, which means Google will not immediately recognize these pages as products, and you will lose the opportunity to have these appear in Google product searches.
Whatever strategy you take, do this immediately. Once these pages are set up you need to tell Google that they exist. The typical way to do that is to include links to these pages within the body of your home page. Google will see and follow those links and should quickly index those pages. Since we are already in November, and since other retail chains are already promoting the holiday season, you shouldn't hesitate to include links to these curated pages on your home page. You could even create a holiday announcement area.
Another way to notify Google of these new pages is to add them to the sitemap of your website. You might be familiar with a Sitemap link in the footer of a website that leads to a page showing the the different sections of your website and all the sub pages within each section. While this page is good, it is not the type of sitemap that Google needs to know about. There's another sitemap which that uses a special format of XML code, rather than HTML code, to list all of the pages within your site. The URL of this special page is usually domain.com/sitemap.xml
Your website should have the built-in ability to create this XML sitemap and keep it updated every time you add a new product or page to your website. In other words, even if you do not include these holiday pages on your home page right now, they should still be visible in the XML sitemap.
In order for Google to know about the XML sitemap, you need to have your Google Search Console account set up. Please refer to the RethinkYour.com Podcast episode #???????? for details on how to set up your Google Search Console account. Within Search Console there is a screen to tell Google where your sitemap is located. Once you'd added the sitemap to your account, Google will routinely revisit the XML page to grab your latest additions to your site.
Of course, when you create new pages specific to the holiday season, you should include them in your main navigation in the top menu of your website. You should activate them in the top menu whenever you officially kick off your promotions. Main navigation links are another way that Google will discover new pages on your site, but it more likely that Google will follow links within the body content of a page than links in your main navigation. When using the sitemap or homepage link approach, your new pages should be found and indexed faster.
As for activating the sitemap on your website, it should be an automatically on feature or something that you activate with a button somewhere within the settings of your site. You do not have to learn XML programming. It should just work.