The SEO Tip Online Retailers Still Are Not Taking Advantage Of!

A while back I posted about the opportunity most retailers miss out on - optimizing their own websites for their store names plus "free shipping."

Related searches in Google indicate the suggestions are highly searched, and therefore valuable to optimize for.

Add to free shipping searches for "promo code(s)," "voucher code(s)," "coupon code(s)," "discount code(s)" et cetera. Customers are actively Googling these terms, and guess who's cherry-picking the traffic? Affiliates, and collecting a nice commission along with it.

I suggested that retailers create dedicated landing pages optimized for their own coupon codes because there's a good chance the store's domain will outrank the affiliate sites. Have I ever seen it in practice? No. I got excited when I spotted Macy's linking to a list of codes off its shopping cart review page...

...which links to:

But, because the coupon codes are in JavaScript, Macy's special page is not crawled or indexed in search engines. It misses all the organic traffic it could capture from the searches on "macys coupon," "macys promo codes" etc.

I'm still keeping my eyes peeled for a major brand to take advantage of this low-hanging fruit. In the mean time, why don't you use this trick for your own online store and create an optimized landing page for your coupons and free shipping offers? Hint: Make sure your title tag includes the keywords "free shipping" and "coupon codes" at a minimum.