Promo Codes (US keyphrase:)
Voucher Codes (UK keyphrase)
Out of all those brand searches across both the UK and the US not a single brand ranks number 1 for their own brand keyphrase.
Yes, I was shocked too. In fact, not many of them rank on the first page of results for that query.What to do about it?
Sure, you might be wondering how you rank for that phrase - after all you don't want to give away free codes do you? Well why not? Create a page that offers your users a chance to get a promo/voucher code in some way. The most obvious I can think of is to offer a promo code if you sign up to an email newsletter, but if that's too easy perhaps offering a promo code to every 5th email newsletter signup.... Or offer a promo code to anyone who fills out a feedback form...... Or offer a promo code to You get the idea, if you have any sort of codes then give your users a way of getting them and make a page that can rank for that juicy branded search term. Here's a perfect example of the kind of page I'm talking about:
Except of course they neglected to do any SEO for the page, like including the phrase "Argos voucher codes" in the title tag so it only ranks 10th...... Still, better than nothing.
Anyway, there you go, short but sweet. In fact this post is so short that you could probably fit the whole post in a tweet. Like this: click here to tweet this post in 140 characters!
Anyone who's had success using this tactic I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Anyway, there you go, short but sweet. In fact this post is so short that you could probably fit the whole post in a tweet. Like this: click here to tweet this post in 140 characters!
Anyone who's had success using this tactic I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
about six months back I realised that several affiliates were driving hundreds of transactions per month for ranking for "[our brand] discount code" as a search term.
the domain, "[our brand] discount code.com" was available - registered it, set it up as a thin affiliate, and guess what, we have reduced our affiliate commisions on that term by about 85%.
total cost to us? $8 for a domain.
monthly savings? substantial!
Great Work!
This is the kind of thing that FTSE 500's are missing. They don't have people who do this kind of analysis and then react to it.
That's a really good idea, I was going suggest doing that in a comment as it makes sense
Seeing your example really does show how important it is to do this..if I asked you for the URL would you be able to show it? No problem if you can't (for whatever reason), just interested in seeing the design really
sure: the search term on google.co.uk is "seatwave discount code" if you type seatw,,, into google that is the first thing on the type ahead search.
the domain is https://seatwavediscountcode.com which uses the seatwave API integrated into a wordpress plugin, its a rubbish looking template, but a much better one is over at https://encoretickets.net
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That's a great idea - now I need to check on the availability of a few domains... :)
really good idea
An airline here in Colombia offers promo codes exclusively through facebook. One must become a fan. This allows them to advertise on a facebook feed and I suspect creates links with people spreading the code around.
Searching for their name with "promo code" brings up results of forum discussions sharing the code.
Getting the thousands of facebook fans creates a good progressive corporate image as well. Whenever they offer a promo, there are plenty of excited comments from users giving them a much more positive image than what is associated with most airlines.
I'm a bit biased towards this airline - I met my wife on their flight between Panama and Cartagena.
I searched these terms, myvouchercodes.co.uk and vouchercodes.co.uk are just taking huge advantages of these terms.
I think it's the time for those big brands to setup their own voucher page and save a decent amount of money on commissions.
the question is how much would it cost to outrank the pages in front and what is the roi ?one way of seeing it is the commission paid is just a way of outsourcing the promoting of the coupon code side of the business.
it may actually cost less to pay a comission than try to outrank your affiliates.
Good point!
One thing to be sure - you need to offer value to users on that page. Otherwise they'll go to result #2, 3, 4, etc... looking for a coupon code that works and provides them real value. Larger advertisers might even consider restricting affiliates from offering coupon codes unless they are seeing value from it.
Hi Tom, good post. Fathom SEO wrote about this same topic back in August and included some observations on traffic and sales numbers. We hope this can help the SEOmoz readers as well with some additional tips to optimizing for promo and coupon code search traffic.
Use SEO to Maximize Your e-Commerce Promo Code Traffic
Great addition there, sorry I hadn't seen that post when I wrote mine but you go into a bit more detail which is nice. I like the revenue stats especially.
Good work! I never thought of using promo code as one of our long tail keywords. I never buy anything online without looking for a promo code first, including seomoz pro. I I couldn't find one :(
No matter what I purchase online I always do a Google Search for "promo code STORE NAME" even an additional 15% is worth a search. I always found it odd that major websites would rather let consumers find deals on othersites rather than optimizing their own websites for these terms. I am glad someone finally put together a post on this and agree they need to get on this right away.
Ranking for a coupong for your brand higher thant the retail coupon monster sites sounds like ranking higher that wikipedia for certain terms. While there was a very interesting theory of how to outrank wikipedia, for this I think you will need a linking strategy with a pretty well optimized page for coupons. Social media will definetely help getting links to that page.
yes I think this article is more for small ecommerce site, if you have compete with coupon site good luck, there are 200+ sites now who has been working for last 4-5 years on store name + coupon code.
Another thing to remember is to think about optimizing that page based on the wording you use on your checkout form. For example, Walgreens.com uses "coupon code" and if it were me, I would search for "coupon code walgreens" since that is the term they use. If I'm checking out, and see the box asking for a promo code, coupon code, etc. I'm more likely to search for the term they're asking for, it's sort of like "Oh yea! I forgot about that!" and will do the search in a different tab, right then. I rarely do a search for promos before I get to checkout (but that might just be me).
Great point. This could also be a way for an existing brand to "take over" a compeitive seach term - by registering a domain with the new terminology and switching their form to use the new term.
And the inverse of that is true...
Understanding the language of the users and the target audience and realigning the site terminology if appropriate.
Fortunately for Walgreens, "coupon" terms are aligned better than "promo," but that may not always be the case.
I'd even recommend trying to target the broader category terms as well to potential win for non-brand too. And definitely a good time to work in variations: promotional, discount coupons, online codes, etc.
Very true!
Nice post with good information. So you optimize your page for your promotion code and it improves your ranking. Is that good for your business? Do you want everyone to have your promotion code or only a certain customer segment? Promotion codes have a cost to the business and if someone already has items in the shopping cart and are close to purchaing, why give them money to complete the purchase? Thoughts?
I suspect it is all market sector dependent. People expect to find discount codes for electrical white goods or air flights. I am not so sure they think about them when, for example, they believe themselves to be making a quality or knowledge based decison
If you wanted to rank but didn't want to offer promo codes you could put something on your "about us" page or another similiar page that says something to this effect:
"<sitename> does not offer promo codes" or
"beware of sites offering <sitename> promo codes as we do not authorize 3rd parties to offer redemptive coupon codes without direct written permission"
Great post, it would be interesting to see a case study from someone who has implemented this successfully. As someone mentioned earlier, it might not be worth the effort (ROI) but in the case mentioned by MOGmartin it was obviously worth the time and money.
I agree with jonathanwalker-me it would be interesting to see your website as an example MOGmartin.
What are voucher codes? Have I been living in a vacuum?
they help u get money off shoppign etc. u do ur shopping online then type in voucher code. u get money off
I hope more brands start doing this - spammy voucher code sites deserve a whacking.
Yup, nearly as bad as Wikipedia and Price Comparison sites!
why do I get 2 thumbs down for not liking Price comparison sites and Wikipedia lol.
It's a mistake for retailers to offer codes at all. (As they are doing now) It cheapens the brand in my book. It's too uncontrollable.
You abandon the cart to look for the code!
Then you end up at Amazon!
A better way is to give reward points for purchases... oh... a bit like loyalty cards!
Then you can offer automatic discounts via accounts (at least you can test segments of customers) for stuff you want rid of... like pumpkins.
In general I think anyone running an ecommerce site needs to look beyond the SEO angle and instead / as well as implement your own voucher code page also work out a way for the promo code box not to appear in the checkout.... If the company really must use promo codes for facebook or whatever there are various ways to avoid having the box inviting people over to Google to search for a code.
There are few additional things to overcome, e.g. backlinks to the specific pages and page ranks. voucher code sites have enourmous backlinks.
A new voucher code website popping up in Ireland is oxcodes.ie and i have used them a couple of times.... Like many other comments myvouchercodes.co.uk, vouchercodes.co.uk and a more recent one is vouchercloud.com and they are all fantastic code websites. But as I am in printing how do i rank well for keywords in my field... Are we talking about off page SEO in order to rank well or do the keywords need to bbe built into my own website?
Hi Guys,
I think it is a good idea to rank for brand + promo code because simply, if you are a retail site like myself with an affiliate scheme if you are not doing it your affiliates are.
Your customers are already in your basket will stuff ready to buy, they see your promo code box, open a new tab and Google promo code + your brand. (I know everyone does it)
You need to try and recapture that customer in to your site, so that you don’t lose margin to your affiliates.
We took the other step to not allow promo codes and instead offer a lower price which works just as good.
Thanks Tom, I will be adding it to the list of things to rank for.
Good post, I like the short, straight to the point ones!
Its interesting that in the main you are showing "big brands" in the examples. It is the big brands who are generally rubbish at SEO and don't really look at what they should be trying to rank on.
They have no idea about the value of the long tail, and even if someone in their business did they'd likely be so junior they wouldn't stand a chance of getting anything done!
I'm actually writing a blog post about this area at the moment, based around the FTSE 500 Conductor report, which basically shows the FTSE 500 are still useless at SEO ;-) no surprise!
I agree Ben, the majority of the big companies are pretty poor at SEO and rely on their brand names to get traffic, which is why SEO has been a great leveller of the online playing field (e.g realisticly a one man operation couldn't open a massive store on the high street, but could set up a website and rank well)
I'm interested to see your findings on your blog post, i'll be sure to check it out
https://www.clickitseo.co.uk/blog/fortune-500-still-dont-get-seo/
Could have written an awful lot more and got into a lot more detail, but didn't want to bore the audience to much.
Cheers,
Ben
Nice post, short, to the point, and packed with info and tips - brilliant!
I know i never really buy anything online without searching online for voucher codes & discount codes, and I think i'll add promo codes to my arsenal. However, I hardly ever find anything other than the usual myvouchercodes.co.uk - which is pretty much useless. It would really be worth major retailers time to optimise a page for those term in the long run!
Great post Tom. I know I never personally buy anything online without searching for a coupon code, voucher code, discount code or a combo of all those. As a large retailer you should definately spend the time to rank for these searches as I know I am not alone.
THis is a great reminder for me, as I work to set up our new site, I am going to make sure we do a better job highlighting our specials and getting them in from of our prospects!
great advise i always look for those codes and find a discount