A seasonal promotion page

One address, updated every year

A new page each season starts from nothing, every time. Whatever the last one earned in links, visibility and familiarity is discarded, and the new page spends the whole season catching up to where the old one ended.

A permanent address accumulates instead. By the third or fourth cycle it is an established page that a search engine or an answer engine already knows when the season begins, which is precisely when you need it to.

Name it for the offer rather than for the year. An address with a year in it is a page you have committed to abandoning, and it will be abandoned exactly as planned.

What it says out of season

Never leave an expired offer live as though it were current. That is the commonest embarrassment on small business sites and it makes the whole site look unmaintained.

Instead say what the offer normally is, when it runs, and how to be told when it opens. That keeps the page useful to somebody researching in the quiet months, which is most of the year.

Our page on seasonal businesses covers the wider pattern. The principle is the same: change what the page says rather than whether it exists.

Getting the offer right

State what is included, what is excluded, who qualifies and when it ends. Ambiguity in an offer produces disputes, and disputes over a discount cost more than the discount was ever worth.

Avoid comparisons you cannot evidence. Was and now pricing, percentage savings and limited availability all carry rules about what must actually be true before you can say them.

Our page on pricing claims covers the wording that creates obligations. Nothing here is legal advice, and promotional claims are an area where regulators are active.

What the page needs each cycle

The list below is the annual update. Working through it takes under an hour and prevents every version of the stale promotion page problem.

• This season's dates, stated plainly
• The current price and what it includes
• Terms and exclusions on the page, not behind a link
• New photographs from the season just finished
• Questions that came up last time, answered
• The status line changed from closed to open
• A note in the calendar to reverse it when the season ends

Urgency that is real

A genuine deadline is a legitimate and effective thing to state. An invented one is a deceptive practice, and the difference is whether the date actually means anything.

Countdown timers that reset on refresh, offers that end and then reappear, and stock counters that are not connected to stock are all covered by our page on deceptive design.

The honest version works well enough. Booked out by March most years is a true statement of urgency and it persuades more effectively than any timer, because customers recognize it as real.

Linking it into the site

Link to the promotion from the relevant service pages during the season, and remove those links when it ends. Leaving them pointing at an expired offer is how visitors find the stale page.

Keep one permanent link from a sensible parent page all year. That keeps the address reachable and crawled outside the season rather than becoming an orphan for nine months.

Our page on orphan pages covers why a page nothing links to is effectively invisible, which is what happens to most seasonal pages in their quiet months.

Learning between cycles

Write down what happened. How many enquiries, what people asked, which objection came up most, and what you would change. Do it at the end of the season while it is fresh.

That record is what makes the next cycle better, and it is almost always the part nobody keeps. A season later, nobody remembers why the offer was structured the way it was.

Then apply it during the quiet months rather than in the week before the season opens. The work is the same and the pressure is completely different.