What’s the most important page on your eCommerce website? If you answered “product page,” you’ll be absolutely correct.
As an online shop, you will reckon that your primary focus is to sell products and make profits. That’s precisely what SEO for eCommerce product pages helps you do. Let me explain.
Product pages comprise titles, descriptions, and reviews with texts, photos, and videos that provide key information about your goods to your clients. Without product pages, your customers wouldn’t have an easy way to purchase what you sell instantly.
Your product page, though, may also get in the way of your business goals if not well-optimised for search engines and users. For example, a customer is less likely to engage with a website that has poor-quality pictures on its product pages than those with excellent descriptions and images.
You can optimise your product pages by following search engine optimisation rules to drive traffic. In fact, SEO ensures that your customers are pleased with your website enough to convert and grow your business revenue.
In summary, your traffic and conversions will soar if you construct your product page properly with SEO best practices in mind, while your marketing and advertising initiatives might be unsuccessful if you don’t.
At this point, you might be asking yourself: what SEO best practices should I follow then to ensure that my product pages are optimally functional? And are there any mistakes to avoid?
I’ll try to answer your questions in this article by giving you 19 tips to follow and 5 mistakes to avoid. Ready? Let’s dive in.
19 Tips To Optimise Your Product Pages for SEO
After figuring out what products to focus your marketing strategies on, you need to also ask yourself, how do I optimise for the best results? This all-important question decides how well you convert your target audience into loyal customers. At this stage, your product page visitors already know that they want to buy the items on your page. So, you must focus on directing their purchase decision in favour of your brand. Here’s how:
Pay Maximum Attention To Your Keyword Strategy
To optimise your product pages for eCommerce SEO, the first thing to do is conduct a keyword research.
A powerful keyword strategy is a foundation on which your optimisation efforts must stand. It is therefore important to do an excellent job with respect to this.
When doing your keyword research, pick keywords that focus on the products your potential buyers are likely looking for. To do this, you may want to focus on adding your brand name, colour, size, and other attributes that your clients find relevant. This allows your keywords to have enough transactional purpose to help your product pages rank higher on search engines.
For example, if you want to rank for “Paul Smith 12 Men,” they must reflect in your target keywords. Ensure the search intent is accurate and clear before using them based on search traffic.
Optimise Meta Descriptions and Titles
What are the first things your prospects may notice on search engine result pages when they search for your product? The meta titles and description, of course.
These are often referred to as “meta data”. So, be sure to optimise them by including your brand name, essential AR/AI features, product names, description, model, etc.
Your meta data are important because they determine your product page ranking and presentation. If they don’t look great in search results, your prospects will likely ditch your brand for your competition before even reaching your page!
A good meta title and description should be comprehendible, begin with important keywords, and be precise. For meta descriptions, the length should be around 70 to 165 characters max, and for tag titles, 30 to 66 characters max. Remember also to add a call-to-action to your meta descriptions.
Do Not Forget To Add Structured Data to Product Pages
Structured data involves providing product page details in a format that machines can easily read. In other words, structured data organises your product details to ensure that search engines can read and understand them.
Well-structured will give Google adequate product details, allowing it to classify and rank your page as highly relevant to prospects.
Marking up structured data means creating a code for it through a markup language like HTML that organises the content visitors view on web pages. Structured data allows you to label product names, images, review content, etc., for search engines. This ensures they don’t have to rely on algorithms to identify and differentiate content.
Do you want more guaranteed clicks, impressions, and purchases via rich results on Google? Just make sure you have the appropriate structured data!
Generally, the most popular schema you might want to apply to your eCommerce are:
Make Your Product URLs Consistent and Descriptive
Users and search engines will better grasp your site’s structure with the aid of a suitable URL structure. Additionally, when a visitor finds a URL that matches their search query, you are more likely to receive clicks on your snippet on search engines.
A good URL uses lowercase, is descriptive, easy to read, brief, and consistent. When optimising your product URLs, be sure to pay special attention to the URL slug. The URL slug is the last component of the URL and is important for product pages.
Remember To Add Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Top e-commerce sites have something in common: they all offer product pages that are quite detailed.
Given that it satisfies user expectations, quality content is necessary for your product page to rank in SERPs. As such, your product page would benefit from an FAQ section to help you achieve your SEO goals.
This will help answer customers’ questions after visiting your product page.
You must, in fact, be able to foresee and answer all their possible concerns to persuade them to convert. If not, they will revert, stop shopping at your online business, and go next door to your competitors.
And that’s why you should address conceivable queries that your prospects can think about in your FAQ section.
PRO TIP: Don’t forget to annotate them with structured data for FAQs.
Ensure Your Product Descriptions Are Unique
The fact remains that you may not always sell products that are significantly better than your competitors.
In such cases, you will have to ensure that your product page stands out from your rivals in one way or another. A unique product description is one of the best ways to do this.
Your product descriptions should be distinctive enough to draw customers in.
Never use identical product descriptions for all of your items since doing so will cause you to miss out on significant opportunities to get new prospects. In other words, you should present your items differently on your eCommerce store since they are unique products.
Both brand-specific and generic search keywords might result in high product rankings for your website. So, take advantage of this by writing distinctive page descriptions for each item on your e-commerce website.
Focus on Sharing Genuine Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Nothing gives prospects a final push to complete a transaction, like positive reviews from verified customers. The fact remains that testimonials from satisfied past clients speak as loudly and convincingly as your ads. So, it’ll be wise to leverage them to advocate for your brand by including them on your product pages.
One should ask for customers’ feedback to benefit fully from this best practice. This means that you should expressly ask your customers to detail how they felt using your products.
Ensure they emphasise how your products helped them meet one or more of their needs.
PRO TIP: Remember to use the Review Schema to mark the testimonies and use them as a source of frequently updated content for your product pages. This step is crucial for improved SEO rankings.
Ensure Your Pictures and Videos Are High-Quality
Let’s face it: one of the reasons some of your customers may prefer brick-and-mortar stores to online shops is that they can feel the products before purchasing. That way, there is zero to no risk of purchasing items that would leave them dissatisfied. Everyone, including you, wants to know precisely what they’re buying before swiping their cards.
The truth remains that you cannot assure your online customers of physically touching your products before they buy. However, the good news is that you can give them something close to quality visuals.
High-quality videos and pictures are crucial if you want to persuade your potential clients to buy products online from your eCommerce business. This is because buyers cannot physically touch an item, so these photographs and videos fill a significant gap.
Use eye-catching photos to compliment your distinctive product name and description to provide a wonderful user experience for your prospect.
You can exhibit your specific pairings, unique packaging, and other components of the product package with your visuals.
Make Your Headings Descriptive
Headings make it easier for prospects and search engines to understand the purpose and organisation of your product page. While the H1 heading will work well for the product name, use H2 headers for the most crucial sections. These include the features, technical details, reviews, and FAQs of the product.
I will advise you to incorporate your product name organically into one of the H2s. However, if you discover that it detracts from the user experience, discard this advice.
Add and Link Product Attributes
Adding and linking product attributes is one of the best ways to rank for product queries. So, always ensure that you include and link product characteristics, especially SKU and brand, series, and model names. Doing this also helps you improve the structure of your internal links.
Common ways to add link product attributes include linking brand names to brand overview pages and series to overview pages. You may also want to link the target gender to overviews of products that you market similarly.
Make Your Product Descriptions Engaging
Good product descriptions persuade customers to make purchases from you. Don’t write an essay; no one will be interested in that. Instead, make them interesting and personal and discuss the advantages and characteristics of the product.
Additionally, you may include low-competition and closely related searches that you wish to rank for here.
However, as with every other SEO strategy, try not to go overboard. Instead, first focus on the key features, such as the product uses, capacity, etc.
More than just describing your products, I always advise my clients to include colours, weight, sizes, etc. These are words your customers may input when searching for your products, and they help to improve search rankings.
Look Out for Orphan Pages
It is simple to lose track of products when there is a vast, continually changing product inventory.
When a parent category is eliminated, certain product pages could become what it’s referred to as “orphans”.
Orphan pages lack internal links because they aren’t part of the element that makes up the site structure. In most cases, this results in lower ranks, and occasionally Google decides to totally de-index those pages. Be on the alert for this because it’s pretty challenging to rank your product pages without any internal links.
Prioritise Good Breadcrumb Navigation
Good breadcrumb navigation benefits users as well as search engines. Using breadcrumbs, users can easily understand the store’s hierarchy and go to a category page directly. They also ensure that search engines have relevant internal links.
Remember that there are different takes on the best methods to structure your breadcrumb navigation. Therefore, what works best for you is the way to go.
However, regardless of your choice, ensure that you mark them up with Schema. This ensures that machines can clearly identify the breadcrumbs and interpret them correctly.
Highlight Related Products
The prospects that land on your product pages often have already decided on what item to purchase. However, this is not always true.
Sometimes, you may have visitors who are still unsure about their purchase on your product pages. Be sure to retain them by using “you might also like” products to provide alternatives.
A good example is displaying hair growth conditioners for visitors checking out hair growth shampoos.
Besides giving your clients options and improving customer experience, related product pages also help to boost your organic traffic. You can in fact leverage them to improve SEO performance for other product pages by boosting the internal link structure.
Ensure Fast Load Times
Here’s one bitter pill to swallow: your clients will leave your website if you don’t optimise page speed and load time. This is even when your eCommerce product page SEO is as flawless as possible.
In other words, you have only completed half the task if you don’t handle the technical SEO aspect correctly.
Optimising your website’s page speed requires a lot of work and starts by figuring out what makes your website’s page load slow.
As I mentioned already, most clients visiting your product already know what they want. As such, they just want to make a purchase without going through the inconvenience of waiting for so long. With a fast-loading site, these clients will enjoy a top-notch customer experience that keeps them coming back for more.
So, when your consumer browses more goods on your e-commerce site, optimise your product page for speed to boost sales revenue and pages per session.
Add Product Detail Pages To XML Sitemap
Do you regularly upload new products or update previously existing ones? You might want to ensure that search engines can quickly crawl and reindex them using XML sitemaps.
Make distinct XML sitemaps for various categories of content. Create one each for manufacturers, supporting pages, category pages, product pages, and blog posts. This ensures that you can easily monitor how Google crawls your indexing procedure, especially if you’ve uploaded your XML sitemaps to Google Search Console. Be careful to restrict the number of URLs per XML sitemap to 50,000 and only include indexable pages that receive the HTTP status 200 OK.
Take Advantage of Discontinued Products
What do you do with items that aren’t useful anymore? The logical answer will be to discard them to create space for newer items. While this may be true for personal items, it’s never a great option in terms of eCommerce SEO.
Unfortunately, many online store owners fail to use the possibility of out-of-production merchandise. These are goods that are either inaccessible indefinitely or momentarily. They might not have any inventory, their product line might have been axed, or you may have decided not to sell them anymore for any reason.
Regardless, don’t discard them since they usually still have a lot of value to offer. For example, discontinued pages can still get links from external sites or organic traffic.
So, keep a product online if you anticipate that it will become available again later. You can do this by listing them as “out of stock” items, letting your prospects know they’ll be informed when you restock, etc.
Test Your Landing Pages
Make sure to test your landing pages as part of your SEO plan for e-commerce product pages. The layout of your e-commerce site, the position of your CTA, or other factors may all be changed to increase conversions for your online business.
You can also run tests to see how each modification you make to your landing page affects conversion rates to determine what changes result in the greatest increase in sales. Furthermore, consider taking advantage of tools like Optimisely and Google Optimise to test even the tiniest adjustment to your product pages to see how they affect conversion rates.
Check for Technical Problems
Your SEO can suffer greatly because of the frequent duplication of product pages due to faceted URLs. This problem can result in split link equity, wasted crawl budget, and duplicate content.
To avoid this problem, you should consider auditing your product pages to discover elements that need optimisation.
Generally, these elements will include thin content, 302 redirects, broken links, duplicate title tags, and meta descriptions. They may also include slow page load times and missing structured data.
5 eCommerce Product Page SEO Mistakes To Avoid
A comprehensive guide to help you optimise your product pages will be incomplete without the common pitfalls to avoid. Here they are:
Avoid Automating Your SEO Efforts
When performing SEO for eCommerce product pages, overstuffing the product name and brand name is never a good idea. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence s a result of automatically optimised product page SEO.
To avoid this, provide useful and significant information about the products in the titles, which will help your e-commerce website rank higher for your desired keywords.
Avoid automating descriptions and titles because they are not original, appear amateurish, and may negatively influence your click-through and conversion rates.
Never Neglect CTAs
One of the most effective ways to optimise your product pages for SEO is by including a clear call-to-action.
More than just being clear, your call-to-action must be visible enough for your visitors to view them above the scroll.
Also, a well-optimised call-to-action should stay consistent and follow a logical pattern throughout the buyer’s journey.
For example, let’s say your client found your page via a social media ad claiming you offer 20% off your products. Instead of repeating the information in your pop-up, simply continue by offering them more steps. This makes for a better user experience.
Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Internal Links
If you want your eCommerce product pages to rank for high purchase intent keywords, do so by incorporating internal links. This is one of the fastest and easiest tricks to boost your e-commerce store’s traffic and conversion rates.
Also, don’t forget to use long-tail keywords as an essential part of your SEO strategy for your online shop’s product pages. Create links to those pages the same way you would for your home page and category pages.
Avoid Using the Wrong Structured Data Type
I already mentioned the importance of structured data in eCommerce product pages. However, this doesn’t mean you must stick with just any type of structured data. Doing your structured data wrong is just as destructive as not implementing it at all.
If you use improperly formatted data, rich snippets may no longer show on your e-commerce website. Inaccurate structured data shows information inaccurately and degrades the quality of search results. As such, search engines will punish you for this by ranking your pages low on search results.
Never Neglect To Watch Out For Cannibalisation
It’s pretty easy for product variants to cannibalise each other. For example, you may have a shoe in various colours and sizes for which you’ll need to create different pages. This can quickly cause duplicate content, and keyword cannibalisation as these variants may begin competing against each other.
Keyword cannibalisation and duplicate content can spell doom for your SEO strategy. So, be sure to nip them in the bud by choosing a primary variant and canonicalising the rest. This approach can also be tailored to products that appear in several categories.
Ready To Optimise Your eCommerce Pages for SEO?
As an eCommerce store owner, optimising your product pages for SEO is essential if you wish to drive quality traffic to your website.
This is important as increased traffic will also improve your chances of enjoying more sales and revenue.
Although product page SEO can be tricky, everything you need to make things work can be gotten in this article. From page title optimisation to internal link building and everything in between, you can be sure of the best results in no time if you follow the best practice in this guide.
However, if you need more personalised assistance in getting the hang of SEO for your product page, feel free to contact me. As an experienced eCommerce SEO consultant, I can help you rank high on Google while ensuring that your prospect converts to loyal clients.
