Why is Product Page SEO important?
Product page SEO is an important marketing strategy for every online store. Optimizing every product page can be overwhelming, especially when your online store is stocking hundreds of different products.
Investing early-on into a product page SEO strategy will lead to increased organic traffic that can massively increase your sales without extra expenditures. Relying solely on paid advertising campaigns can make your online store less profitable and more volatile compared to your competitors.
A good product SEO strategy will save you time when executed correctly and regularly.
Always being found on Google builds trust in your customers and makes it easier to be found whenever the customer needs your online store.
Building brand recognition is expensive and being found on relevant keywords on your products will increase your exposure to potential customers, and will unlock a profitable sales strategy for your store.
SEO, in general, is a cost-effective strategy for marketing. Learn more about the benefits of search engine optimization for your business.
This article is all about optimizing the product page, if you want a more comprehensive guide, check out our Ecommerce SEO guide.
What Is A Product Page?
A product page is a dedicated page on an online store that allows visitors to view detailed information about a product being sold.
A product page usually includes the following:
- Product title
- Product price
- Product images
- Product descriptions
- Detailed product information
- Product reviews
- Availability
- Buttons for add-to-cart or purchase.
All the elements of a product page are used to improve its search engine visibility through optimization.
We will be showing examples of the elements of product page SEO using Shopify. Learn the benefits of Shopify.
Elements of Product Page SEO
Product page SEO follows the basic guidelines for good SEO that is very similar to any other website or page. Online stores optimizing their product pages have to understand that their pages are transactional, and keywords usually have a lot of competition.
A basic SEO strategy will be good enough for an online store if implemented correctly and updated frequently.
Here come the elements of product page SEO to keep in mind when implementing your SEO strategy on your online store.
Product Keyword Research
Before implementing any product page SEO techniques, you should conduct keyword research to find the most relevant and most searched terms for your products.
A solid keyword plan will be the basis of your growth with SEO. Researching the best keywords that match your product lines will make implementing techniques easier and faster.
To increase the relevancy of your future keywords, pick and choose long-tail keywords that are more than three words. Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for if your products are relevant to them.
When comparing competition between keywords, consider that a keyword with less competition might have more potential for your business if you’d rank higher than in the highly competitive keyword and not reaching the first page.
It all depends on the search volumes: a keyword with very low search volume will not produce enough traffic or even none.
A tip to keyword research. When researching keywords, think about your customers either from your past data or looking at the competition. Different segments inside your business can have drastically different search patterns, try to learn from them.
Try to include your keyword in the following naturally:
- Product title
- Product description
- Meta Title and Description
- URL
- Image Alt Text
The key point is adding keywords naturally. While you’re optimizing for search engines, you’re also trying to write for converting customers, and an only natural copy will do that. Don’t add too many keywords if it’s breaking the user experience and flow of the copy, everything in moderation.
Title & Meta Description
The first thing your potential customers will see in Google is the titles and meta descriptions. Every product should have a unique title and meta description to reflect the product in the best way and include the relevant keywords.
Google can change titles and meta descriptions of your product pages to fit relevant searches with data on your page. It’s important to take the time to optimize them for specific keywords and call-to-actions to improve the clickthrough-rates for your product pages.
Product brands should be included in product titles if relevant.
A high clickthrough-rate (CTR) is a ranking factor that can change your search engine ranking positions (SERPS) to higher. Having a higher CTR than your competition will make your product page rank higher than them!
Titles and meta descriptions can be changed pretty quickly to test different variations to improve your CTR.
If you’re utilizing Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you can search through the data they have produced to produce better titles and descriptions with the CTR data from past campaigns.
Product Description
The product description is key for SEO and user experience, and it’s what makes your customers convert in the end.
A crucial aspect of product descriptions is that they need to be unique. It’s easy to start copy-pasting product descriptions, and it will lead to bad habits.
Utilizing great content marketing within your descriptions is a good marketing strategy that unlocks more opportunities to grow.
A unique product description is not the same as changing a couple of words, though. Think about the experience your customers will face. If your customers are searching on the online store for bags and end up looking at ten pages and all the descriptions are very similar, it will make it harder for them to choose a product.
Conveying to your customers what makes your products special and unique will make it a more pleasant experience of shopping online.
Similar product descriptions make it harder to optimize for multiple keywords, as well.
If you’ve many similar products with the same product descriptions, it might be wise to change the structure of the product pages. For example, using variations when relevant, could be better for you.
For product descriptions, it would best to avoid using premade copy from manufacturers or using automated tools to create them.
Simple URL
Search Engines prefer simple and short URLs. The added benefit of simple URLs is that your customers might remember them, making it easier to find you again.
Simple URLs are less intimidating and can be shared more easily across social media.
Simple and short URLs are more clickable in the search engine and can increase clickthrough-rates.
Tips for creating a simple URL:
- Include the target keyword
- Must be short
- Divide words with a hyphen
- Keep the URL plain
- Avoid dates
- Security with HTTPS
- Using Subfolders
- Categories -> Subcategories -> Product , when necessary.
- Depending on the online store platform, these usually come automatically, but be sure to understand how they are built in your store.
- Remember to create 301 redirects when changing URLs across your online store. Read more about URLs from Backlinko.
Internal Linking & Breadcrumbs
For improving the time spent on your online store and increasing page views across your online store is important.
Better internal linking and navigation can be improved by having relevant product and category recommendations included in every product page. For the best effect, try to match products that complete each other as upsells. Upsells can increase your overall profitability, as well.
To improve navigation, you can enable the use of breadcrumbs on the online store.
Breadcrumbs are links that track the path to the page the visitor is on right now. Starting on the home page of the online store, and ending on the page currently visited.
You can enable the use of a keyword, locations, or path-based breadcrumbs.
Quality Images with Alt Text
A product page without a high-quality image, or set of images, that displays the product’s best features and displays the product as real as possible will have a hard time converting into purchases.
Image search is a big part of Google search. It’s crucial to have high-quality and relevant images with an alt text that matches the keywords and items in the picture.
Having relevant keywords in the alt text will enable the images to be found on Google Images and provide more organic traffic.
A high-quality and unique image in Google Images can make your product listing stand out from the competition.
User Experience of Online Store
Simple and good user experience in your online store can improve your rankings by default. By investing time improving user experiences within your product pages, you’re also improving it’s SEO capabilities.
For example, having a mobile version of the online store that works beautifully will not only increase sales from mobile users but will increase rankings in mobile searches.
As mobile search has grown significantly over the years, it’s the bare minimum for a successful SEO strategy for online stores nowadays.
Structured Data for Rich Results
Utilize Schema.org to include more information about your products directly on the search engines.
Using structured data like availability, reviews, and the price will help you stand out in the searches for relevant keywords. Having the data available for searches will make customers click on your product listing more easily.
Product Reviews
Product reviews are a crucial step for increasing conversions in an online store.
A funnel for optimizing the collection of product reviews should be implemented as soon as possible. It could be done by using a follow-up email sequence asking for reviews after purchase.
Make it easy for your customers to leave product reviews, and importantly give incentives to leave them.
Product review’s visibility on search engines is added with the schema.org.
Page Loading Speed
Loading speeds can make or break your customer’s buying intentions if they can’t load the page fast enough. Loading speeds are also an important ranking factor in SEO and should be taken into consideration in every aspect of your online store.
Faster loading speeds encourage your customers to be longer on your site and will explore more on your page and will not leave to a competitor’s store.
The longer your customers are staying on your product pages, the better search rankings they will achieve as time spent on the page is ranking factor.
Out-of-stock and off-season promotional pages
While it may seem that deleting out-of-stock pages would be a good idea, if there’s any chance of that product or similar product coming back to the stock, don’t delete it just yet.
Having the page live will be beneficial as you can use it to divert the traffic to other products and pages while the product is coming back to stock.
It’ll be harder to gain lost rankings with a new page if the product is still the same.
Only delete the product pages if you’re sure that the product will not be coming back to stock. If that’s the case, you might want to divert the traffic to other relevant products or categories from that product page as long as it’s gaining organic traffic and then removing altogether.
For seasonal promotional pages that have a function only a few times a year, the same applies. During offseason, divert the organic traffic to other relevant pages, like current promotions, the home page, or most sold products.
Then when you’re ready to launch your seasonal promotional, you can have the benefit of the page is already ranked and gaining organic traffic.
Product Page Analytics
The importance of tracking key metrics for product pages can’t be underestimated. Tracking and collecting data on product page behavior will help with at least:
- Testing variations on titles and descriptions
- Testing price points
- Testing user experience
- Testing time spent on product page
- Testing various elements of the page
- and much more.
Regularly keeping track of user behavior and optimizing experiences will not only increase your organic results but also increase the profitability of your products in your online store.
Having a strategy of handling web analytics in your online store will make your product pages better by every measure, and finding the right combination of variations will make the process of product page SEO easier in the long run.
Tracking and testing many variations at the same time can be cumbersome, and starting with best performing product pages could offer a starting point for optimization.
Try to learn what makes your best pages perform so well, and incorporate the learnings into the rest of your store. The results might be surprising, and analyzing them, you will learn how to develop a better strategy.
Learn more about the benefits of web analytics.
Google Analytics should be installed in your online store, no matter the platform it is on. A great benefit of Google Analytics is that you can set up conversions as goals to make it easier for you to test different variables in the online store.
Read about Google Analytics goals that could benefit your store and website.
Conclusion
Building a good strategy of product page SEO takes time and requires being consistent across your pages for maximizing your organic results.
SEO is not an instant process, and investing time early on it will bring the greatest results.
By optimizing with future and past data, you will see better results over time, and eventually, find a sweet spot that increases traffic to your product pages, which leads to increased sales.
Take this article as a starting point for your SEO strategy and keep improving with data.
Engaio Digital is an SEO agency ready to help online stores to maximize their organic growth online.