Smart Ways to Optimize Your Product Pages for Search

E-commerce websites today cannot neglect the importance of SEO for their businesses. One of the latest studies revealed that 88% of consumers research for the product online before making the purchase. It means that your profits depend directly on your online visibility.  And you need to make sure that they easily find your product, click the result and find all the info they need to close the deal.

Your product pages are the most important places on your site that should be perfectly optimized to attract the right visitors and turn them into buyers and loyal customers. Here are a few simple steps you should follow to optimize your product pages for search.

Target Relevant Keywords

Most online shop owners start they research for keywords with the good-old Google Keyword Planner. They just drop the name of their product in the search bar and export all the keywords they get for it. No wonder, that many stores don’t get any visitors for those keywords.

When you research for the keywords for your product page, the main characteristics you should go for are relevancy, good traffic estimation, and low competitiveness. I recommend you to start with… Amazon.

No, I’m not joking! Nowadays, over 55% of shoppers start their shopping journey with Amazon search. It has a perfectly organized structure. So if you start typing your product title in the Amazon search bar, I bet you will get a nice list of keyword suggestions to begin with. You may then check the SERPs for those keywords to see if they return the relevant results.

Use your favorite keyword tool to see the data like search volume, estimated traffic. But be careful: don’t pursue the keywords with the highest search volume. They are usually extremely popular, and it will be difficult to rank on the first page for them and compete with the large brands that are already ranking for those keywords. Go for long-tail keywords that have lower search volume but generate decent traffic and have a good amount of clicks.

Create Proper Meta-Texts

Many online store owners fall into the sin of writing dull Meta-descriptions and titles. Often they use generators to create those descriptions with the use of target keywords. Of course, if you have a big online shop with hundreds of products, creating unique titles, descriptions, and H1s for each page may take a lot of your precious time.

I recommend using a mixed approach here. Use your target keyword on each page to create titles and H1s and add your brand name after the dash. Then, you may add modifiers that will clearly state that you’re selling those products, not just reviewing them or writing an article.

Start with reviewing and optimizing titles and descriptions for those pages that already rank in Google Top 10 for your target keywords. You can check for them in your Google Search Console.

    • Focus on your target keyword;
    • Use words that clearly state the ‘purchase intent,’ like the words ‘buy,’ ‘purchase,’ ‘sale,’ etc.;
  • Add words that define your unique selling proposition, like “Free shipping,” “Get +1 for Free,” “Gift,” etc.

As for the H1s, you may simply use the title of the product and the category title after the dash. Remember to use only one H1 on a page. And do some split-test to see what titles and descriptions work the best for you.

Write Incentivising On-Page Descriptions

Product descriptions are not only good for SEO purposes (Google bot “reads” words and can’t rank a page that doesn’t have a text on it). They also help your customers to learn more about the product and decide if they are ready to buy.

You can use the same recommendations given here for the Meta-descriptions but pay attention to a few points:

    • Add as more detail as possible: describe the product’s features, size, and color, special aspects of maintenance, delivery and return conditions, etc.;
  • Use bullet lists for features to improve the text readability.

Remember: you write for your customers in the first place, not the Google bot. Use explicit constructions, well-written sentences and LSI keywords (but avoid keyword spamming). Add many product photos as visuals can boost your SEO and help customers to “feel” the product.

Discard Ugly URLs

URLs should be informative and clean not just because they look better then. Tidy URLs are good for SEO purposes since they help search engines and users to understand if the content on a page is relevant for them.

Avoid using generic URL slugs that WordPress or other platforms may automatically create for your pages. The idea is simple:

    • use your category title and the product title separated with dashes;
    • Don’t make your URLs too long;
  • Avoid using modifiers since they may make your product page URL look like the one of a blog post.

Make Use of Rich Snippets

If you have Schema Markup on your E-commerce website, you have more chance to get into Google’s rich search results, especially on mobile. It will show additional info, like pricing, review ratings, product availability, etc, right in the SERP. And people will likely click the result that offers this info.

Just follow the Schema guidelines to add markup to your online store. Pay attention to the fact that you can’t apply markup only to several pages on the site – you should keep consistency across all your pages.

The Bottom Line

On-page SEO is no rocket science, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to it. Include SEO activities in your E-commerce strategy!  Don’t overdo it and stick to clean and clear pages with lots of useful info for your customers.

Featured Image Credit: Pixabay

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