Products on websites can be treated similar to pages on a website with the same needs for optimization falling to product pages as well as service pages, with a few nuances. Obviously you have some variation in descriptions with various types of products, inventory options, shipping options, and much more, but which ones are the ones that matter? We hope to answer these questions and more for you so you can optimize for ECommerce with confidence.
Standard Optimization
Whether you are looking at blogs, about pages, or even your home page, each should have a target keyword and have those keywords implemented in certain areas such as:
- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- H1
- Body Paragraphs
- Image Alt Text
While there are some other areas to optimize, these are among the most important. If you can start with the standard optimization for all of your pages, you have some variability in product page builds. Focus on optimizing your content to read naturally. Stuffed keywords and other black hat techniques can create poor results for your website, so create your content with your users in mind. As long as you hit all of the optimization items, your products will be “optimized” for search engines, but what else can you do?
Product Architecture
This could probably fall into a technical SEO category, but who’s keeping score. The product pages available to your users should be informative, easy to read, and easy to navigate. This can come in various forms, but we will be discussing URL architecture today with a few specific examples you should be able to relate to. Take our website for instance, while these are not specific products, SEO in a certain area is our product. We have recently launched a few pages to tap into various markets in the United States and have nested them under the states they are found in. So our URL structure tree looks something like the following:
- https://www.firestarterseo.com/locations/
- https://www.firestarterseo.com/locations/fl
- https://www.firestarterseo.com/locations/fl/tampa-bay-seo
As you can see, we have nested the Tampa bay page under the Florida page. So now people can navigate to the Florida page to see the various cities we serve, and then the final page (Tampa Bay SEO) is our “product page” in this instance. Say you sold kitchen utensils, you will probably have a few categories, such as serving, cooking, and utility. You would want to nest all of your serving utensils under the serving category, so your page URL would end up somewhere along the lines of www.”fakeutensilcompany.com/serving/serving-spoon”. This allows both users and search engines to understand what the page is about and keeps both from getting confused when they encounter the page. Being sure to strategically group your products will help keep them in confined lines, and the more confined lines you can hand to a search engine, the better chance of ranking you have. This tactic also allows you to optimize for more keywords because now you have a “serving” page as well as your individual product page, so maybe you target “serving utensils” on the serving page and
Create Engaging Descriptions
The product descriptions you list on your site are the real chance for the product to shine and a great opportunity to include target keywords and variations related. While it is important to highlight the expectations a buyer can expect, you should also view this as a hard sell opportunity. If our client’s products are not converting, we first look at the copy within the descriptions. Take a look at what your competition is doing to gather an idea of what converts well. Google tends to rank well-converting sites due to their algorithm, so you know you have something that works by doing competitive research. In some cases it may be better to contract your content and make things more concise and in other cases it may make sense to expand your content. It is never a bad idea to do some testing on product content to see what converts better than other options.
We hope this has given you some ideas to optimize your ECommerce products for SEO. As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions about ECommerce or anything SEO related.
