Optimizing your product pages with well-researched and thoughtful content that speaks to your target customer can have a big impact in terms of visibility and sales. Fortunately, there are a variety of tips and tricks your eCommerce business can employ to make your products stand out in a world of similarity. Begin this process by trying to understand your customer as much as possible, and then try the tips we’ve listed below to effectively optimize product pages.
Do Your Research
Don’t make the mistake of targeting completely generic keywords associated with your products – you’ll be missing out on an abundance of terms that may assist with organic traffic. Instead, research how your customers search for solutions to problems or products that you offer. Start by Googling phrases and don’t hit enter – review what Google suggestions appear in the search box or interview your customer service staff (or customers directly) to better understand their journey in finding your products. Answer the Public is also one of our favorite search insight tools to help generate content ideas for the next steps in optimizing product pages.
Embrace SEO Best Practices
Once you’ve established which phrases customers search for in relation to your products, incorporate them into your product page and surrounding content. Aside from the required product details, all content on the product page, including images and video, should explain how and why that product solves problems and improves the lives of customers. Highlight features and benefits, lifestyle improvements and how-to style content with whatever media your demographic best consumes.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Typically your page title and meta descriptions are the first messages customers see when your product appears directly within a search results page. Understand that often times customers arrive to your products via different avenues, but fine tuning the messages that customers see will help you stand out from the proverbial meta tag templates that have grown in popularity for the sake of automation. If it’s worth putting on your site, it’s worth doing right.
For more SEO tips and tricks, check out 3 Ways Merchants Can Improve SEO.
Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are typically set up within your template and forgotten about, but recently we’ve seen module updates or lack of attention result in broken snippets. Google is also making use of more markup as the search landscape evolves, especially in the travel and food industry in recent months. We recommend auditing your markup every few months to ensure the basic product schema (SKU, title, price) as well as additional snippets, such as reviews and ratings, are identified properly.
Internal Linking
This is more about providing multiple pathways to your products than optimizing the actual product page, but it’s important to note that the more links you include to specific products across your site increases the importance of said products to both customers and search engines. Don’t go crazy, but link to specific products from relevant content within your blog, cross-link between similar or complementary products, highlight popular or new products from your homepage, categories, or custom landing pages. The key here is relevancy – create journeys to your products from multiple touchpoints in an effort to lead customers to the ultimate answer to their questions or problems.
Supporting Content
In addition to the on-page product descriptions and content, more popular or profitable products are worthy of additional content in the form of blog articles, press releases, case studies, testimonials, influencer reviews, or additional how-to and review videos. This shareable content should all link directly back to the product page and, again, target specific answers to questions or problems that the product helps to solve. This kind of supporting content will educate your audience about your products and brand, as well as provide links back to the product page.
Implementing SEO best practices and making sure you have the SEO basics in place will also help you succeed in other marketing initiatives. If your website is not accessible and your content is not relevant or, if your page doesn’t display well on mobile, you will be penalized. Fortunately, InteractOne is skilled and experienced at SEO implementation for eCommerce. For more details on SEO and how we can help get you going, please contact us today.