Whether you’re building eCommerce sites for yourself or for your clients, product pages are some of the most important parts of your website design. Not only are they very important for your conversion rate and user experience, but they are also crucial for your SEO strategy. Here’s how you can create the best possible product pages for SEO.
How to Optimize eCommerce Product Pages for Search Engines
There are multiple optimizations you should do to have SEO ready eCommerce product pages. Here are the 10 best tips you should follow.
A slow page load time can drastically increase bounce rate and hurt your conversion rate, not only for your organic traffic but also for any paid traffic that comes to your eCommerce site.
On top of that, Google doesn’t like websites with high bounce rates so this can hurt your search engine optimization efforts.
There are multiple ways you can improve your page speed performance;
The first thing you have to do when working on any SEO strategy is your keyword research. The most significant difference between any website’s keywords and an eCommerce site’s, is that you have to align your research to the products you’re selling. That means including:
For example, if you’re Lush, and you sell an amazing honey soap, you’ll want to use keywords related to:
You can use tools such as SEMrush, Google Search Console and Ahrefs to help you find the target keywords that have the most search volume for the least difficulty, so you can improve your SERPs and get more organic traffic.
Now that you have your target keywords, ensure your product pages have the right technical SEO content.
Here are some key places where you should plug your target keywords:
Make sure all these are optimized for SEO, but don’t go overboard. No one likes huge titles with 300 stuffed keywords (yes, I’m talking about you, Wish.com).
Structured data is a way of describing your site to make it easier for search engines to understand, using a vocabulary called Schema.org, to display search results in a specific and much richer way. There is a specific product schema that helps you get highlighted search results, (or rich results). You should mark up structured data so searchers will pull out more information about your product, like customer reviews, ratings, prices, breadcrumbs, and FAQs.
Having rich snippets and results will help you improve your eCommerce store CTR (click through rate).
With SEO, the page content you create is a major ranking factor.
You have to write quality content for each of your pages, but how do you translate this to product pages?
Easy; product descriptions.
Write unique descriptions for each of your items, containing your target keywords, long-tail keywords, and all the information the searcher needs, such as functionality, specs, benefits, ingredients, and qualities of the product.
Just make sure the content is relevant and helps your users in their buying decision.
To improve the conversion rate on your product page, make sure your call to actions are clear, well placed and above the fold. You can even make it sticky so that when the user scrolls, they always have the CTA easily reachable.
The CTA button should also be big enough to be spotted immediately and easy to access on desktop and mobile.
Another key tip for product page optimization is to showcase high-quality images of your products. This not only helps to sell the item, but when showcased on search engines, you want your product to stand out from all the others.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:
Add videos, particularly if you need to show the product’s functionalities or the item in function.
At the bottom of each product page, feature related products to improve traffic and conversions on your different web pages. This will also help SEO as related products usually contain secondary keywords that can help you have more unique and relevant content that search engines will like.
If we take our Lush honey soap example, having other moisturizing soaps, with aloe vera, oatmeal, and other ingredients featured on the page, can help you rank for these searches as well as the primary “honey soap”.
It can also help users find a more appropriate product for their needs if what they were looking for was a broader item such as “moisturizing soap” or “hand soap” for example.
Having comments and product reviews on your product pages can help with a few things:
It’s a good way to have unique content displayed on each of your product pages, without having to work much on it. It can also help users make up their minds about the product and have a clear understanding of its pros and cons, which helps them manage their expectations.
Like in our soap example, we can see that the honey soap melts too fast, but it might not be a problem for all buyers, and now they’ll expect it to be easy-to-melt and won’t be as disappointed if it happens to them.