How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Product Pages to Maximize SEO Benefits
As many as 44% of all online purchases start with a Google search. So if you’re not optimizing your e-commerce site’s product pages for SEO and overall search visibility, then you’re certainly missing out on a lot of targeted traffic. So with that quick introduction, let’s walk you through the process of properly optimizing your site’s product pages to get the most out of what Google has to offer.
Keyword Research
When it comes to SEO, pretty much every campaign begins with keyword research. This is because in order to optimize your product pages for SEO, you need to know what terms people are using to search for those products. There are many ways to do this, but we will cover two of the most effective, easiest ones. The first one is to simply use the Google Keyword Planner. When you put a general term into this tool that’s used to describe your product, you will find its search volume on Google as well as other keywords relevant to the product. You can note down a few keywords that are the most relevant and have the highest search volume.
The second method is to take the results that are already ranking for your product’s term, and put them into a tool like SEM Rush. This will fetch you a long list of keywords those pages may be ranking for, including easy-to-rank long-tail keywords.
Optimizing the Product Pages
Once you have the right keywords at your disposal, you need to start the optimization process. The first step would be to optimize the title of your product pages, as it’s the most important area of your product page in terms of SEO.
Title and description
Make sure the title contains the main keyword relevant to the product and is also descriptive with the model number or a long-tail keyword to attract users. The next area to optimize is the description, where you can also include other relevant, smaller, and long-tail keywords you cannot include in the title. This will maximize the search exposure for your product pages. The descriptions need to be unique and long. Never copy the descriptions from the manufacturer’s site, or use the same descriptions for multiple products on your site. This would negatively affect the SEO of your product pages.
Images and videos
Then comes the images. The images not only need to be clean and attractive but also have a relevant file name (when stored on your computer), ALT text, and other details. Similarly, product pages with videos may or may not have a direct SEO advantage, but they will certainly help you increase the conversion rate. There are many ways to optimize your videos to get them more exposure.
Reviews and URLs
Customer reviews help as well, so you can encourage your customers to leave you reviews on the product pages. Finally, don’t ignore the URLs of your product pages. They tend to be an SEO factor too. Make sure they are short, clean, and relevant, ideally with the main keyword included. If you’re changing the URL due to some reason or have an updated version of a product and want to do away with the older version, then don’t simply delete the product page and be done with it. You need to do a 301 permanent redirect of the old URL to the new one.
Site Architecture
Optimizing your site’s product pages is not about the pages alone, but your site’s architecture as a whole. You must be using breadcrumbs for enhanced navigation and to make your site crawl-friendly for Google. Breadcrumbs are the links that appear at the top of a page, that describe the funnel from the homepage to the product page. All your product pages must be connected to your homepage using breadcrumbs for the SEO juice to pass through from the homepage to the product pages. Using categories and sub-categories is always a good idea.
There are also some other more technical things that may help you further, but these simple ways of optimizing your product pages and your e-commerce site as a whole can go a long way in helping you increase organic traffic to your product pages without having to go too deep into technical SEO stuff.
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