Although creating appealing product pages can attract customers, without a successful SEO strategy, it may all be in vain. Optimizing your product pages makes it easier for users to find your website. More users lead to a higher ranking, more conversions, and ultimately more sales.
By 2019, it was estimated that there were 1.92 billion digital buyers. This figure is expected to double by 2023. With the current trend of increasing online sales, e-commerce websites need to optimize their product pages to stay ahead of the competition.
What is Product Page SEO?
Product pages are the individual pages where users can obtain valuable information about your product such as product price, dimensions, features, and other relevant data before completing a purchase. Product page SEO is, therefore, the practice of enhancing the elements of product pages to boost the ranking of the e-commerce website in search engines.
Optimizing Your Product Page for SEO
There are several ways you can enhance your product page SEO and some of them are outlined below.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
This is the foundation of product page optimization. It helps you to know what words buyers are using to search for your products. By identifying the terms customers use, you can create keywords that will increase your search traffic.
Keyword research is more than just a game of numbers. It requires you to keenly study your audience so that you can cater to their needs in terms of the content on your product pages.
When conducting keyword research, you need to:
- Focus on search intent.
- Check the Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs).
- Pay attention to search volumes.
- Include long-tail keyword search variations.
- Factor in profitability.
- Conduct a competitive analysis.
During this process, entrepreneurs are advised not to fixate on volume but, instead, think about relevancy and what will actually convert. Some tools that could help include SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubbersuggest.
2. On-page SEO Implementation
The next logical step is to execute basic on-page SEO. Begin by optimizing your product page URL and ensure you include a keyword(s). It’s considered best practice to match the product name with the URL handle since using product numbers and auto-generated URLs often confuses customers. URL optimization is best suited for startup websites with few product offerings.
What follows is product title optimization. In e-commerce optimization, your titles need to include product specifications and keywords people use to search for a product. Ideally, the title should have a maximum of 60 characters to ensure search engines do not break it up. A great title tag should be descriptive for the search engines and enticing to the customer.
Optimizing the meta description concludes the on-page SEO implementation. A meta description is a snippet of around 160 characters that say what a page is about. When crafted carefully, it increases your product page Click-Through Rate(CTR) and boosts your rankings. An optimized description needs to include the product name and keywords, benefits, and information that differentiates your entry from the rest.
3. Create Unique Product Descriptions
Since writing unique product descriptions for all items may seem like a daunting task, most e-commerce websites copy and paste product descriptions from the manufacturer. Although this is a common trend, it leads to duplicate content and consequently lowers your rankings.
To prevent this, every product on your page needs to have unique and valuable information for your customers. If you’re a large e-commerce store with numerous product pages, consider prioritizing them, and making it your long-term goal to create unique descriptions for each item.
Here are some factors to consider when writing a unique product description:
- Your buyer personas.
- Product features and benefits to motivate purchase.
- Brand’s tone of voice.
- Choice of words.
- Placement of keywords.
- Quality of images and mixed media.
4. Use Schema Markup
Schema Markup is an essential element of product page SEO. It is a code that you place on your website to help search engines read and present your page in SERPs. Using schema markup on your product pages lets the search engine bots know what the page entails. It can be added to your business home page or “about” section, and it has the following benefits:
- Improves the Search engine’s ability to crawl your site: This process helps local businesses clarify information such as products offered and their contacts.
- Increases your site’s visibility on search pages: It adds more information, making it more visible, attractive, and engaging to users.
- Enhances your visitor’s user experience: The extra information allows users to make more informed decisions, so you’ll be getting more traffic and boosting conversions.
Most successful e-commerce websites, e.g. Shopify, include properties such as company name, product name, official website, address, official logo, ratings, offers, social accounts, unique identifying URLs, and availability as part of their schema markup strategy. Once this approach is used, ensure that you review its implementation by using a tool from Google.
5. Split Test Your Product Page
Split testing your product page is an essential part of your digital marketing strategy. It entails dividing pages of similar intent on your website into two groups, making a change to one of them, and monitoring the impact it has on a key SEO metric such as click-through-rate, or keyword ranking positions.
For product pages, split testing is a blessing since it can be used to validate the appearance and usability of each product page. You can run A/B tests on product pages by periodically trying new messaging, highlighting different benefits or customer pain points, changing imagery, and exploring different Call-To-Action buttons.
Below is a simple guide on how split testing can be conducted:
- Check your site structure and include template pages
- Set a hypothesis
- Split your product pages into control and variant test groups
- Make necessary changes to the Variant pages
- Report on your test results
It is worth noting that testing one hypothesis at a time is recommended so that you can be confident that the positive or negative change was a direct result of the test and nothing else.
Summary
As an enterprise, making proactive changes to optimize your website’s SEO gives you a competitive advantage in the dynamic world of e-commerce.As part of your strategy to optimize your e-commerce product pages for SEO, ensure that every product on your site gets the positioning and attention it deserves. Remember to continually test and experiment with various methods and stick to what gives the best results.
