A sustainable product page is one that consistently drives organic traffic from search engines and converts that traffic into paying customers. However, many ecommerce businesses rely on paid mediums to drive traffic to product pages.
In this post, we share 10 tips and strategies on how ecommerce websites can optimize their product pages for SEO and drive free, targeted traffic.
1. Create product pages after thorough keyword research
Keyword research isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind when creating product pages. Product pages are primarily created for … well, showcasing products. But it doesn’t mean that you should ignore keyword research.
Researching keywords for product pages may be slightly different than researching keywords for a top-of-the-funnel informative blog post.
For product pages, do not fixate on monthly search volume. Instead, the focus should be on long-tail transactional keywords. Unlike informative search queries, transactional search queries indicate the searcher’s intent to buy the product. For example:
- Informational search query = “ecommerce platforms”
- Transactional search query = “Shopify vs. WooCommerce”
Pro tip: Use data from paid search ad campaigns if you have it. That can help you identify the transactional intent of visitors, the right keywords, and how you should present your product page for maximum conversions.
2. Optimize meta titles and meta descriptions
Title tags are important regardless of the type of page, but they can be vital for product pages.
Why?
First, the right title tags and descriptions can help you add the right keywords. Product pages rarely offer the luxury that a 2,000-word informative blog post does for keyword insertion. So every opportunity is valuable.
Second, long-tail transactional search queries do not have a lot of search volume. The focus, therefore, shifts to driving most of the available (limited) search traffic to your website and converting it. Well-written and optimized meta titles and descriptions play a crucial role in driving a higher organic click-through rate.
Make sure that every product page has a unique meta title and meta description. Moreover, try to include the product brand, product name, model number, and other important information about your products.
3. Utilize structured data
Structured data can help Google understand what a web page is about more effectively and easily. Product pages usually have a lot more opportunities to utilize structured data.
For instance, you can mark up many different elements on a web page:
- Product
- Breadcrumb list
- Review
- Price
- Contact number
Having the right type of structured data on your product pages can help you achieve higher search engine rankings. In addition, structured data can also make your page eligible for rich results, which further increases the organic click-through rate.
4. Leverage FAQ content
Apart from structured data, product pages also offer excellent opportunities to add FAQ content and target a variety of keywords that you couldn’t otherwise.
Apart from the obvious goal of including keywords, FAQ content is helpful for readers. When searchers are browsing product pages, they often have different questions. If you can create a bunch of relevant and helpful FAQs, you can help users with high-quality content.
In addition to helping you with keywords and search engine rankings, that FAQ content can also help increase the conversion rate.
5. Don’t forget user-generated content
Just like FAQ content, product page visitors are also usually looking for customer testimonials and reviews. They want social proof and credibility before they decide to part with their hard-earned money.
High-quality testimonials and reviews can help you improve the conversion rate significantly. It is estimated that product pages that have customer reviews convert 58 percent more website visitors than pages without customer reviews.
Moreover, user-generated content is also content in Google’s eyes and can help you rank higher in search rankings. And although it is not always in your control, testimonials and user-generated content is also an excellent opportunity for keyword inclusion.
Lastly, user-generated content like testimonials and comments can also help you with unique and fresh content that Google prefers.
6. Focus on the loading speed of your product page
The loading speed of a web page is an important search engine ranking factor. For product pages that need to have a higher conversion rate, the loading speed becomes all the more important.
Web pages that load quickly offer three benefits:
- They offer better a user experience to your potential customers.
- They help with higher search engine rankings.
- They usually have a higher conversion rate than pages that take too long to load.
Apart from the loading speed of your product page, also make sure that:
- Your product page is perfectly responsive and optimized for smaller mobile devices, and
- It meets the criteria for all the core web vitals.
Learn how to improve the loading speed of your website.
7. Find and fix technical issues
Technical SEO issues can easily hold back a product page from ranking higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, finding and fixing these technical issues on a regular basis can help significantly.
Look out for:
- Duplicate content
- Crawlability issues
- Indexing issues
- Split link equity
- Keyword cannibalization
- Thin content
- Duplicate meta tags
- Broken internal and external links
- Redirect chains and loops
8. Create unique product descriptions
This is one of the most important product page SEO tips.
Google wants unique and useful content from every website. The main content on a product page is the product description. Therefore, always make sure to create unique, helpful, and engaging product descriptions.
The more detailed information, the better it usually is for SEO.
Moreover, a lot of ecommerce websites make the mistake of copying the product description for the manufacturer’s website. Apart from the fact that a lot of these descriptions are not compelling or search-engine optimized, this is duplicate content and can lead to a Google penalty.
Instead of copying product descriptions, take your time to write unique, helpful, engaging, and SEO-friendly descriptions for your product pages.
9. Preserve URLs for yearly and seasonal product pages
Another common mistake that many websites make is that they create a new product page for every seasonal product. The same thing happens with yearly or seasonal discount offers.
Every time you create a new page, you have to build its link authority from scratch. That is not a sustainable way to rank on the SERPs and get organic traffic on a consistent basis.
We recommend creating a dedicated page for each seasonal product or discount offer. For example, www.yourwebsite.com/black-friday/.
Make sure that the URL slug can be used every year. So /black-friday-2022/ would not work in 2023.
This strategy helps you accumulate page authority over time.
When the time of the discount comes — or when your seasonal product gets stocked — just update that page.
10. Don’t forget internal and external links
Links — whether they are internal or external — play a huge role in passing link equity and helping a page rank higher on the SERPs.
Ecommerce websites rarely focus on links when it comes to product pages. However, with a little bit of research, you’ll find that there are always opportunities.
For example, you can publish guests posts and drive contextually relevant backlinks to your product pages. Similarly, you can create blog posts on your website and create internal links that point to your product page.
Regardless of whatever link-building strategy you use, it is important to use internal and external links to propel your product pages in search rankings.
