The product page is the heart of any e-commerce website. These pages generate a lot of organic traffic and play the most important role in the process of purchasing decisions. Thus, when building your PDPs, you need to focus on the right balance between SEO needs and customers’ demands. Luckily, search engine algorithms are becoming more and more user-centric, so knowing just a couple of rules and hints, you can do it easily.
Here are 10 best practices of SEO for e-commerce product pages to keep in mind when optimizing your website.
#1. Put keywords in the right places
Adding keywords to your product page is the very first step in your way to improving SEO. However, you need to make sure that you put keywords in the best places possible.
Title
The product name will be tagged as H1. Use the keyword with the most search volume in it. A good idea will be to add the brand name, product name, and model number to the title. To make it more specific, you can include product attributes like color, size, or SKU, but only if it makes sense.
From the user experience perspective, you want your title to be short, easy to remember, and specific.
Product description and subtitles
A product description is the main text content you have on the product page. It should help you convince users to buy your product.
So how to write a top SEO product description?
Make sure your product description is unique and easy to read, and the used keywords don’t make the text robotic and look natural. Don’t write long essays about your product. Focus on the main features and the most important details. On average, the length of a product description is around 500 words.
Subtitles are another good place for your keywords. H2 and H3 tags are reference points for crawling bots, so adding relevant keywords to the subtitle will help you rank higher.
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URL
Finally, you need to pay attention to your URLs. URL structure is important for both users and search engines. A good URL should include the main keyword of the page and be short and easy to read. Quite often, URLs duplicate the H1 of the page or its shortened version.
#2. Optimize metadata
Metadata in SEO means meta title and meta description that will be displayed on search engine result page (SERP). This short text should include your main keywords and brief information about your product like:
- brand name
- name of the product and its model
- short description of the product
- important product attributes.
#3. Use high-quality images and videos
The image gallery is the #1 thing users will click on on your product page. The importance of quality product photos and videos in the shopping journey cannot be underestimated. However, you’ve probably at least once seen an online store with a single blurry image on the PDP.
Moreover, adding high-quality visual content will give you at least 2 SEO benefits:
- Improvement in user behavior. Catchy images decrease the bounce rate and increase the time spent on the page.
- Better ranking in search by image. The more images you have and the better their quality, the more chances for your website to appear at the top of the search-by-image result page.
Here are the best practices for optimizing your images:
- Include keywords in the image alt text
- Use JPG or WebP formats
- Be careful around the image size and compress them, if needed
- Include images in the XML sitemap
- Enable the lazy load technology to not slow down the overall page load.
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#4. Add product attributes
Product attributes are normally used for filters on the category page and advanced search. However, adding product attributes to the product description can help you rank better for more specific queries that include color, size, or other specifications. Also, you can use product attributes to strengthen your internal link structure by cross-linking them with other website pages. For example, you can link the brand name to the brand overview page.
Pro tip: Do you know that a full list of product attributes can be generated in minutes with the help of a neural network? Find out how it works →
#5. Don’t let product options cannibalize each other
Let’s say you have tiles in several different color variations. For a better user experience, they should have different URLs but almost the same content. This means Google will see several pages with identical content, which can hurt your ranking on SERP.
To avoid such situations, use the rel=” canonical” tag to mark the main product page and the rest of them as copies. Thus, Google bots will understand what pages they should crawl.
#6. Include product detail pages in the XML sitemap
Every time you change something on your website, you want search engine bots to reindex updated pages as soon as possible. You can send pages to the indexation manually or submit updated XML sitemaps in Google Search Console. This will save a lot of time if you need to make changes to many pages at once.
It is also recommended to have separate sitemaps for different parts of your website, like category pages, product pages, blog articles, etc.
#7. Add FAQ and Q&A sections
The FAQ section can not only reduce loans on sales managers and decrease the number of support tickets, but it’s also a tool that can help you reach “special” content sections like people also ask and zero position on the search result page.
Ask your sales managers about the most common questions they get about products, brands, and policies, and put them on the product page. Also, you can add a Q&A section, so users can ask you other important questions.
#8. Let customers leave real reviews
User-generated content (UGC) is very welcomed by search engines. Reviews and your answers to them will help you get more pieces of unique content on the product page while gaining more trust and loyalty among your customers. Statistics show that placing reviews on the product page can increase your conversions by 52% compared to pages without reviews.
#9. Track your page loading speed
If your website loads longer than 2 seconds, you risk losing up to 57% of visitors, and 80% of them won’t return to your site again. And high bounce rate is what makes Google ranks your website lower on SERP.
Run a test using Pagespeed Insights to see your current website loading speed and address the technical issues detected by this tool.
#10. Don’t forget about mobile optimization
Last but not least is the optimization of your website for mobile users. Since July 1, 2019, Google has been using the mobile-first approach for indexing and ranking. This means that crawling bots predominantly scan mobile versions of the pages. So after adding any new piece of content to your product page, check it on your mobile devices. See if it looks good and is easy to read and interact with.
Product page SEO plays a crucial role in online sales, and focusing your attention on it will help you grow organic traffic, conversion, and revenue. Start implementing the best practices we've described above, and you'll see the result soon.