How to SEO for eCommerce Product Pages

Besides optimizing your product pages for user experience, you want to make sure these product pages are as good as possible for SEO as well.

Obviously, you might think. In this post, I’ll show you how to SEO for eCommerce product pages and tell you why it’s so important to take these things into account.

Let’s starts with the basics of product page SEO

A product page is just a web page. So all the SEO factors that matter to a web page should also apply to your product pages.

1. Get to know how people search for your product by doing keyword research.

The keywords you choose will affect multiple other areas of SEO such as URLs, tags, descriptions, etc., it’s important that you take time to perform the keyword research.

Trying to rank for broad keywords is usually worthless because of the huge competition you’ll be up against.

Besides this, the visitors you do receive may quickly leave your site because it may not have what they’re looking for.

This is obviously problematic because it’s likely to result in a high bounce rate and low conversion rate. Neither of which are good.

That’s why I suggest aiming for long-tail keywords that are highly relevant to your product.

Although they’ll receive fewer searches, these keywords tend to have much less competition, which gives you a realistic chance of ranking favorably.

You’re also likely to have a lower bounce rate and experience higher conversions, which means you’re fully capitalizing on the traffic you drive to your site.

The three main factors you’ll want to focus on when selecting keywords are:

• Relevancy
• Search volume
• Ranking difficulty (level of competition)

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free and effective tool for performing your keyword research and has all of the features you’ll need.

2. Create an SEO Friendly URL

When you finish the keywords research and decided which keyword you are targeting, you should next to create simple URL that’s easily understood by both search engines and human visitors.

A company called “Boku Super Food” sells organic superfoods, and one of their products is called Super Food Essentials.

On the product page, they use the following URL:

Notice that it’s short, sweet and to the point.

If they used something much more complicated such as the following, it’s going to cause confusion and just looks ugly.

http://www.yourwebsitedomain.com/store/product/index.jsp?productId=3547943840248424232

The bottom line here is that your URL should include your targeting keywords and be clear enough that it’s understandable by search engines and human visitors.

3. Add a Great Title

As you may already know, title tags play an important role in SEO and help search engines understand what your page is about.

That’s why you’ll want to ensure that your primary title tag includes your keywords. As you can see below, the targeting keyword “organic super food” is included in the title tag.

4. Optimize the On-page Heading Tags(H1, H2, H3)

You should also try to include your keywords in these tags(h1, h2, h3) as well. While this doesn’t carry as much SEO weight as a title tag, it can still have an impact.

Be sure that you only use one H1 on a single page.

5. Creating a Story-Telling Product Description

Many people underestimate the power of product description. A great product description will not only drive the purchase intention but also help your product page to rank for the targeting keyword.

The product description provides you another chance to weave in your targeting keywords to search engines. Like the example below:

I think that the product description for “Super Food Essentials” is rock solid.

It’s descriptive, flows well, includes the keyword “organic super food” and doesn’t sound too sterile.

6. Don’t forget meta description and image alt.

To avoid Google using that unrelated text in a meta description, you want to add a meta description to your product pages.

Meta descriptions are free advertising that Google gives you in the SERPs. Take time to craft meta descriptions that will get visitors to click on your result.

According to Moz, roughly 155 characters in the meta description is ideal. Below is an example of meta description.

How meta description display on Google Search Engine Result.

Add images with proper ALT text. Include the product name in at least the main product image.

7. Are Your Product Page Mobile Friendly?

At this time of year, many SEOs are looking forward, and, referring to an SEO best practices post for 2017, Google’s Gary Illyes complimented those who suggested mobile is the big drive for 2017.

Google has begun testing its mobile-first index, which will primarily look at the mobile version of your website for its ranking signals and fall back on the desktop version when there is no mobile version.

There are 3 ways to make a mobile-friendly page:

• Responsive web design
• Dynamic content
• Separate URLs (mobile site)

Responsive website design is Google’s recommended way to tackle mobile-friendly sites and, as such, is the approach you should take unless you have very strong reasons not to.

Responsive design has been around for a while, so this is not a new concept. However, many sites are technically responsive while not providing a strong experience for mobile users.

Ultimately, responsive design is just a small part of creating truly mobile-friendly websites.

The SEO Techniques Especial for eCommerce Product Page

Other than the basics of on-page SEO, there are more SEO factors that only apply to the eCommerce product page such as schema.org structured data, Open graph data, and page speed.

8. Structured Data Schema

Schema.org (often called Schema) is a specific vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way your page is represented in SERPs.

Schema.org is the result of collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible at this time. Adding Schema markup to your HTML improves the way your page displays in SERPs by enhancing the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title.

Schema.org structured data defined a data schema called “Product”. By adding the “Product” markup into your product page, it is easier to recognize for Google and other search engines. So your visitor knows your price up front and knows that the product is in stock and offers. How’s that for user experience!

An example of schema.org structured data results in Google:

9. Open Graph Product tags & Twitter’s Summary Card

Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards are actually pretty similar to schema.org markup. It divides the product page into easy-to-digest chunks, but this time these chunks are not for Google, but for social websites like Facebook, Instagram a, d Pinterest.

You can highlight things like product images, and prices and availability. For WordPress websites, Yoast plugin has included the Open Graph and Twitter Cards features.

In the next example, you’ll find og:type and twitter:card. These are similar to the schema.org structured data. These items tell the social media platform that the page is about a product.

10. Page Load Speed

It’s time to take a look at just how fast your product page loads.

In fact, speed may play a bigger role than you think, and “1 second delay in page load time means 11% loss of page views.”

If your site is anything less than lighting quick, you’re going to need to take measures to speed it up.

To determine just how fast your site is, I recommend using the webpagetest.com.

To know how Google sees your page speed, use the PageSpeed Insights tool.

Takeaways

There is no doubt that numerous factors determine just how well your product pages end up the ranking. As a result, it can seem a little overwhelming, especially if you’re new to SEO.

By addressing the right aspects of SEO, you can cover all of the bases and maximize your product visibility in search engines, while simultaneously providing an awesome user experience.