Robert Jacobi of Cloudways breaks down five do’s and don’ts to ensure ecommerce SEO for your product pages turns prospects into customers.
The success of an ecommerce website depends heavily on product page optimization. Using search engine optimization to drive searchers to user-friendly and eye-catching homepages plays a key role in driving interest and engagement… but it’s the effectiveness of e-commerce SEO on product pages that converts browsers into buyers.
As digital adoption continues to increase, more buyers are looking for products online. According to a Google survey, 49% of shoppers from around the world use search engines to search for or discover new items or products. This means that if ecommerce sellers want to tap into and capture the attention of millions of searchers looking for products, they need to optimize their product pages.
Securing the coveted first page position for ecommerce products can be a challenge, as you’re competing for prime real estate with countless other brands. To ensure that your product has a fighting chance in the rankings, here are some important do’s and don’ts.
Don’t optimize low-volume keywords
Many brand owners make the mistake of optimizing for keywords that are specific to their brand. For example, if their product has a unique name that is unfamiliar to everyday consumers, using that name as a keyword for SEO optimization could prevent the product from showing up in search results.
Product descriptions and meta should contain keywords with moderate to high search volume and low to moderate competition. Companies that sell desks they call “Bauhaus desks” and use that name as a keyword will lose sales, because that keyword only has 100-1000 monthly search volume on Google. Instead, companies can optimize for high-volume keywords like “desk” which drive a flood of traffic due to a monthly search volume of around 100,000.
Do optimize title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions play an important role in how ecommerce website products are displayed in search. When optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, it’s important to include the most important information, written with the prospect in mind, not what the brand thinks is most important.
The e-tailer should make every effort to include customer-relevant details, such as brand name, product name and model number. Additionally, many popular online outlets use structured data that allows product descriptions to include price information, as well as customer reviews and ratings. Search engines value websites that are information-rich and useful to searchers. Therefore, understanding the title tag, meta description, and structured data will give your ecommerce product the best chance of ranking well.
Don’t automate optimization
Allowing plug-ins, software or content management systems to dictate and automatically include optimizations for a website’s product pages may seem like a business hack, but in reality it can do more harm than good. Automatic optimization will limit the product page’s ability to rank favorably, because it means that the page contains only the product name and brand name in the title tag.
In addition, automatic optimization will be considered untrustworthy by searchers.
While it may seem time-consuming and tedious, manually optimizing pages for SEO is always in the online shopping platform’s best interest from a traffic-driving and revenue-generating perspective.
Do include informative and relevant content
A largely overlooked way to get top spot on search engine ranking pages is to include informative and relevant content on every product page. The more engaging and customer-centric the content, the better. For example, successful ecommerce sites often include a frequently asked questions section on their product pages, which can be a major driver of traffic. Or a site could instead include a guide or instruction manual that takes potential buyers through the ins and outs of how the product is manufactured, how it works, and how to use it.
The content of these additional product pages must be unique to the retailer’s website. Duplicating product producer content likely won’t have the same effect as creating unique content, because producer content is unlikely to be optimized for engagement. Failure to include content that is useful to customers will cause product pages to see high volume of drop-offs, resulting in high bounce rates, lower sales, and poor search engine rankings.
Don’t remove out-of-stock product pages
After taking steps to ensure that product pages are optimized and result in sold out of all item inventory, you may be tempted to delete the page. But deleting an already optimized out of stock page that has high ranking and traffic is a big mistake. Instead, ecommerce sites should store URLs on all out-of-stock pages, especially if an item is about to be restocked. The traffic generated from this page can be used to direct users to a waiting list or increase the visibility of similar products.
Ecommerce vendors should also ensure that their out of stock page is clear and honest, informing customers if and when a product will be restocked and pointing to comparable in stock items. Removing this out of stock page will redirect potential customers to a 404 page which may cause them to leave the site without making a purchase.
Effective product page optimization = more traffic and sales
The more effort and thought that is put into ecommerce SEO for product pages, the better the online business will be. Ensuring that all SEO best practice tactics are implemented on every product page will yield significant results: product rankings will increase, website traffic will soar, and sales rates will skyrocket. Taking shortcuts by doing the bare minimum when it comes to optimizing product pages may achieve limited short-term success, but taking the time to do due diligence on product pages will lead to long-term growth and offer e-tailers greater opportunities to increase business. they.
Robert Jacobi is director of WordPress at Cloudways, DigitalOcean’s multi-cloud managed application-as-a-service platform. Robert leads the WordPress business unit at Cloudways in community engagement, strategic partnerships and product.
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