As an online seller, it can be disheartening to know that a potential customer searched for a product on Google, then found and bought it from a competitor instead of your store.
But don’t despair! By optimizing your product pages for SEO, you can increase their visibility in Google searches.
This will ensure that the next time a customer searches for a similar product, they’ll find it on your site.
Implementing the most effective product-page SEO practices is essential for discovery.
However, it’s not as simple as setting it and forgetting it.
To help you with product page SEO, we have compiled a list of 25 Dos and Don’ts.
By following these guidelines, you can maximize your product pages and attract high-value organic traffic.
SEO for product pages: Things to do
1. In-depth keyword research
Optimizing your product pages for eCommerce SEO requires a strong keyword strategy, and keyword research is the first step.
When doing keyword research, remember that relevancy is more significant than keyword ranking difficulty and search volume.
Your keyword selection should focus on the products potential buyers are searching for, including brand name, color, size, and other relevant attributes.
Additionally, think about the different ways a person might search for your product, including adjectives and the pain points it addresses.
This will maximize your keyword strategy’s effectiveness.
2. Optimize your product page URL
Although having a well-structured URL is not the most critical ranking factor, it is a necessity for both visitors and search engines as it makes it easier to understand a web page’s content, context, and target for search engines.
For example, an effective URL looks like this –
https://yourwebsiteurl.com/black-phone-case/
And an unoptimized URL –
https://yourwebsiteurl.com/index.php?=product=129
How to optimize the URL?
URL optimization is not a difficult task. An easily understandable and SEO-optimized URL has certain qualities, including:
- Short and descriptive
- Easy to read
- Separated by dashes
- Consist of only lowercase characters
- Some details about the product attributes and characteristics
- Have the main keywords
Avoid using,
- Product numbers
- Auto-generated gibberish
- Long URLs
- Unnecessary characters
- Words such as “a,” “an,” and “the”
It is critical to ensure that the URL reflects what the consumer can expect from the page.
Aim for “speaking URLs,” or URLs that clearly communicate the page content to the user.
3. Optimize the meta title
Crafting a compelling meta title is crucial to grab potential customers’ attention in search engine results.
It should include the brand, product name, and distinguishing characteristics such as color or gender.
To make it unique, use an expanded name for each product and target keywords within the 60-character limit, as this is the average amount shown in search snippets without getting cut off.
For example, this title is below 60 characters,
And this one is over 60 characters,
From the examples given, the first title is displayed without cutting off, but the second title gets broken up in the search snippet.
On the other hand, a purchase intent meta description is crucial in attracting customers to click the link on search pages.
It’s necessary to make the meta description concise, enticing, easy to read, and straightforward to stand out from other top-ranking competitors.
4. Use heading tags effectively
Headers are a crucial aspect of your product page’s structure, allowing visitors and search engines to comprehend its content and organization easily.
For your product name, we recommend using the H1 heading.
In contrast, H2 headings are ideal for product features, technical specifications, reviews, and Q&As.
Although you can integrate the product name into an H2 heading, it’s unnecessary if it interferes with the user experience.
Additionally, it’s critical to ensure that the page only has one H1 tag. This is located at the top of the page and above other headings such as H2, H3, etc.
5. Optimize your product description
An e-commerce study found that 20% of purchase failures are due to poor presentation or unclear product descriptions.
Crafting an effective product description infused with keywords that target your audience’s search intent can help your product page rank higher on Google searches.
This will convince customers that your products are of the highest quality.
To create compelling product descriptions, you need to focus on four key components:
- Speak to your target audience.
- Highlight your product’s benefits.
- Make the content digestible.
- Use long-tail keywords.
Your product description should describe how it will solve a problem for the buyer or enhance their life and be relevant to your consumers’ needs.
Moreover, including a strong CTA (call to action) in the description is also critical.
With an engaging and enticing product description, you can showcase your product’s unique selling points and entice potential buyers to take action.
6. Optimize the product images
Images should always be optimized to keep a website’s performance high in SEO and user engagement.
Your product images should highlight the product from various perspectives, including up close, in use, and as part of a scene.
Additionally, adding a zoom option can enable customers to see the product details easily.
In order to help you with the product images for your eCommerce store, eCommerce image editing services can be a great help.
Moreover, optimize the alt text of your product images. Using SEO-optimized image alt text has multiple benefits including:
- They can make managing large numbers of images in your store easier.
- Having meaningful filenames helps convey what the image is about.
- Improve the chance of ranking higher in Google image searches.
Additionally, you need to choose descriptive and relevant filenames for your product images to maximize benefits.
Here are examples of meaningful and not meaningful image file names:
7. Add product schema markup
Product schema provides a way to add specific product attributes to listings, which appear as rich snippets in search results.
It helps search engines understand the purpose and content of a webpage, which is particularly relevant for product pages.
Furthermore, structured data can enhance the appearance of organic search listings, and increase click-through rates (CTRs) by displaying rich snippets with review information directly on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The example demonstrates how an accurate schema configuration can lead to a more informative search snippet.
To get the most out of this approach, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to validate your implementation.
9. Leverage user-generated content
Incorporating user-generated content into your product pages can provide original and valuable information for your customers and improve SEO.
One example is Amazon’s “Customer Questions and Answers” section.
To maintain the quality of this content, it’s crucial to disallow links in answers or add the nofollow attribute.
The most effective way to avoid spammy content is to regularly monitor and publish only relevant questions and answers.
Don’t overload your page with too many questions; instead, redirect customers to a dedicated page for more information.
10. Cross-sell your products
Including related products in an eCommerce product page can retain visitors and encourage them to purchase additional items.
For instance, you can showcase your other products in the “You May Also Like” or “Similar Products” option.
Etsy leverages this functionality to enhance its customers’ shopping experience by offering suggestions and guiding them toward related products.
An example of this feature in action can be seen in this screenshot:
The practice has both customer experience and product page SEO benefits, as it provides alternatives and strengthens the internal link structure.
11. Speed up page loading
Page speed is a crucial aspect of the user experience, affecting several important metrics like bounce rate, search performance, and revenue.
Research shows that fast-loading sites perform better across various marketing and SEO metrics, including organic search results, site engagement, conversion rate, bounce rate, abandonment, and loyalty.
Product pages are often complex and run scripts that could slow down the site.
It’s essential to test each product page template individually for speed and conduct more all-around tests before and after any significant changes are made.
12. Optimize for mobile
As an increasing number of people are turning to their mobile devices for online shopping, it has become increasingly important to optimize your product pages for mobile users.
Making sure that your product pages are designed with the unique needs and constraints of mobile users in mind is now a necessary step to providing an optimal shopping experience.
We recommend using Google’s page speed testing tool to evaluate the impact of site speed on user experience.
Additionally, you can use the Google mobile testing tool to get valuable insights about the user-friendliness of your product page.
13. Use breadcrumbs
The structure of your eCommerce website plays an essential role in guiding both your audience and search engines to the appropriate pages.
Imagine it as a collection of folders and sub-folders on your computer desktop.
Search engines utilize this hierarchy to determine the significance and authority of each page on your website, with higher-level pages carrying more weight.
Once your visitors and search engines arrive at their intended destination, providing them with a seamless experience is crucial.
Offer them a clear path to their desired product, including the ability to view the route they took and easily return to any higher-level category.
This is why implementing breadcrumbs and effective internal linking practices are indispensable aspects of a well-designed website.
14. Check for technical issues
For large eCommerce stores, having separate URLs for every filtered search can cause problems such as wasting crawl budget, split link equity issues, and duplicate content.
To avoid these issues and optimize the crawl budget, it is important to audit your product page SEO using SEO tools and address any technical issues and content optimization for your eCommerce product pages.
15. Add relevant FAQs
An FAQ section on your product page can help achieve your SEO goals and provide a positive user experience.
By addressing conceivable queries your prospects may have, you can persuade them to convert and prevent them from turning to your competitors.
Because quality content is essential for ranking on the SERP, and an FAQ section helps meet your users’ needs.
Ensure that your FAQ section is marked up with FAQ structured data and easily accessible on relevant pages.
16. Include and link product attributes
Improving the internal linking structure through cross-linking product attributes is an excellent strategy to boost eCommerce product page SEO.
This approach enhances customers’ experience and helps rank queries related to the product.
Various ways can be used to implement this, such as linking to the brand page, category page, and color or size to the product range with the same size or color.
Including and linking product characteristics such as SKU, brand, series, and model names is also important in ranking for product queries and improving the internal linking structure.
17. Include product detail pages in the XML sitemap
When publishing new products or updating existing ones, you want to ensure that Google quickly crawls and indexes new or updated products.
This is where XML sitemaps can be utilized.
Creating separate XML sitemaps for different types of content, such as category pages, product pages, manufacturers, supporting pages, and blog articles, is recommended.
This makes it easier to track the indexing process in Google Search Console.
Only indexable pages with HTTP status 200 OK should be included in the XML sitemap, and limiting the number of URLs to 50,000 per sitemap is recommended.
18. Regularly update and revise content
Be open to customer feedback and tailor your content to seasonal trends.
Keeping your content up to date and tailored to customer preferences can improve your SEO performance, increase conversions, and build a stronger brand presence online.
Product Pages SEO: Things not to do
19. Don’t use auto-generated meta titles and descriptions
Auto-generating title tags and meta descriptions can be quick, but it’s not advisable.
Writing unique and informative title tags and meta descriptions is essential to ensure your product pages perform well on the search engine results page (SERP).
20. Avoid deleting out-of-stock product pages
When a product goes out of stock, it’s important to consider if it will only be temporarily unavailable.
If so, it’s advisable to keep the URL live, especially if the page has high traffic and rankings, and provide links to other relevant products.
To maintain the page, ensure it remains in the XML sitemap, mark the product as temporarily unavailable, and include a get notification button when it’s back in stock.
Additionally, removing the “add to cart” functionality is necessary to avoid users’ frustration.
21. Avoid structured data mistakes
Incorrect use of structured data can lead to Google penalizing your website for misrepresenting information, resulting in lower-ranking in search results.
To avoid such a situation, it is essential to pay attention to details and avoid common mistakes such as using inappropriate structured data, using structured data that doesn’t match on-page content, violating Google’s guidelines for a specific data type, violating Google’s general structured data guidelines, etc.
22. Never let product pages become orphaned
Orphan pages can pose an issue for SEO since they have no internal links leading to them.
But some pages serve a specific purpose, such as advertising campaigns or displaying a status message.
In these cases, adding a noindex meta tag prevents search engines from indexing them.
The issue arises when orphan pages represent a significant portion of a site’s indexed URLs.
Near-orphan pages with just one or two internal links can also become problematic since Google assesses a page’s importance based on its internal links.
23. Avoid duplicating product descriptions
Many small to moderate-sized businesses sell products from well-known brands.
Unfortunately, many of these businesses copy and paste the manufacturer’s product descriptions, resulting in duplicate content on their website.
As a result, Google may ignore these product pages as they are not unique and do not add value to the customer’s experience.
To avoid hurting your SEO efforts, avoiding duplicate content and focusing on creating original product descriptions is essential.
24. Don’t remove your seasonal pages
Deleting seasonal pages leads to losing the SEO equity gained and requires starting the process over each year.
An alternative solution is disconnecting the page from navigation and keeping it active in the background.
You can still remove outdated pricing or promotions, but the page remains searchable and can attract potential customers.
25. Avoid keyword stuffing
Google penalizes websites that use excessive keywords in their content to rank higher on Google search results.
In the past, stuffing as many keywords into a page was seen as a viable method for improving search engine visibility.
However, this approach is for now considered a big mistake.
For optimal results, incorporate keywords into your content naturally and organically.
Focus on delivering value, providing unique solutions, and giving readers the information they need in context.
Final thoughts
In the competitive world of eCommerce, it’s not enough to have great products.
You also need to make sure your potential customers can find them. That’s why SEO is so crucial, and optimizing your product pages is the key to success.
By paying attention to page title optimization, internal link building, accurate product information, etc., you can attract high-quality traffic to your site and boost your revenue.
However, you may need more personalized assistance as a top SEO company. In that case, we can help your product pages rank higher on Google while ensuring prospects convert to loyal customers.
