SEO for Product Pages: Tips, FAQs and Advice

There is so much information and advice on how a brand that sells physical products can increase its online visibility to ultimately sell more and build a loyal customer base. With that said, a lot of the focus seems to be on higher-level pages, such as optimising a product category page, sub-category page, hub content, blog posts and even the homepage. These pages are essential for eCommerce SEO. But there is also hidden power in product page SEO. This guide focuses purely on improving organic search results and user experience for product pages. First, some frequently asked questions about online product pages. Then a list of twelve practical ways to make product pages rank better and convert more.

What is product SEO?

Product SEO refers to things like:

• Carrying out search term research
• Filling in missing structured data
• Optimising images
• Creating an enticing, educational and unique product page description
• Creating internal links to and from the product to assist in the customer journey and crawl bots

And much more besides, all of it aimed at increasing the chances of your target audience finding and investing in your brand’s offering.

Is SEO important for eCommerce?

In a word, yes. And the approach you take to these pages is not all that different to how you would optimise category or sub-category pages. The aim is to get your products to rank as highly in the search engine results and the image search results as possible, and to carry out conversion rate optimisation on each page ahead of your competitors. With so many people vying to be on the first page of Google image search and its main search results page, and the drastic impact that can have on brand revenue and profit, SEO is vital to success.

How long should an SEO product page be?

The length of content you should aim for on a web page as a blanket statement is always difficult. A really niche product page may need to have more content than, say, a toilet paper product page. The rule of thumb is to include:

• Enough to explain what the product is
• The benefits of investing in it
• Additional information like technical specifications
• Answers to frequently asked questions if relevant
• Some natural-language-processing related terms

That means one product page written for one client may be vastly longer or shorter than what gets written for another. If you want to get technical, you can carry out competitor research based on the first page of the search results to see how long their product pages are. But the general advice is to write as much or as little as needed to get your points across succinctly. There is also always the option of A/B testing your pages with different content lengths to find out what your customers prefer.

Should I use PPC to advertise my products?

There are numerous benefits to using paid search like Google Ads alongside your SEO efforts to increase product visibility. These include: Better site visitor qualification. With Google Shopping, visitors can see exactly what your product looks like and will only click through if they like the look and style and want to know more. That makes them automatically more qualified as a potential customer. Potentially increased click-through rate. Images are eye-catching, so having high-quality images directly in the SERPs can have a positive impact on click-through rate. Take up more SERP space. Let’s face it, Google search results are getting busier and busier. The more space your products take up, the better the chance of a searcher seeing them, clicking through and, if it is well optimised, converting. With that said, PPC can be costly, and if you have hundreds or thousands of products listed on your site, you likely will not be able to apply budget to advertising all of them through Google Shopping Ads. For brands considering this approach alongside their SEO, our paid search team can advise on what is worth running and at what budget.

What problems are there with eCommerce product page SEO?

Three main hindrances stop most ecommerce brands fully optimising all their product pages.

1) The vast amount of them

This is probably why there is so much automation of product pages. If you consider the time cost of asking your agency or in-house team to update hundreds of product pages individually, you may wonder if that budget is better spent elsewhere. However, it is important to think about your product pages as the main place you want site visitors to get to. Apart from the checkout page, these are the most important pages for end-of-funnel visitors. What is the point in putting so much time, energy and resources into getting users through the customer journey and ready to purchase if you are not going to see the process through with a well-written and optimised product page? There are over 600,000 words in the online Oxford English Dictionary. Finding the right ones to describe each item you sell helps customers pick the perfect product, builds trust by showcasing your detailed knowledge, and reduces churn because customers can identify exactly what they need.

2) Boilerplate copy

Everyone in the industry knows it and everyone hates it. But if you stock products from brands that demand boilerplate copy, what can you do? Plenty, as it turns out. Do not let it stop you creating great experiences for your customers. By carrying out further search term research (also known as keyword research), and adding additional content to your product descriptions, you reduce the overall percentage of duplicate content on the page. That increases the chances of the product being ranked and provides a better user experience, especially if you can incorporate user-generated content.

3) The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality

Another common reason is that the product page is so precious when it comes to driving revenue that there is a fear of making any changes. If it is already generating revenue, why change anything? However, if there is one constant truth in SEO it is that things are always changing. Google is constantly forcing brands’ hands to ensure the best user experiences via algorithm updates. Ecommerce companies that lean on this mentality may find it comes back to bite them down the line. To win at SEO, you need to constantly strive to deliver the best customer experience. The same is true of your product pages.

How can I improve my eCommerce website ranking?

The good news is there is so much opportunity out there when it comes to improving your product performance online. Here are twelve practical recommendations.

Conversion rate optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation is an absolute must for your product pages. They should be short, snappy and clear. They should also make sense and be eye-catching enough that users notice them and naturally feel compelled to take the action your brand desires. Prominent calls to action, clear product information, and visible customer reviews all boost conversions. These small details can be the difference between users converting on your page or heading to a competitor.

Image optimisation

A common problem most ecommerce brands face, particularly online sites with a comprehensive range, is that the number of images held in the back end causes page load problems. However, investing in high-quality images offers another chance for your product page to rank organically in search engines. Google image search will match your product images to relevant search terms when they are properly optimised. As long as you work to reduce image file sizes and ensure your alt text is accessibility-friendly, having high-quality product images may actually increase the rankability of your page, and will certainly help get visitors over the line and convert them into paying customers.

User-generated content

This is a brilliant opportunity, particularly if you are forced to include boilerplate content on your product pages. User-generated content in the form of reviews is an incredibly powerful tool for an ecommerce store, particularly for smaller, lesser-known brands. Trust is a major factor. Whether it is a search engine bot trusting you will provide the best product, or a site visitor trusting that you are a legitimate business, the answer to both is reviews from real people who enjoyed your product enough to recommend it. Showing users that you have a trustworthy following through user-posted reviews helps you gain the trust of new users. It is also a great source of feedback for your business. Demonstrating that you have made changes informed by reviews builds further trust and gives your users a voice they would not have otherwise. Uploading customer reviews not only helps potential customers trust your brand and encourages them to invest, it also reduces the amount of duplicate content on your page caused by boilerplate content.

Product schema markup

Another way to give your product pages a boost is through schema markup. Shoppers will not see this information but search engine crawlers will use it to get a better understanding of what the page is about. Product schema can also generate rich snippets and rich results, including prices, star ratings, brands stocked, FAQs (if you implement FAQ structured data) and more, showing all of this information on the search results. This further qualifies any traffic that continues to click through to your ecommerce store, as they will already have gleaned plenty of information. While schema markup is not a direct ranking factor, there are still benefits to explaining to search engine bots what the page is about in a language they understand. It plays an important part in a well-optimised product page. Our free schema markup generator can help you build the JSON-LD for product schema in minutes.

NLP research

Natural language processing is an incredibly powerful secret weapon that can level up the impact of your targeted keywords. It is always important to write unique product descriptions that demonstrate your in-depth knowledge of the items you are selling. Carrying out NLP and entity research to support your keyword strategy is a great way to display that expertise. To do this, you need to go beyond basic keywords and think about the other items and entities that your product is connected to. Consider what it can be used for, and the benefits it brings to potential customers. This is good practice for writing great descriptions, but it also gives your SEO efforts a boost by contextualising your product and the relationships it has with other things. The level of clarity this brings can lead to better rankings. For a deeper dive on this, Search Engine Land published a useful primer on using relationships to level up SEO. Going back to the issue we mentioned earlier about having hundreds or thousands of descriptions to publish, it may be tempting to copy and paste product descriptions from the manufacturer’s ecommerce sites. We highly recommend taking the time to write your own instead. Using content from another site may save you time, but there is a good chance those product pages will not rank because crawl bots see them as duplicate content.

Conscious consumer content

Incorporating conscious-consumer-related content as part of SEO optimisation for your product pages is still a relatively new approach but is a great way to stand out from the crowd. Research from Global Web Index shows that shoppers are now searching online for environmental information on the brands and products they are interested in. These searches are taking place on the brand and product web pages 34% of the time. Adding information about how sustainable the product is, and how to recycle it effectively, is a great way to connect with a target audience that may choose you over a competitor if they know that your brand’s beliefs align with theirs.

Accessibility

Accessibility is an incredibly important aspect of an SEO strategy but can also be a tad confusing to get going with. One in five people in the UK has a disability. By not making your product pages accessible, you are excluding up to 20% of the UK population from being able to access them and purchase your products. Web accessibility is not just a nice-to-have, it is a legal requirement. Whatever actions non-disabled users can complete on your site, make sure users with disabilities or any users of assistive technologies can complete them too. Imagine putting in all the hard work and effort of finding an audience, navigating them down the customer journey, and then it being impossible for them to actually make a purchase. All of that work has led to nothing except a sour taste in a potential customer’s mouth.

Cannibalisation

Cannibalisation is when more than one landing page is being ranked for the same term. This causes a lot of volatility as two ecommerce product pages essentially try to battle it out for a higher position. This can happen particularly if you have different pages for the same product, but each page represents a slight variation. For example, you may have one t-shirt but five web pages to focus on the white, black, red, yellow and blue versions of that t-shirt. Perhaps the simplest solution is to collate all of these products onto the same page and apply filters to help users select the colour and size they want. You could also target long-tail search terms (also known as long-tail keywords) and additional content to help crawlers understand the range of colours available for the one product. This also creates a cleaner, more organised online store as well as a better ranking for your main ecommerce product, because it is not battling with variant pages.

Unique page titles and meta descriptions

Page titles and meta descriptions can sometimes be the first thing a potential customer sees about your product. If they have performed a search that your product has ranked for, the user can discover in the 50 to 60 characters in the page title, and the 150 to 160 characters in the meta description, whether it is something they want to investigate further. Title tags are not only a constructive way to clearly communicate what you are selling, but also an underappreciated opportunity to display your professionalism, and therefore trustworthiness. This works for both users and for search engines. Too much faff and you are not effectively informing users what they are clicking through to, and risk losing their attention at the first hurdle. When it comes to search engines, faff can lead to truncation. Search engines may choose to display an entirely different title tag to the one you have tried to optimise, creating what they deem to be a more relevant title from the page’s content, or cutting it short to fit into the SERPs better. Clever and well-researched optimisation (think keywords, intent, trustworthiness, not keyword stuffing, “huge deals” and other click-baity jargon) is one of the key elements of performing well in the SERPs from both a user and search engine perspective. Even though shoppers do not see a product’s page titles or meta description once they are on your web page, it can make all the difference when choosing between the options that rank on search engine result pages. Our free SERP snippet preview tool lets you check exactly how each page’s title and meta description will render before you publish.

Cross-selling

While working on your product page SEO, you have the opportunity to increase your customers’ average order value by recommending additional products available in your online store that they may be interested in. With a little analysis and site development magic, you can set up “people also purchased” sections that encourage shoppers to add additional, low-priced products to their baskets before checking out. Depending on which platform your website operates on (WooCommerce, Shopify and so on) it can be a relatively simple yet highly effective strategy to implement. If your ecommerce website has been custom built, it may be a little more tricky but not impossible with the help of a good web development team.

Digital PR and link building

Another benefit of renovating your ecommerce product pages is that they do not just serve potential customers who are ready to buy. Product reviews, user guides and comparisons are not only a great way to add supporting authoritative content to your product pages, they can also be of benefit from a digital PR and link-building perspective. Other websites will often use and link to them as a resource to add value to their own content. Links are a trust signal and a ranking factor, so it is always worth considering how you might extend beyond the product page itself to fully optimise it.

Need help optimising your product pages?

There are loads of ways your ecommerce site can be made to work harder and perform better simply by optimising your product pages. If you would like to discuss how our ecommerce SEO team can apply some of these techniques to your store, get in touch for a no-pressure conversation.