Ecommerce Product Page SEO: 10 Tips & 5 Mistakes to Avoid

People are shopping online more than ever, so it’s essential to make sure your online store can compete with the endless stores available on search engine results pages. Optimizing user experience plays a role in how users interact with your site, but getting them to your pages from the search results is another challenge altogether.

Why is SEO important for your business? Going down the Ecommerce product page SEO checklist can not only drive traffic but help convert users into buyers, too. Beat out the competition and ensure your product pages are optimized for maximum exposure using our complete list of tips for optimizing Ecommerce pages below.

How To Improve Your Product Page SEO

1. Conduct Research & Implement a Keyword Strategy

Keyword research is one of the most important things you can do to set the foundation for strongly optimized pages. To align with Ecommerce product page SEO, make sure you choose product-focused keywords that your potential customers will likely search for.

During the keyword research phase, keep in mind the keyword you choose should be relevant and have a clear intent. Pursue keywords with a transactional intent so your audience can find you by placing you within their search scope, especially if their intent is to buy.

Also, be sure to consider the keyword ranking difficulty and search volume. Relevancy, though, is often more important. Approach your strategy with long-tail, descriptive keywords, which can help improve discoverability in search.

For example: If you sell arts and crafts kits, instead of pursuing “arts and crafts,” it can be beneficial to target keywords like “arts and craft kits for kids.” The longer-tail query indicates the searcher is looking for a specific product, while “arts and crafts” does not.

2. Optimize Product Page Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

After understanding the keywords that can help improve your product page SEO, it’s important to ensure your title tags and meta descriptions are optimized accordingly.

Title tags should include:

• The name of the product
• Brand information
• Other relevant information

Usually, a product page contains tons of general information from dimensions, application instructions, and other important details. This is great for users already on the page. However, this isn’t enticing for users scanning the search results pages.

Meta descriptions should provide users with a brief overview of what’s offered in your product page, with important details and calls to action so they are more likely to click and visit your page.

Here’s an example of an enticing meta description:

This Best Buy meta description for their ink and toner cartridges highlights what users can expect upon clicking on the link. If users don’t know what kind of printer ink or toner they need, they can be inclined to click on this page to look at the range available at Best Buy.

3. Have Unique Product Page Descriptions

Not only does this help to describe your products in detail, but it’s also the source of many keyword opportunities throughout the page. Important information to include in your product description includes:

• SKU numbers
• Weight
• Size
• Uses
• Instructions

Here is an example of a unique product description:

This L’ange dry shampoo product page highlights the uses and benefits of the dry shampoo in a manner that’s easy to read.

4. Include FAQ Content

If you want to rank high in the search results, your product pages should be full of high-quality content. If users don’t find your content useful, it’s likely you’ll see high bounce rates and low conversion rates.

Adding an FAQ section to your product pages allows users to become more familiar with what you’re selling and is great for users who would rather find the information themselves as opposed to chatting with a robot or calling customer service.

To identify keyword-rich questions for your FAQ section, consider looking through the questions you receive from your customers, your competitors’ websites, and Google auto-suggestions in the search bar. Your FAQs should include general questions about your product or industry, rather than just for your brand specifically.

5. Show Testimonials & Real Customer Reviews

While your product descriptions and photos may sound enticing to users, having real customer reviews displayed is equally important for product page SEO since it can help users figure out if they want to buy your product or service.

Additionally, reviews help build trust, as users are able to understand that your site is not a scam. Celebrity endorsements and reviews are great, too, and they can drive sales for you!

6. Add Structured Data To Product Pages

Having structured data can help your page show up as featured snippets on the results page.

Structured data feeds site crawlers more information about the products you sell and helps boost your brand authority, which is key to attaining snippets.

Product pages should include the following structure:

• Product schema: This provides users with product information in a structured way, which makes product photos and information simpler to display on the search results pages.
• Review schema: Structured data within the reviews sections provides site crawlers with informative results about your products that can boost your trustworthiness.
• FAQ schema: Data within the FAQ section provides search engine crawlers more context and can boost trustworthiness and authority, as your page provides information important to users.

Websites can do this automatically, with plugins or through manual input. There are also plenty of Google resources to help you learn more or to validate your schema for manual input.

7. Have High-Quality Images & Videos With Alt Text Tags

Because you aren’t selling your products in a typical brick-and-mortar store, potential customers don’t get to get a feel for your products themselves. High-quality images and videos provide users with the visual context they need to understand your products. Showcase your unique packaging, bundles, and kits through attractive images and use them to support your brand to deliver a great user experience.

While site crawlers do scan images on the page, the more relevant clues on the page, the better. To provide them more context as to what those pictures represent and how they relate to the page, add alt text tagging.

8. Test Your Product Pages

Make sure to test your landing pages as part of your Ecommerce product page SEO strategy. Even small changes from the positions of your copy, modifying calls to action and changing the homepage and certain product pages can drive more conversions for your online store.

Test the impact of each change to figure out what works well and drives more sales. Use tools like Optimizely and Google Optimize to test even the smallest change on your product pages to understand their impact on your conversions. However, finding what works for your product pages doesn’t always happen in one try—don’t be afraid to do some trial and error to see what works best!

9. Reduce Page Load Times

A website that loads quickly provides a better user experience to your customers and makes the online shopping experience convenient. If your pages’ speed and loading times aren’t optimized, you’ll probably see high bounce rates.

However, you’ll never get your pages to load faster without identifying what’s slowing them down first. To address page speed issues, you’ll have to look into the technical side of the page. Large images can make a page slow, so consider image best practices when uploading to your site.

10. Audit for Product Page Technical SEO Issues

New URLs for every filtered search can create a problem, especially for big Ecommerce stores. When your site has too many different URLs, chances are that you will be wasting crawl budget, have split link equity, and have duplicate content.

To optimize your crawl budget and subsequently improve rankings, audit your site for technical issues. There are many SEO tools available to help you with these.

These are a few issues to keep in mind as they relate to SEO for Ecommerce product pages:

• Slow page load times
• Missing structured data
• Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
• Thin content
• Broken links
• 302 redirects
• 404 pages
• Canonicals
• Hreflang

5 Things to Avoid in Your Product Pages

1. Thin Content and No Calls to Action

Online stores need all the help they can get to inspire users to purchase products since they don’t get to see, feel, and use the products physically before purchasing. Be as descriptive as possible to give browsers a good idea of what you sell, and encourage them to purchase throughout the page by explaining how they can benefit from it. Plus, make sure every product has a unique description.

2. No Canonical Tags on Product Pages

Canonical tags help site crawlers avoid indexing duplicate or similar content that is accessible on multiple URLs. Crawl budgets are limited and we don’t want to waste them on duplicate content.

3. Removing Pages for Products That Are Seasonal or Out of Stock

Deleting pages to re-publish later leaves you with an uphill battle every time, especially if they have built up rankings, traffic and sales over time. SEO for Ecommerce pages involves linking that product page with other relevant product pages so traffic can flow through them, which can bring sales when the product is back.

So, rather than taking down your pages entirely, optimize for peak seasons.

4. Skipping on Internal Linking Opportunities

Support your Ecommerce product pages with internal links to make them rank for keywords with high purchase intent. Doing so increases traffic and conversions for your Ecommerce store.

Often, brands build links to their homepages, category pages and blog pages but forget about product pages. Remember to include long-tail keywords in your Ecommerce product page SEO strategy, and build links to your Ecommerce product pages as well to increase revenue and sales.

5. Not Optimizing for Mobile

These days, most people are using their mobile devices to browse the internet. Besides that, Google is a mobile-first indexer, meaning it predominantly uses the mobile version for indexing and ranking.

Not having a mobile-friendly website can hinder your sales goals. Here are a few mobile-first SEO for Ecommerce product page must-haves:

• Product names
• Descriptions
• Delivery options
• Images
• Price reviews

Need Help Optimizing Your Ecommerce Product Pages?

If you have a business with an online presence, SEO can be a tremendous tool to improve your reach. If you’re interested in learning more about how SEO can help your business, get in touch with Go Fish Digital today to get started!