More often than not, people mistakenly put all their efforts into trying to rank well for their homepage and/or industry generic keywords. Although this will bring in good levels of traffic, these visitors are not necessarily looking to buy. By focusing on specific product-level search terms, you are more likely to attract visitors who are in the later stages of the buying cycle. This is due to the fact that product-level searchers tend to be more specific and have usually conducted their research. So by ranking well for specific products, you can increase the propensity of your visitors purchasing your products.
With the e-commerce industry becoming more competitive, it’s never been more important to ensure your product pages are SEO friendly. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, our current economic climate has meant consumers are becoming increasingly frugal, meaning they are more likely to research and compare products before making a purchase. They will do this by using shopping comparison websites and search engines to find the best deals. Also, not only have Google recently released data showing that online retail has declined, but there is also more competition than ever as companies who have gone out of business on the high street are switching their focus to online retail.
Importance of SEO for eCommerce Websites
Having a product sitting around and waiting for it to be sold is not the best game plan for any eCommerce merchant. No matter how the product should be marketed, the digital age has us doing almost all of our shopping online, and with over 2 billion Internet users and 90% of them shopping one or more times a week, even search engines are becoming the most popular way to shop. According to a 2008 study from DoubleClick Performics, search engines were used by 20 million consumers a month to find or research products. This is almost as many consumers as those who shopped in traditional retail locations, and significantly more than those who went to all online retail stores combined. In terms of where any eCommerce site would want traffic coming from, it really doesn’t get much better than that.
One would hope, very much, that this can practically be agreed without a lot of debate. A good starting point might be a definition from the granddaddy of all online resources, Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines search engine optimization (SEO) as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results.” So in other words, it’s the process of getting your website visible, and on the first page, of a search engine (preferably Google) without having to pay to get it there.
Benefits of SEO-Friendly Product Pages
– Increased trust in your business: Generally speaking, people have more trust in a business that has a high search engine ranking. Whether or not this is a valid assumption, it is one that is held by many. If people have higher trust in your business, they are more likely to become customers. A higher search engine ranking will help to achieve this.
– Cost-effectiveness: As mentioned above, receiving clicks from search engine results is a cost-effective method. But how? There is the common misconception that SEO is free; you either have to invest time or money into it. Although this is true to a certain extent, it does not consider the value of your time. Time is money. Compare the value of your time to the cost of Adwords or other paid search methods. What is your time worth? How much would it cost you to buy clicks for specific keyword terms? This is a detailed analysis in itself, but the point is that there is a long-term cost benefit to ranking high for keyword terms (organic search engine results).
– Higher sales in the long-run: As previously mentioned, SEO friendly product pages will allow you to rank high for specific keyword terms. By being found for these keyword terms, you are more likely to increase sales. Although it will take some time to get ranked for various keyword terms, it is far better than paying for clicks in the long-run. Some studies have shown that clicks from organic search engine results are more valuable than paid clicks.
– Increased visibility in search engines: This is the most obvious. When your product pages rank high for specific keyword terms, you are more likely to be found. If your pages are not found, you’re not going to generate sales.
As mentioned above, if you rank high in the search engine results, you are more likely to increase your sales. But what are the actual benefits of SEO’ing your product pages? Here’s a detailed list:
Key Elements of SEO-Friendly Product Pages
The first element crucial to the creation of an effective SEO-friendly product page is the inclusion of a relevant and unique product title. This element is a basic attribute that is not unique to SEO, however the specific manner in which it is created. It is vitally important to include keywords that are both relevant to the product and likely to be used by search engine users as this will influence the propensity of the page appears to the user when using said keywords. It is important to avoid ambiguity when selecting product titles as this can lead to the product page appearing in unrelated searches. This would not be beneficial in attracting traffic that is likely to be converted into a sale. An example may be a store which sells a variety of backpacks of different brands and styles. It would be unwise for this store to create a product title such as “backpack” for any of their products, as the likelihood of the product appearing in a high position on a search engine results page are minimal, and even if it did the traffic would be largely non-specific and irrelevant. Secondly, providing an optimized Meta descriptions and Meta title play a significant role in providing a high click through rate from search engine results pages as well as affect the pages search engine ranking. The Meta title and description is what is visible to the user in search engine results pages and a well written description that is both relevant to the product and clearly explains what it is can be the difference between a potential customer clicking on your page, or that of a competitor. Due to the 156 character limit in Meta descriptions it is important to accurately summarize the page content while using enticing language to encourage the user to click through to the page. This is another area in which it is important to use relevant keywords.
Relevant and Unique Product Titles
One of the common mistakes online store owners make is duplicating the manufacturer’s product title, Meta title, and/or product name as the title for the product page. This is not beneficial from an SEO perspective. You must impart the product’s value and its relevance to the customer and to a search engine. By using the manufacturer title, you’re competing with every other retailer that is selling the same product. Using the same title will also mean that the page is duplicate content. This means more difficulty in ranking and a smaller possibility of a consumer finding your site. If a title is more relevant, you have a higher chance of ranking over the manufacturer’s site.
Title tags are important and are considered as one of the best ways of optimizing a web page. It should describe the product in short and should contain the most important keywords. Keep the title tag under 66 characters and try to put the most important keyword near the beginning. If the brand name is included in the title tag, it should be placed at the end. Every title on every page should be unique. This will increase the number of indexed pages and it will avoid duplicate content.
When creating SEO-friendly product pages, one of the key elements is having relevant and unique title tags for each product. The title tag is the most important on-page factor for search engine rankings. Title tags should be different for every page. In search results, the title tag is the text which is hyperlinked to the page.
Optimized Meta Descriptions
Product pages can get a great deal of simple traffic from lookers who are searching for your item by the brand. The belt and braces approach is making a brand + product page for everything, except you can adhere to the fundamental offering on just a single URL with a basic route. Considering the Meta data, incorporate a Meta title and Meta portrayal with every special watchword driven page. Meta portrayals are regularly overlooked or hurled off as not being critical. Site owners. The individual page’s (or group of pages) special incentive isn’t communicated well to the client so they aren’t convinced to click for more. Meandering into a Meta drink is another story with a pack of snoopy and searching users wanting to make the following stride and visit your page. This request can be a half month, and can utilize ad testing to streamline the cuts. Start by characterizing each page’s one of a kind offering point and think of a notice that offers the call to activity or next venture for the client. At that point sift through the inserted watchword list developed in the past few months to feature off the research terms with high snaps and sales.
High-Quality Product Images
In terms of search engine rankings, images are displayed separately from text. Therefore, optimizing your images can lead to lots of additional visitors from search engines. This can be a large source of potential customer acquisition. Therefore, SEO service is an essential part of building your online store. Make sure your images are of a reasonable file size and do not create a detrimental effect on your page load speed. High-quality images don’t need to be very large files, and large files will slow down your site. Add an alt tag to your image with keywords or product IDs. This will help your images to rank in image search results for long-tail keywords. Using clean URLs will also net a few extra image search visitors. Although creating an image sitemap has no penalties, it may be of significant benefit to those with a large product range.
High-quality images are more important for e-businesses. A substantial number of visitors make their decision to purchase based solely on the image. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to make the best first impression possible in order to turn a site visitor into a potential customer. High-quality product images are the most influential tool in gaining visitor trust and confidence over an internet buying decision. If visitors can inspect products in a comprehensive manner, they are more likely to make a purchase. High-quality images go hand in hand with detailed product descriptions, which in a sense paint a mental image with the customer. Being able to match this with a real product image is a strong selling point.
Detailed Product Descriptions
Detailed product descriptions are necessary for providing content to the search engine spiders. Black discusses the effectiveness of inserting keywords into your product descriptions. You have the ability to control the content of your site; thus, you have a better chance of achieving a higher on-page ranking. Words used within the product description will likely be chosen as the keywords, so the more relevant, the better. It is important to refrain from using duplicate content or product descriptions from the manufacturer’s site, as this will ultimately give you less visibility among search engines. Instead, create a unique and compelling product description, with persuasive language and a call to action. This is also a marketing effort to the consumer, so creativity is allowed. Make sure to effectively communicate the unique attributes and benefits of your products, using persuasive language that sparks consumer desires. This will help to differentiate your product from similar ones sold online. Reasons why this product is better than others should be included. Make sure to include any promotions or deals, using visual or text links to coupons. Black emphasizes the importance of a call to action, which leads straight to the purchase of the item. This way, the consumer won’t get lost within your site and abandon the effort to buy. The Google algorithm is referred to as a “relevance algorithm,” in that it’s targeting main phrases, rather than individual keywords which will often times change. Due to this, it’s more effective to use a lower word count and integrate the most relevant terms and phrases. An optimal product description is around 150-200 words. This isn’t a set limit but rather a general idea since the word count will largely depend on the price and perceived risk of the product. Keep in mind that Google only displays 23 words of a title tag, so it is effective to front load keywords. A picture of the product should also be included adjacent to the product description, since pictures are a call to action for buying the product and may lead to Google Image Label-ads.
User-Friendly URLs
User-friendly URLs are another important aspect of URL structure. A URL that is easy to read and understand is also easy to share. This increases the likelihood of people actually clicking on the URL and visiting the website. A URL is often comprised of a collection of words where the positioning of hyphens can enhance its readability. It is far easier for a human to read the URL “best-seo-company” than “bestseocompany”. In a similar vein, it can be useful to create a URL from the title of the page or the targeted keyword. A complex string of letters and numbers does nothing to indicate the content of the page, and it is generally assumed that a URL that is made from the title is more search engine friendly. If for some reason you cannot use words to create a URL and you absolutely must use a long string of numbers, it is possible to modify the URL with the use of URL rewriting. This involves the use of server-side scripts to reformat the URL or to redirect it to a different URL.
Best Practices for Optimizing Product Pages
What has worked for us in the past is recording data. Record present rankings, backlinks from webmaster tools, traffic, etc., and save this to compare it with the post-optimization data to see the effects. Data retention is good after, as it is a long process and you can often forget what changes were made and when. Any changes made can usually take a few weeks to notice an effect, so it’s good to record a list of the changes with dates so you can see effects and know the timescale it takes.
For an SEO product page, practice is vital. This is what we are getting back to our parents who have taught us to practice, and this is what I am teaching now. Practices are important and effective for performance, and so it is here. You should take time to sit down and run through practices just for optimizing one single product page, just to see what works and how it affects the page.
Conducting Keyword Research
The next step is to conduct competitive research. A thorough competitive analysis can give you a plethora of useful data that can help you identify the areas in which your site is lacking and help you position your product more effectively. The goal is to learn from others in your market who are doing a better job, so analyzing the sites that rank best for your target keywords is a logical place to start. What keyword phrases are they ranking for? Which ones are driving the most traffic? Are they utilizing these keywords in their URL structure? These are important questions to ask and can easily be answered using tools such as SEMrush or the MOZ Open Site Explorer.
The first step to conducting keyword research is to identify the main topics for your homepage and product pages. You can try to answer questions such as: What important themes am I trying to convey through this page? What topics are my products or services related to? It may be helpful to make a list of the topics you’d like to cover on the page. Once that is done, you will need to expand that topic into a list of potential keywords. You may need to get creative and use different phrase variations. For example, if you were selling a marketing automation tool, you’d probably want to target terms that were related to marketing automation, such as “campaign automation” or “email marketing automation.” It’s important to note that keyword research should be an ongoing and ever-evolving part of your job as a marketer, and as your product evolves, so too will the keywords you target.
Incorporating Keywords Strategically
Uncommon or long-tail keywords often have a better chance of ranking higher in search results. An example of a long-tail keyword is “baseball cleats”. A corresponding long-tail keyword could be “discount baseball cleats” or “youth baseball cleats”. In this case, optimizing a post for “youth baseball cleats” would have a better chance of bringing in more targeted traffic, as opposed to a generic term like just “baseball cleats”.
Strategic keyword placement is critical to a post being found through search. Once you have established the keywords/meta tags, these keywords should be included in the page title, the H1, H2, and in the body of the page. It is important not to overuse keywords, which is called “keyword stuffing”. This can lead to a post being penalized in search results. Using it one time in the page title, once in an H1, once in an H2, and 3-4 times in the body is more than sufficient. Keyword density is another important factor to keep in mind when writing. Do not exceed more than 3-4% keyword density for any given keyword. Finally, words that are in bold or italics, and words that are bulleted or numbered tend to carry more weight with search engines. It is good practice to ensure that these are utilized for keywords.
Enhancing Page Loading Speed
A number of studies have shown the ever-increasing importance of page loading speed as a Google ranking factor. In 2017, a study by SEMrush found that there is a direct correlation between site speed and the position of the site in Google’s search results. The same study found that 82% of websites which feature on the first page of Google search results are considered to be technically ‘fast’. Google previously stated that “2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second”. This statement has likely not changed and implies that a sub-2 second page loading time is what Google sees as an acceptable loading time for an ecommerce web page.
Page loading speed is the length of time it takes for a page to become fully visible and operational after a user clicks on a web page search listing or advertisement. Page loading time has always been an important aspect of SEO. It has recently become an even more important factor with the advent of Google’s mobile-first index. Since 2010, Google has used page speed as a factor in its ranking algorithm. While this was initially only for desktop indexing, in 2018 Google updated its speed ranking factor to include mobile page speed. This means that if your ecommerce site has slow page loading times, it may now suffer in terms of search engine rankings for both desktop and mobile searches.
Implementing Schema Markup
Once you have your markup generated, you will now need to input the code into your web pages. If your website has a lot of product and different model types, it may be difficult to fill out markup manually, especially if you have data stored in spreadsheets. For this there are plugins to help insert code into the backend of your website but also spreadsheets that you can upload to the markup generator to get the correct code output. Focus on the validation and testing of your code at this point, as incorrect code input could mean snippets not showing up in search results. Google offers a rich snippet testing tool which can give you an idea of what different snippets will look like. Lastly, always remember that you can go back to edit or add new markup in the future. With changes in product details and different trends of what people are searching for, updating your markup can keep giving more appeal and relevance to your web pages.
When you first begin thinking about implementing schema, think about what types of rich snippets would be most beneficial to your website and would most attract users to the website. For product pages it would be beneficial to try and get price, currency, availability, brand and model snippets shown in search engines. These are common search criteria that would help users not only find the right product but find out where to buy the product. Step 2 would be researching the tools that can help generate the right kind of code to be put on your website. For basic markup a tool such as Google’s Data Highlighting Tool can be quite sufficient but there are also several WordPress plugins and other generators to help with more specific markups.
There are several types of markup that can be used for various kinds of websites but each type of markup has different information to be filled out, often relying on data you may already have in a spreadsheet or database.
A schema markup is a code that is put on your website to help the search engines provide more informative results for users. If implemented correctly, this code can have a huge positive impact on where your website shows up in search results. This is because the results with added code can give extra appeal in the form of rich snippets, which will visually show users that our page has the information they are looking for. This alone can attract a much higher CTR for your web pages.
Optimizing Mobile Responsiveness
Google’s update on mobile-first indexing now means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Failure to have a mobile-friendly page will result in poor search engine ranking as your page will be ranked based on the mobile version before the desktop version. This makes it crucial for websites to have a mobile version of the website with similar content to the desktop version, as well as ensuring that the mobile site loads at the same speed if not faster. Google also stated that it will only look at the mobile version of the page when indexing, and responding to structured data or rich results markup, as well as having a fast mobile version will only result in increasing your search engine ranking. This is crucial for ecommerce websites as if your website does not appear high in search engine results most people will not be aware that your product exists. Step one in order to optimize your mobile site is to test how mobile friendly your site is using the mobile-friendly test tool, and ensuring that Google fully comprehends your page with the use of robot.txt. This tool will allow you to see which pages are not mobile friendly and why they are not. Step two will be to avoid using popups especially those which cover the entire screen, as they can be hard to dismiss on mobile devices and this could lead to a Google penalty. Consider using banners and if popups are necessary then use smaller ones which are easily removable. Step three is to configure your website in a way that Google understands that it is the mobile version of the site. An example is when using separate URLs serving different HTML to desktop and mobile versions of a page, make sure that the Googlebot only looks at the mobile URLs. Step four is to improve the speed of your mobile page which can be done by removing render blocking JavaScript, minimizing redirects and using browser caching. Finally, be sure to monitor the mobile search traffic as well as general website traffic continuously. This will allow you to notice if there are any sudden drops in mobile traffic and will help you to understand changes to general search traffic as well as changes to your website.
Monitoring and Improving SEO Performance
The next step is analyzing organic traffic. Take data on the number of visitors from search engines for periods of one month after you optimize product pages. Compare with the previous period and analyze the increase or decrease in traffic. If the traffic gets worse, you might need to re-optimize your product page. Determine which pages get more traffic and find out the landing pages. This is useful to ensure that changes to your product pages do not adversely affect other pages on your website.
Tracking keyword rankings is the first thing to do. You can use keywords that you define in metadata. Then, make a list of keywords that you have optimized and use a keyword rank tracking tool to find out your position for those keywords. Position changes on your keywords will affect organic traffic in search engines. If the keyword position increases, then it will increase traffic, or vice versa. Write down all keywords that bring traffic from search engines and make periodic checks on search engines to find out the position. This allows you to maintain keywords that bring traffic or change to more effective keywords.
After SEO improvements have been implemented on product pages, you need to monitor the effectiveness of the changes made. Without monitoring, you will not know whether you need to maintain the recent condition or make further improvements. This part will help identify what to monitor and how to know it.
Tracking Keyword Rankings
Our software generates keyword ranking reports that compare your website to your competitors using data from the major global and local search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can choose what time frame you would like the report to display to see how your rankings have improved or declined over that time period. Reports can also be compared to previous reports to see how your rankings have changed over a longer time period—this can be particularly useful to see if there is a correlation with ranking movement and on-page or off-page changes made to your website. Keyword ranking reports show the specific page of your website that is ranking for each keyword, the position, and the change in position compared to the previous data. These reports are detailed and can be exported to HTML, PDF, or CSV so you can send them to clients or colleagues. All packages come with keyword ranking reports; Professional and Enterprise packages also include local rankings and competitor discovery features.
A keyword ranking report allows you to see in a quick, visual way how your website ranks in the major search engines for your targeted keywords compared to your competitors. With the reports, you can track and analyze in detail where your SEO campaign is taking you and where you need to focus your efforts. Keyword ranking reports are not only necessary but imperative to the success of your search engine optimization campaign—this is the tool that will save you a tremendous amount of time and energy in assessing where you are in the search engine results page for many keywords. Keyword ranking reports update automatically and provide data that is easy to understand.
Analyzing Organic Traffic
There are still some ways to accurately measure changes in organic traffic. The easiest method is to use Google Analytics and filter by organic traffic. From here, we can monitor the total number of visitors referred by search engines, the pages they visited, and the keywords they used to find our site. This is useful in seeing if traffic is landing on our site’s content pages as opposed to only the homepage. If an eCommerce site has multiple products, we want various pages to be indexed and ranked well. By monitoring the keywords used to find our site and the landing pages, we can get an idea of how well the site is targeting a variety of keywords and if our internal linking structure is effective in spreading link juice to all pages.
Now that we have optimized our site for organic traffic and know what keywords we are targeting, we now need to monitor to what extent our changes have influenced traffic from search engines and how well this traffic converts. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as monitoring rankings for specific keywords, as search engines often change the search terms they use to find our site. This is the main problem here. It is difficult to track organic traffic only from search engines as a referral from another site, a search term may have auto-populated and still shown as organic traffic. This happens often with Google Images as the search terms are stored and a user may simply click on their previous search from within the image search tab, taking them to the page again. This will still be shown as organic traffic, but it did not come from a search engine.
Monitoring Conversion Rates
If it really comes down to it, optimizing keywords and driving traffic are about as comparable as grapes and wine. Both are vital ingredients that come together to produce a certain end result. You can churn through hundreds and thousands of dollars (or grapes) through an SEO campaign, but if it’s not converting traffic into sales (that delicious wine) then it’s all for nothing. Conversion rates are the ultimate measure of success for any SEO campaign and it’s a great way to measure and evaluate the overall effectiveness of a website. In some cases, making small changes can increase a site’s conversion rate by 50% or more! Since SEO campaigns can sometimes have undesirable long-term effects on a website’s reliability (due to the linking strategies involved), it’s important in some cases to direct traffic to landing pages rather than the home page. By doing this, you can measure the effectiveness of individual pages on your site and change elements that are affecting their overall performance. For incoming PPC traffic, it’s ideal to create a duplicate version of the page with the PPC source in the URL. This will allow you to make changes to the duplicate page without affecting the original and see if those changes are effective in increasing conversion from that traffic source. The viewers who are taking the time to conduct an SEO campaign will likely already have a good understanding of the web analytics tool available to measure the conversion rate. A great tool available to both webmasters and SEOs is the “Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin” which can provide clear and insightful data. In relation to organic search traffic, the SEO will want to be setting up goals and funnels in Google Analytics to measure which keywords are driving traffic and if that traffic is leading to any conversions.
Conducting Regular SEO Audits
A SEO audit is an important aspect of maintaining and improving the way a website ranks within search engines. As the internet and the market competition changes, so must the site strategies and potential weak points within the site identified and corrected. An audit can be very time-consuming and a result costly for businesses to have done on a regular basis, but it doesn’t have to be as complex as some suggest. A simple traffic light system on the home pages of various webmaster tools indicates how healthy each element is, the health of which can then be investigated in more detail via the webmaster tools reporting or by using a paid tool which allows a detailed SEO analysis on the entire site. The important factor is that the audits are done repeatedly, as this is the only way to keep constant check on a site’s performance within search engines and deter any newly arising issues. For many small businesses, a monthly audit will bring sufficient results, others dealing with high search volumes and competitors will want to perform a health check every couple of weeks. This will also allow for comparison of audits and give an indication of the time frame in which issues are arising. Issues should be noted in a document with colored tabs for different elements of the site and highlighted in different colors according to their severity of the issue. Using this method also makes it easier to remove or check off issues once they are resolved.
