E-commerce retailers can boost their sales by ranking well in search engines like Google. Unfortunately, paid media costs continue to rise, but organic SEO is an inexpensive way for these businesses to drive traffic and sales over the long term.
Although e-commerce businesses face many SEO challenges as they sell software or other B2B or SaaS products. They also have some unique challenges. For instance, to maximize their organic search traffic, e-commerce retailers must optimize their product pages. Here are some product page SEO tips to keep in mind.
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What is Product Page SEO in eCommerce?
E-commerce product page optimization is a process that helps businesses rank more often in search results. It is for transactional and commercial keyword searches. Although like traditional SEO, product page SEO is focused particularly to help rank e-commerce businesses.
Challenges faced by SEO product pages
E-commerce websites often have a difficult time ranking in search results.
Poor site architecture: Poor architecture on e-commerce sites can make it difficult for customers to find their desired products. It is due to unorganized categories or poor internal linking and navigation menus.
Less Content: Google favors well-written, in-depth content. Product pages tend to be light on content and can be difficult for Google to deem high quality.
Duplicate Content: You can be negatively affected in case of using duplicate content for your pages. Google always wants to promote original content.
Inventory: When your products rank high in search engine results and your products are seasonal or out of stock. You may face challenges with your product pages.
Crawl Budget: Retailers with thousands of pages can easily exceed their crawl budget, resulting in poorly indexed content.
Overall, product-page SEO can lead to more keyword rankings and organic clicks. Which can help lower customer-acquisition costs in the long term.
Best ways to optimize product page SEO for eCommerce
To ensure that your product pages rank well in the search engine results pages you should blend generic SEO principles with tailored optimizations that work well for web pages designed to sell products.
Use keywords to align Product Names
To ensure a good experience for the people who visit your site. Make sure that the names of your products are consistent with the keywords you use in your SEO strategy. The main aim is to see that Google crawlers understand your web page and display the exact products that users are searching for.
Use of Breadcrumbs
Ecommerce websites tend to have many inner pages, which leaves the customers in a puzzle on navigation. Try to add breadcrumbs to make it easy for the searchers to know the hierarchy of your store.
Understanding your site architecture is very important for Google crawlers. They help the customers to view your site with ease. It will, in turn, increase the click-through rates as your site will be more visible to your potential customers on the SERPs.
Page Title Optimization
People who browse your website products tend to see your page title first. So try to describe your products so that the users can easily click on the link. Sometimes you may have some product names that gets repeated in the page title and URL slugs, which do not create any problem as it’s an eCommerce site.
The ultimate aim is to see that Google crawlers know what your product page is displaying. Use keyword phrases targeting your product in the metadata or long-tail keywords with slight variation.
Simple, Descriptive, and Consistent Product URLs
URL paths are the structures behind your website’s URLs as you organize your products into categories and collections. The URL paths for different sections of your site should be consistent and understandable.
If more people should click on your URL, then include target keywords in a descriptive way to get more clicks. Let’s show how keywords integrated with descriptive url paths look like
- https://ahbivdigitalagency.com/professional-seo-services/
Using long-tail keywords adds more important as people are searching for more specific products on search engines. But it is always a best practice to keep your URL short and descriptive.
Keep your Product pages descriptive
Product descriptions allow you to add more content to product pages, helping readers find what they’re looking for on the page. They can also signal keyword relevance when using synonyms and LSI keywords.
Product descriptions should be unique, original, and search engine-friendly. Content optimization software can help site owners identify related terms, topics, and phrases that Google crawlers look for on a page to understand the relevance and topical depth. Using these keywords in your product descriptions can help improve your page’s ranking.
Optimize File Names and Alt Text of Images
To help your customers find what they are looking for in your online store, optimize your product images so Google can recognize them. Also, to help enhance the user experience of your online store, make sure that both the file names and alt text in your images are descriptive.
You can add promotional text to your Meta Descriptions
The meta description is your opportunity to distinguish yourself from competitors’ websites. So, it would be best to keep Meta descriptions between 120 and 150 characters. Including your primary keyword in the meta description can help improve relevancy. But it’s not a substitute for offering perks such as discounts, free shipping, or returns.
Although Google may rewrite meta descriptions from time to time, it’s still important to make an effort to optimize them. But, you should no longer stuff keywords into your meta descriptions repeatedly . This is because Google is now advanced enough to understand synonyms and related phrases. Instead of writing your meta descriptions like product copy, use natural language. Try to provide a clear picture of what users will find if they click on your page in the search results.
Fast loading pages
The content on your product pages is not only important to rank in Google but also how quickly they load and perform for users across devices. When choosing a theme for your online store, ensure that your theme design is fast-loading and SEO optimized. You can audit your site using free tools like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights etc.
Good links to Product pages
Content quality is important, but links remain essential for search engine optimization. Digital PR and outreach can help generate high-quality inbound links that improve the rankings of all pages on your website.
Use Noindex, Nofollow When Needed
If a website has thousands of product pages, it could overspend its crawl budget. But, if a site spends more than its allotted crawl budget, you could exclude some pages from Google’s index.
If you don’t pay attention to the crawl budget, Google may index and rank out-of-stock or seasonal products, resulting in disappointed users. Implementing the noindex, nofollow robots tag can keep their product pages from being indexed by search engines.
Ranking many web pages in the search engines for various product and service-related keywords is impossible in most cases. Thus, you should optimize your site to the highest quality, highest converting pages to rank well in the search engine results pages.
Proper use of Internal Links
Internal links can help search engine spiders better understand your site’s structure. They are important as they help visitors navigate through your site. For example, product pages can be more useful by adding internal links to related products. If you have out-of-stock items that rank well on Google, you can use related product features to direct users to other relevant products on your site. It will prevent users from bouncing back to the SERPs.
Conclusion
For larger e-commerce websites with hundreds to thousands of products, optimizing every page on the site can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.
If you do not feel comfortable taking a do-it-yourself approach or do not have the internal resources at your disposal, we can help. At Ahbiv Digital Agency, we provide E-commerce site optimization services designed to increase your site’s search engine rankings.
