Don’t Ignore These 5 Crucial Aspects of Product Page SEO

Intro

When it comes to e-commerce SEO, a lot of new website owners fixate on the wrong things. You can spend as much time as you like making sure that you have a pretty home page and an active blog, but the reality is that nothing is more important than your product pages because those are the pages that ultimately drive conversions. If your product pages rank on Google, you’ll earn money – it’s that simple.

Product page SEO isn’t always easy, and it’s worth the time and effort to really get into the weeds here and make sure that your content is absolutely perfect. In this overview, we’re going to discuss five crucial things that new site owners often overlook. If you want your product pages to rank, these are the things that you absolutely must look at.

Description Text

It is crucial for every product page to have unique human-written description text. One of the most common mistakes new website owners make is assuming that the text doesn’t matter – that people will come pouring in just because the site exists. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t work that way in practice.

In the past, many new e-commerce site owners made the mistake of copying their product description text from other websites. Today, though, it’s more common for website owners to use AI to generate product descriptions automatically. In both cases, though, the problem is the same: The text isn’t truly unique.

AI text may look polished on the surface, but it’s often filled with recycled phrases that have already appeared in many other places. This problem is compounded by the fact that product descriptions are often fairly short – typically around 100 words. If just a few of the phrases in a description appear on several other websites, Google will reject the text as a whole because it’s not unique.

As an example, suppose that you have a vape shop and use AI to generate the product text for a few e-liquids. One of the recycled phrases you’re likely to get is “a symphony of flavor,” which appears on about 4.1 million websites at the time of writing. Because the text typically isn’t unique, Google often doesn’t index product pages with AI text at all.

Take the time to write your product descriptions by hand. Human-written text doesn’t just rank better on Google. It also converts better because people can tell that it’s authentic.

Product Photos

Even if your distributor provides high-quality pictures of the products that your site sells, you should resist the temptation to use those photos as they are because they’re most likely indexed by Google already. That matters because Google’s image search can be a **valuable source of potential buyers **for many types of products. You want to capture some of that traffic if you can.

It’s worth the time and effort to create your own high-quality product photos – and once again, this is great for both SEO and conversions because people want to see products before buying them. Don’t forget to optimize your images with descriptive file names and alt texts, which are good for accessibility and can also help Google understand what’s in the pictures.

Structured Data and Metadata

Metadata – also known as structured data or schema – is information carried within a page’s source code that helps Google and other search engines understand the content of that page. Because e-commerce is such an important part of the web, there’s a wide variety of structured data that a product page can include. Google uses this information to ensure that your pages are indexed for the correct search terms, and metadata can also be used to enhance the way your page appears on Google’s search results.

At minimum, a product page should include Product schema, which allows you to populate the page with information about the price, availability and brand. Other useful schema types include Review schema – which displays information about customer reviews – and Breadcrumb schema, which helps Google to navigate your site more efficiently.

There’s a good chance that your site’s content management system or e-commerce platform implements some or all of the above-mentioned schema automatically. You can check it by running a product page’s URL through the Schema.org Markup Validator. If the tool doesn’t show anything, it would be useful to have a developer take a closer look.

Clickthrough Optimization

Google’s top goal as a search engine is to provide search results that users want. Providing good results keeps users coming back, and repeat users view more ads – which is how Google makes most of their money.

Although what’s on the page is always the most important factor in getting your website shown for the right search terms, Google also confirms that they’re showing the right pages for various searches by watching which results users click. If a particular result gets more clicks than other results, Google concludes that the page is delivering what users want and will likely give it a ranking boost.

When you create product pages, always take the time to give them appealing titles and meta descriptions. Your content management system or e-commerce platform probably populates these fields automatically, but it’s usually much more effective to write them yourself. Entice people to click by pre-selling the value that you’ll deliver when they visit.

User Experience

The most important thing to know about product page SEO is that it’s not just about how Google sees the page. Users are every bit as important because they’re the ones interacting with your site and hopefully buying the products. Using data sources like the Chrome web browser, Google knows what people do on your site and uses their behavior as a ranking factor.

Many people visit e-commerce sites without buying anything. You don’t need every single user to buy a product in order to show Google that your product pages are providing a satisfying experience. However, you do want people to spend a bit of time interacting with your site before they leave. You don’t want them to click back to the search results.

Some good ways to ensure that a product page generates plenty of positive user engagement include:

• Readable product descriptions that are broken up with subheadings and bullet points. Don’t just write huge walls of text.
• High-quality product photography.
• Authentic customer reviews.
• Interactive elements like product comparison tables.
• Alternative product suggestions, in case the product being viewed isn’t quite what the user wants.

Anything you can do that encourages people to spend more time navigating your website – even if they don’t buy products – tells Google that you’re providing a satisfying experience, and that can be hugely beneficial for your rankings over time.