Ecommerce Guide: SEO For Products in 13-Steps

Want to leap ahead of competitors in the search engine and do it in the next 60-90 days? This may sound far-fetched but if you follow the steps in this SEO for products article, the change in ranking results will shock you. We are about to show you precisely what we do as a part of our ecommerce SEO work, to help our clients outperform their competitors in Google. 

Ready to learn how to set up your product page SEO? Awesome, but first, we need you to understand something. Product page SEO will do much more for you than improve your rankings in Google. 

The product SEO steps we provide will enhance the user experience, position your products higher in secondary search engines, and create insights helping you make better decisions for other ecommerce marketing strategies. 

An Uncommon Approach to Product Page SEO 

You’ve got a great product and set appropriate pricing. Now you need to build the product page on your website, which includes search engine optimization.

What’s the first thing most brands do to improve their ecommerce SEO? They run to their product description and start hammering out the benefits of their product while puffing their chest at how exceptional their product is. 

We prioritize product page SEO work a little differently. We lead with the vital details that most ecommerce brands neglect (and you will, too) because of listing fatigue. 

The motivational speaker and author Brian Tracy is known for saying that we should “eat the frog first.” While that might not be the best approach to starting our day, it’s the right approach when working through the SEO steps for products we want to sell…a lot of. 

Start Your Schema

Have you heard of product schema markup? Probably not, and that’s OK. It’s a technical SEO term that requires more research to fully wrap your head around. But Schema is structured data on your website helping search engines better understand what your page is and why it matters. 

Product schema markup is critical for product pages. With schema, your product becomes more visible across many of Google’s product platforms including Google shopping. While you can only create some schema up front, take care of what you can. Then, review schema opportunities at each stage of the SEO process. 

Perform Extensive Keyword Research

Before doing anything further, you must establish a list of relevant product keywords. We can better explain this through an example. A website selling a toaster will need to create a keyword phrase list about toast, toaster, and toasting alongside keyword extensions such as best, small, luxury, and oven. 

Like schema markup, you will reference this keyword list at each step.

Optimize Product Images

If you think you can simply create the main product image and show it from various angles, think again. Product Images are far more important than website owners consider and are a crucial part of ecommerce SEO. 

Google has a specific image search tab for its search engine, which they invest heavily in. As artificial intelligence expands camera-based visual search, image search is becoming even more critical.

You might need 10,20 or even 30 images on your product page. Each of these images represents a feature of your product or the product’s uses. In each image, you provide a title and explanation. Google uses these images to understand better what it is and display it when people search for this term. 

For example, a toaster timer receives 90 searches per month with an extremely low difficulty score. An up-close image of the dial with feature details and why it’s different may lead to unexpected page visitors and higher sales. 

Create a Video Series

One way to outshine your competition by providing a better page experience. You can accomplish this by creating a series of videos to support your product. 

Dwell time is a ranking factor. If a potential customer sticks around to watch your video, it signals to Google how the user is getting value. 

These videos also serve as content for your YouTube, the world’s second-largest search engine. Writing a complete description and following YouTube SEO best practices further helps your product page. Your video will receive views and, hopefully, clicks back to your product page. 

Since they own YouTube, we have a hunch that Google pays attention to the back-and-forth relationship. Oh, and your video may end up in Google search when people search for something like “The most reliable toaster timers.” Just another reason to include YouTube in your ecommerce marketing strategy.

Setup All Meta Information

We’ve discussed adding a meta product title and meta description to your images, but you will need to set this up for your page as well. Meta page information is what people see when you appear in a search, and what you display is essential. 

A poor meta title and description will lead to a low CTR (click-thru rate), which causes Google to deprioritize your page in the search result. 

Meta description optimization is also important because the more people click thru, the more sales you will make. That’s pretty important, right?

Make Page Speed Lightning Fast

If we’re honest, shoppers already trust us less than Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other national retailers. A slow page is a red flag to shoppers, and you can expect them to hit the back button if your page doesn’t load immediately. Review them to ensure these features don’t slow your ecommerce product page. 

You can significantly increase page speed by compressing images and hosting videos on YouTube. It’s also important to recognize how the totality of your site affects page performance. So, improve page speed on every page of your site and remove any unnecessary pages.

Create a Product Review Engine

Set up a robust reputation management system even if you’ve yet to sell a single product. Extreme measures must be taken to make leaving product reviews a breeze. Besides being social proof that leads to higher conversion rates, product reviews also create more user-generated content for your page, which Google appreciates. 

Google’s search engines are smart enough to recognize how this content comes from shoppers (especially with schema markup in place). User-generated content prevents penalties from keyword stuffing giving important keywords permission to be mentioned multiple times on a page. 

For example, if you put “best toaster” on your page ten times, it looks spammy. But on a page with 50-reviews and 10 of them say “best toaster,” you’ve created a signal to Google that maybe, just maybe, you are the best toaster available. 

Create an FAQ With External Links

The first type of long-form content you create for your product page is a set of frequently asked questions. We suggest this because unfortunately, most people neglect their FAQ. A set of frequently asked questions is a great way to stimulate your team’s creativity when writing your product page description, and we want you to capitalize on this.

There’s another reason to begin with your FAQ. These frequently asked questions can become the subject of blog articles, which you will learn is another way to improve search engine optimization for your product page. 

Create Fresh Product Page Content 

We’re now at the point where every other online store starts. Through research, you now have a firm understanding of what information to include on the product page of your ecommerce site. You know all the keyword ideas and topics to discuss, so let’s discuss how to approach your product page content. 

We have two primary aspects of content creation that deserve mention. 

1. Never duplicate a product page description.

2. Always write from a “solving customer’s problems” perspective. 

Product descriptions are not a place to puff your chest showing how you’re better than the competition. Instead, express understanding of a potential customer's concerns of potential and show how your product solves their problems. 

If you want to include product benefits and features, place them lower in the description when people may need additional convincing for why they should choose you over a competitor. 

Product Page Description Best Practices

• Keep your sentences short and to the point.

• Limit paragraphs to 1-3 sentences.

• Write at an 8th-grade or lower reading level.

• Keep your word count between sub-headings to 300 or less.

• Include bullet lists & number lists to prevent reader fatigue.

• Add images or videos with captions and staggered text to keep the reader interested.

Create a Product Topic Cluster

To support our product pages, you need an ecommerce content marketing strategy that includes blog articles that relate to your product. Topic clusters are a significant ranking factor for your ecommerce website. 

Creating a topic cluster is finding a group of directly related articles you can write. Topic clusters are also a ranking factor, as Google wants to reward websites with expertise in the products they sell. 

Strangely, most content marketing strategies forget about leveraging topic clusters. Instead, they write random articles that their customers may be interested in but are irrelevant to their product. An example would be a toaster company writing an article about 5-meals to take to a picnic. Instead, they should start with articles about “how to clean the toaster” or “to know when it’s time to replace your toaster.” 

Point Internal Links From Articles To The Page

If you’ve done an excellent job of creating a topic cluster, you will start receiving website traffic to these pages. Get more out of these blog articles by including a link to your product page. Internal links on traffic-receiving pages create “link equity,” which helps to improve your product page ranking. 

Another reason to make sure your articles are related to your product as creating a natural link is easier when the topic is related to your product.

Outreach To Product Related Articles

Want another reason besides product awareness to reach out to social media influencers, bloggers, and news media outlets? When someone online mentions your product, it often includes a backlink to your product page. Link building for ecommerce sites is a critical ranking factor that plays a big role in the success of your product page. 

There are two parts to the backlink. The first is how authoritative the site is, and the second is the anchor text they used to link back to your page. Often, this is your product title or your another relevant keyword. The anchor text they use helps improve your ranking for the exact phrase match and related search terms.

Increase Page Traffic

With most people using Google chrome to surf the internet, we can consider page traffic a ranking factor for Google’s search engine. So, even though it falls outside of SEO tactics, continue building product awareness. Give people good reasons to visit your product page and return in the future. 

In a lower-cost way, you can continue to promote your product page on social media. Find additional reasons to promote your product page by leveraging recent reviews, the latest photos, special offers, and more. 

Increasing page traffic can also occur through paid media. Using Google ads as an example, it might be worth investing in some keywords you will have difficulty reaching page one. This way, you get traffic to the page while you wait for rankings to improve.

Look at your Google Merchant Center to learn more about the paid options ecommerce stores have available to them.

SEO For Ecommerce Brands

From website development to content marketing, our ecommerce agency can help your business show up at the top of Google for your most profitable products. Learn more about our SEO services by scheduling a chat with our digital marketing experts.