It’s a question almost any business asks: How do you get users to find your website? If users’ search queries align with your industry, you want search engines to showcase your website at the top of the search engine results page. The standard solution has been search engine optimization, a strategy more than 80% of marketing professionals say helps their organization’s performance.
But for ecommerce business owners, this question has an extra layer: How do you get potential customers to find your online store’s individual product pages? Enter ecommerce product page SEO. Optimized product pages have become crucial to a comprehensive ecommerce SEO strategy. Read on to learn how optimizing product pages can boost your search engine rankings, with tips from Kyle Risley, senior SEO lead at Shopify.
What is ecommerce product page SEO?
Ecommerce product page SEO is a form of search engine optimization that drives organic traffic to individual product listings in your ecommerce store. Product page optimization attracts search users interested in making a purchase, and it helps convert them into customers.
“If you haven’t noticed already, Google likes to rank popular brands and products,” Kyle says. He emphasizes that steering relevant search queries to your ecommerce site starts with understanding how the major search engines work. “Anything you can do to get more people actively searching for your brand and your products can have a carryover effect to how your pages rank for non-branded queries.”
When people find and visit your ecommerce site, Google understands your site is worth promoting. That triggers Google to send more users to your site, creating continual growth. “If your niche is at all competitive, Google needs to see signals—branded queries, links—that people want what you’re selling,” Kyle says.
According to Kyle, optimizing ecommerce product pages serves two purposes: “The first is helping the search engine understand the page, and the second is convincing the user to buy. Sometimes, you can accomplish both of these goals with the same action.”
11 ways to optimize your ecommerce product pages
- Optimize title tags and meta descriptions
- Write helpful product descriptions
- Use high-quality product images and descriptive alt text
- Enhance your internal linking and site structure
- Increase your page speed
- Implement structured data and product schema
- Monitor performance and optimize for mobile users
- Add user-generated content and reviews
- Make conversion easy
- Feature FAQs with common questions about your product
- Integrate with Google Merchant Center
Like all search engine optimization, product page optimization comes down to communication. “At the most basic level,” Kyle says, “you need to convey this information: what the product is, how much it costs, and the shipping speed. Google wants to know this. Your customers want to know this. After that, it’s building a page that converts and selling a product that people love and want to buy.”
Help your products rank higher on Google Search results with these tips to optimize product pages:
1. Optimize title tags and meta descriptions
As with standard ecommerce SEO best practices, start with keyword research tools to identify relevant keywords with a high search volume from your target audience. Popular research tools include Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and Google’s free Keyword Planner. Include target keywords in your product page’s title tag, meta description, and product description to align with the search demand within your industry.
“The product name should be an H1 heading and accurately describe the product,” Kyle notes. “Most people get this right and most ecommerce platform themes (including Shopify’s themes) will automatically make your product name an H1.”
2. Write helpful product descriptions
Google’s ranking system values helpful, reliable information geared toward people rather than web crawlers. Craft unique descriptions for each listing, including product variants, to reduce unhelpful duplicate content. Incorporate long-tail keywords and break up information with formatting to avoid losing your customer’s attention.
“Don’t be afraid to use bold, italics, or underline when needed to help highlight the most important info,” Kyle advises. “Make it skimmable. Don’t drop in a wall of text. Use descriptive sub-headings if you need to share a lot of information about your product.”
3. Use high-quality product images and descriptive alt text
Upload multiple high-quality images and add descriptive alt text for each product to improve accessibility for visually impaired users. High-quality images also help you surface in search engine image results, adding reach for individual products.
Use the images as a way to express what makes your product unique. “If your product has key features, take images of those key features too,” Kyle says. “If people don’t like the page, that will hurt your rankings over time.”
4. Enhance your internal linking and site structure
External links, where other sites link to yours, help your SEO but can be hard to control. Optimize your site structure by adding internal links to help search engine bots understand your ecommerce site’s hierarchy.
Link product pages to relevant category pages, related products, blog articles, and other internal web pages. This has the added benefit of providing shoppers with helpful guidance and keeping them on your site longer.
5. Increase your page speed
Slow page load times can turn off potential customers: A site that loads in one second has a conversion rate five times higher than a site that loads in 10 seconds.
Compress product images, minimize unnecessary HTML code, and consider a content delivery network (CDN), a group of geographically distributed servers that load web content closest to the user to lower page load time.
Aim for three seconds or less for desktop and nine seconds or less for mobile. You can check your load speed with tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
6. Implement structured data and product schema
Add product schema and structured data to your product pages to help search engines understand product details and improve search result visibility. Product schema adds details like pricing, availability, and reviews to your product pages. It’s a form of structured data, a standardized machine-readable code.
Adding this information enables search engines to create rich snippets containing product details, which can land you at the top of a SERP.
7. Monitor performance and optimize for mobile users
Set up Google Search Console as part of your overall SEO strategy, and regularly check the console for technical SEO issues so that you can fix them immediately. Use it to track the ranking performance of product page URLs and check whether your keyword strategy draws in more site visitors.
Many website visitors may be accessing your ecommerce store on mobile devices. Ensure your product pages are mobile-friendly with responsive design. “Make sure your page looks as good on mobile as it does on desktop,” Kyle says. “Pay attention to the percentage of visitors that are using each device type—Shopify gives you this by default.”
8. Add user-generated content and reviews
Promote user-generated content, like videos and reviews, on your site to engage potential customers and build trust in your brand. Use a branded hashtag to feature unboxing videos from social media or encourage reviews that feature examples of how to style and use your product. This continually created content keeps your pages fresh and active, helping Google recommend your website.
“Shopify has tons of great apps for including social proof on your pages,” Kyle says. Connect with a review tool, like Judge.me or Yotpo, to make it easy for customers to share examples of your product in use.
Shopify users can also use a built-in feature within the Themes section to add reviews. “Feature reviews and mark up the reviews with aggregateRating markup,” Kyle says. AggregateRating is a type of schema markup that allows your products to display star ratings on Google’s results pages. Most good review apps and content management systems allow you to add it easily.
9. Make conversion easy
The most successful ecommerce sites make it easy and enticing to become a customer. Include calls to action (CTAs) high on the page and optimize your page for conversions with actions like consistent branding and related products. “Do not bury your Buy button,” Kyle says. “Have it above the fold or within one screen-sized scroll down. And share things like shipping speeds that shoppers care about.”
10. Include FAQs with common questions about your product
Answer common customer questions before they have them with an FAQ page. The best FAQ pages build a connection with prospective clients and reduce reliance on your customer support reps. Search engines understand that users value web pages that offer tangible information, so including FAQ structured data helps your product pages rank higher.
11. Integrate with Google Merchant Center
Integrate with Google’s Merchant Center tool to manage your product details across Google services, like Maps and YouTube. Kyle considers this an essential step: “This is required to rank in ‘Popular Products’ modules that are appearing more frequently in Google Search. They can also help you get ‘Store Ratings’ below your pages in SERPs.”
He notes that Shopify users can do this for free with the Google & YouTube Shopify app.
4 mistakes to avoid when optimizing your product pages
- Obsessing over a product page URL
- Adding too many apps and plug-ins
- Leaving discontinued products among your listings
- Stuffing the page with keywords
Optimizing your product page SEO can boost search volume and attract prospective customers, but Kyle cautions that not all changes are worth the effort. Here are four things to avoid when optimizing a product web page:
1. Obsessing over a product page URL
“A lot of the stuff people think about the most when they hear ‘SEO,’ like URL structure or alt text, really aren’t a big ranking factor,” Kyle advises. “Improving them is unlikely to get you more traffic.” Other factors, like hitting your target keywords and providing high-quality images, matter much more.
“Of course, alt text is important for accessibility and ranking in image search,” Kyle says, “so do not neglect it; just don’t expect it to get you significant web traffic.”
2. Adding too many apps and plug-ins
“Make sure your page is not slow,” Kyle cautions. “Loading it up with a bunch of apps can be fun, but make sure they’re not negatively impacting your site speed. Using Built for Shopify apps can help you make sure you’re using apps that won’t significantly slow down your site.”
3. Leaving discontinued products among your listings
Don’t leave permanently discontinued products among your product listings. If Google shows those discontinued products in its search results and customers find unavailable products, it can reflect poorly on your brand and lead to a higher bounce rate. Search engines interpret high bounce rates as an indicator of poor content, impacting your ranking.
Removing permanently discontinued product pages can also help a search engine crawl your website more effectively. Ensure you’ve checked your site for any internal links to the product before removing the page.
4. Stuffing the page with keywords
While you want to include target keywords in your product descriptions, avoid keyword stuffing. Google can consider keyword stuffing a spam technique and rank your website lower. Write complete sentences with helpful, legitimate descriptions and avoid jargon. Use SEO content writing best practices to ensure your site’s copy stays readable.
Ecommerce product page SEO FAQ
Why is it important to optimize your product pages for SEO?
Optimizing your product pages for SEO is crucial to improving visibility on search engine results, driving more organic traffic to your online store, and introducing prospective customers to your brand. Optimize every page on your website, from a blog post to a product listing.
How do you optimize a product page?
There are many ways to optimize a product page. Write helpful product descriptions with relevant keywords in the title, descriptions, and meta tags. Improve your page speed by removing superfluous apps and plug-ins. Use high-quality images with descriptive alt text. Implement structured data for better search engine visibility.
How does SEO work for ecommerce products?
SEO for ecommerce products works by optimizing product pages and website content to improve their visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal is to make individual product pages appear in organic search results, rather than just the homepage for your ecommerce site.
