In this topic, you’ll learn how to SEO your product pages.

Product page SEO is not just about SEO. As weird as this may sound, when optimizing your eCommerce product pages, you need to take into account other factors that affect the user experience.

A product page that offers a great experience for the users will also generate more sales and conversions.

Let’s see step by step which areas of your product pages can be optimized and how to do this in practice.

URL Optimization

The first element that needs your attention is the product URL. Although it’s not the most important ranking factor, having properly optimized product URLs is recommended for a number of reasons.

1^st – It’s easier for search engines to understand

2^nd – It’s easier for users to understand

3^rd – It’s good for readability purposes especially in cases when you (or someone else) posts a URL of your products in a forum or a comment.

For example, it’s easier to understand that this URL:

http://www.example.com/products/macbookpro-256gb

will lead to a product page about a 256GB Macbook Pro

than this:

http://www.example.com/product_id=34?S256_DEF

How do you optimize your product URLs?

To be more specific, your product URLS should be:

• Short and descriptive without unnecessary characters
• Use “-” to separate the different parts of the URL
• Use only lowercase characters
• Avoid using stop words like “a,” “an,” and “the.”, in the URL.
• Include attributes and product characteristics like the brand name or color.
• If you do have to include extra characters that are maybe needed by your CMS, try to have those at the end.

Here is an example of an SEO optimized product URL:

And an example of a non-optimized product URL from Amazon!

If you are wondering why Amazon doesn’t optimize its URLs, the answer is simple.

First, they don’t have to do it because SEO optimization is not their priority and second, they have a huge website with millions of products and it might be technically impossible for them to do this change.

With that being said, if you have a lot of products or it’s too difficult to change them, don’t spend time optimizing the URLs, there are more important changes to do to your shop (as you will read below).

If you are up to the job, then make sure that for each product page you change the URL, you add a respective 301 Redirection so that the old URL is redirected to the new URL.

Product Title Optimization

The next step is to work on is your product titles. This is one of the important optimization tasks you can do for your product pages.

To be more precise, your titles should combine details about the product and keywords that people use in searching for a particular product, in 60 characters or less.

Why 60 characters or less? Because this is what is shown on average in the search snippets, without breaking your title.

See the two examples below.

The first one is 60 characters (excluding the site name) and it shows as is, while the second one is more than 60 characters so Google breaks it up.

How do you combine product names and keywords in the title?

Let’s see some examples to understand how to have both your product names and keywords in the same title.

The first step is to refer to the results of your keyword research. Having a clear idea of what people type in the Google search box is important.

Let’s say that you are selling shoes and you know from the keyword research that people search for “men’s running shoes”.

Your first action is to optimize your category page for that term.

It’s a general term and a great candidate for category optimization.

Within the category, you can optimize your product names like the examples below:

Notice the format of the title which includes the brand name, model, and keywords i.e. Men’s Running Shoe.

If your selling products that the brand name is not so important, you can change the order of the words in the title to include the keywords first and then the brand or type.

For example, look at this product title from Etsy.com. The keyword “boyfriend gift” is at the beginning of the title and this makes the title more optimized.

Last but certainly not least, don’t forget that each and every product page of your eCommerce website needs to have a <title> and this has to be unique across your site.

The product page H1 Tag

It is very common for the H1 tag of the page to be the same as the title.

While this is ok (and the default configuration for many CMS) if you want you can change it to be friendlier for users (since you can safely use more characters) and also, it’s another opportunity to enrich your page with related keywords.

Besides that, the other thing to check and ensure is that your page has only one H1 tag and this is located high on the page and above the other headings (h2, h3, etc).

When it comes to other headings (h2, h2, etc), use them according to best practices.

Meta Description Optimization

What to include in your product meta description?

A description needs to include the product name and keywords. As you can see in the examples below, Google highlights the words from a description that matches the user’s query.

Other than that, to make your descriptions more inviting, you can add benefits like free shipping and returns, a money-back guarantee, and other information that can differentiate your snippet entry from the rest.

The snippet from Amazon below is a very good example of an optimized meta description.

Breadcrumb Menu

In the Shop Site Structure lesson, I have explained why breadcrumb menus are important for user-friendliness and the usability aspect of an eCommerce website.

What is necessary to highlight again is that besides making your website user-friendly and SEO friendly, breadcrumbs can contribute to higher CTRs (click-through rates), because they enhance the presentation of your snippet in the SERPS.

To take advantage of this, breadcrumbs need to have the proper structure data so that they can be understood by Google.

Look at the example below and see how Google is using the breadcrumb information in the snippet (for both desktop and mobile), instead of showing the product URL.

It’s more relevant and can contribute to better CTRs.

Product Description

Optimizing your product descriptions is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks, especially if you have a lot of products in your store.

From experience, it’s also one of the tasks that most eCommerce owners get wrong.

Let’s see what we mean by product description optimization.

Unique Content

Google is looking for unique, high-quality content to show in the search results from high-quality websites.

Google does not penalize websites because of duplicate content but it does not reward them either.

An eCommerce website that has a lot of pages with duplicate content is considered a low-quality website and the chances of ranking high for competitive terms are minimum to none.

So, the first thing that you need to do is to ensure that your product page description is unique.

Uniqueness is not limited to websites across the web but to your own website too.

In other words, each and every product of your shop needs to have a unique description and not the same description as another product within your shop.

Content length

There is no golden rule as to the number of words your product description should be, but it is proven that long-form content ranks higher in Google, and is shared more frequently in social media.