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How to optimise your Product Pages for SEO

Monday, October 19th, 2020
Written by Content Team

If you’re operating an eCommerce store you’re often left with a bit of a conundrum. Your most powerful pages from an SEO perspective are your category pages and your home page, but there’s a sea of key terms which are directly related to your products that are on offer. To tap into this wealth of search volume you need to look at how you can optimise your product pages effectively for SEO.

How to optimise your Product Pages for SEO

Step 1) Meta Titles

Meta titles are a standard part of any SEO optimisation process but for product pages there are a couple of additional areas you can look at.

Your starting point should always be including your target key term near the start of your title tag if possible, but you’ll also need to pay attention to the character and pixel limits that Google places on meta titles when they’re displayed on the search results page. You’ll need to keep your title to less than 120 characters (roughly) to fit within Google’s 600-pixel limit.

What it’s always worth looking to try and do though for a product page is finding a way to separate yourself from the pack. The bulk of titles on the page will be following best practice and virtually indistinguishable from each other. If you can add a USP to your title (do you have a money back guarantee? Free Delivery? etc) to the title you’ll be able to stand out an attract more clicks, which will not only boost your traffic but can help increase your rankings.

Step 2) Copy Optimisation

You’ll often find that copy is something that SEO experts spend a lot of time fretting about. Including the right number of key terms ( but also avoiding putting in too many of them) onto a page is in many ways the bread and butter of SEO. For product pages though you can end up damaging your Conversion Rate if you have too much copy on the page.

Your use of copy on a product page should be sparse and kept to the bear minimum. Whilst there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more copy boosts rankings, if you look at product pages that rank they tend not to have that much copy, so you can get away with less than other pages.

You’ll still need to ensure you’re using key terms in the copy correctly but don’t worry about adding an extra 500 words. Product pages don’t seem to be affected by the same “thin content” problems that other sorts of web pages can suffer from.

Step 3) Optimising Your  Header Tags

One of the most common issues on any type of page on a website is a failure to utilise Header tag properly. For product pages though this can be a particularly troubling area. As an ideally optimised product page would use the key term in the h1 tag, and often your template will default to the product name as the h1, you may find yourself in a position where the product name doesn’t include the key term. This will result in your h1 not being fully optimised. The good news is that you don’t need to fret too much about this.

For most product searches that lead to specific product pages are going to be brands and it’s very unlikely that your product name doesn’t include the brand. If for some reason it doesn’t, what you’ll need to do is utilise h2 tags in your product description and make sure the target term is included in there.

Step 4) Optimising Images – Alt tags and file names

Images are an essential part of any ecommerce product page as they help you convert more users to customers. They also have a role to play in SEO as well. Both the file names of the images and the alt tags that you use to describe them can have an impact on SEO. To optimise them you should, ideally, be using the key term that you’re targeting for the page in both the file name and the alt tag of the image. For the alt tag though you should endeavour to ensure that you’re accurately describing what the images are of though to ensure that if the page loads without the image the alt tag is able to function for its intended purpose. For more advice on how you can improve your ecommerce websites search engine rankings get in touch with us and we’ll audit your website.