Product Page SEO tips

Here’s a checklist to see whether this product page SEO tip post is for you, or not.
If you answer no to any of the following items then do move on to one of the many other smashing posts.

Checklist: Do you…

• run a business that depends on shipping products to happy clients?
• manage a really tidy, fully ecommerce’d-up website built precisely to meet the previous goal?
• care about new business that comes from people finding your site or product in a search engine?
• want repeat business that is scalable from your own personal input?

Still here, great!

There is no simple trick: Write Product Descriptions That Matter

Optimising a product heavy commerce site requires that someone like me goes through it with a fine tooth comb, and I’ll recommend that each and every page holds some unique, plain text, descriptive content. That’s a given.

Optimisation is the process of making something “just right” and fit for purpose. Technically it is impossible to over-optimise something- that would make it plain old spam. It is all about getting something to an optimal level. In SEO speak with product pages that means giving each product page some unique on-page, descriptive text content.

Unfortunately it means that if you’re a reseller it’s not great to copy & paste descriptions provided by the manufacturer. That would make your description the same as theirs. That duplication would just devalue your product page a little to the search engines, which kind of defeats the object of the exercise. Here’s an example of a really heavily duplicated product description.

You could opt to avoid the issue all together, and pump out a series of product pages that contain no unique text. The problem with that is if the only thing that differentiates one product page from another is image views and base specifications, those pages are going to end up looking like duplicates of one another.

Ideally you need to take ownership of the task and get on and write those product descriptions. If you want any one of your website’s product pages to be found, or even rank in a search engine, it is that on-page description that can give the page some serious leverage.

This is sound SEO advice, but if you are starting from scratch with no descriptions, and have thousands and thousands of pages to work on, its simply not going to get done is it? (Lets be realistic about this). In this case you can take a pragmatic approach and work on maybe 10% of the products that you want to promote. You could also chip away at it, and give yourself 30 minutes a day to get writing. As you add more products to the line you can give them each a unique description as they are added.

Ultimately there’s no perfect solution, but in time you can make inroads, and when you start shipping more product you’ll know it was worth doing.