Your Volusion store may be brimming with the best and most affordable products in your industry, yet your traffic and sales stay disheartening. If your product pages aren't built to be found by search engines, that gap is the reason — and it's fixable. This guide is the product-page-level companion to our broader Volusion SEO work (see also preparing Volusion categories for SEO for the category layer, and strengthening your Volusion SEO for site-wide structure). Here we focus specifically on the individual product page, because that's where long-tail, high-intent, ready-to-buy queries land and convert.
Search engines, despite running on complex algorithms, work best when the information they gather is simple and fast to process. Long, character-stuffed URLs and thin, duplicated product copy slow that down. The goal for every product page is a clean URL, unique on-page content, and complete metadata.
Enable Search-Engine-Friendly URLs
From your Volusion Admin Area, go to Marketing > SEO. In the Search Engine Friendly URLs section, select Enable Search Engine Friendly URLs and save. Your URLs will now be formatted in a simplified way search engines can process and understand. One essential caveat: if the store has been live and indexed under the old query-string URLs, enabling this changes them — set up 301 redirects from every old product URL to its new one before considering the change done, or you'll lose the rankings and inbound links those old URLs already earned. Verify the redirects by crawling the old URL list and confirming each returns a single 301 to the correct destination.
Customize Each Product's URL Text
To customize a product URL, open the product's edit page in your Admin Area, expand Advanced Info, and enter your desired text in the Product URL field. Save the change. Make the slug short, lowercase, hyphen-separated, and descriptive — ideally the product's real name and key attribute. When your product names double as your target keywords, this helps search engines connect the query, the page, and your store, and it improves your odds of capturing organic shoppers searching for exactly that item. Avoid duplicate slugs across similar variants; canonicalize color/size variants to a parent so they don't compete with each other.
Complete the Product Metadata
On the product edit page, fill in these fields for every product, not just the bestsellers:
- Photo Alt Text — describes the image to search engines (and to screen-reader users). Write what the photo actually shows, including the product name and a distinguishing attribute, rather than leaving it blank or stuffing keywords. Good alt text helps you rank in image search, which is a real traffic source for visual product categories.
- Meta Tag Title — the headline shown on the browser tab and, more importantly, as the clickable title in search results. Lead with the product name and a key differentiator, keep it roughly under 60 characters, and make every product's title unique.
- Meta Tag Description — typically two to five sentences summarizing the page. It doesn't directly affect ranking, but it's the ad copy in the results: a clear, benefit-led description with the product name in it earns more clicks. Aim for roughly 150–160 characters and write a distinct one per product; auto-duplicated descriptions across a catalog read as low-effort to both shoppers and crawlers.
- Meta Tag Keywords — historically a keyword list. Note Google has publicly stated, since 2009, that it does not use the meta keywords tag for ranking. Fill it for internal tidiness if you like, but spend real effort on the title, description, and on-page copy instead.
The Meta Tag Description and Meta Tag Keywords fields never appear on the storefront — they exist purely for search engines, so don't worry about them affecting your page design.
Write Unique, Useful Product Copy
Metadata gets the click; the on-page description earns the sale and most of the ranking. The single biggest product-page SEO mistake on Volusion stores is pasting the manufacturer's description verbatim — that identical text appears on dozens of competing retailers, and search engines suppress duplicate content in favor of one canonical source that usually isn't you. Write your own copy for every product: lead with the benefit and use case, then cover the specifics shoppers and search both want (materials, dimensions, compatibility, sizing, what's in the box, warranty), and close with the one or two questions customers ask most before buying. That content is naturally unique per product and is exactly what both shoppers and crawlers reward.
Add Product Structured Data and Reviews
Beyond the built-in fields, the highest-leverage additions to a product page are review collection and product structured data. Genuine, recent reviews lift conversion directly, and product schema (price, availability, rating) can surface star ratings and price in Google results, which lifts click-through before the visitor even arrives. Together they often move a product page more than another round of meta tweaks.
A Practical Order of Operations
Don't try to perfect every page at once. Prioritize by revenue and search demand: the products that drive sales or have real search volume get the full treatment first — clean URL with redirect, unique title and description, complete alt text, original copy, reviews, and schema. The long tail gets queued, and genuinely low-value SKUs you can't cover yet are better left out of the index than published thin. Done in priority order, the work pays back fastest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will changing product URLs hurt my rankings? Only if you change them without 301 redirects. With proper redirects in place, cleaner URLs help; without them, you lose existing equity.
Is the manufacturer's description ever okay to use? As source material to rewrite, yes. Published verbatim, no — it's duplicated across the web and will usually be outranked by a larger competitor.
How long should a product description be? Long enough to answer the real pre-purchase questions for that product. There's no universal word count; a simple commodity needs less than a high-consideration item.
For more on enhancing your Volusion store, reach out to our skilled Volusion SEO experts for a consultation.