Expert SEO Tips on How to Format Your Ecommerce Product Pages

SEO for Your ECommerce Product Pages To Improve Traffic and Sales

Running an eCommerce business is undeniably tough especially without knowing what SEO best practices are. There is national and global competition for products and only a select few who can rank for a product in search engines. With that said,, it is up to you to make sure that you do all you can to rank for your keywords. In the world we live in today, you can no longer do business without fully utilizing the power of SEO . They say content is king. Well, if that’s true, SEO is its right-hand man who does all the dirty work to make sure it remains king.

Google has a long list of factors that it considers to rank a particular page for a keyword. Today, our focus is solely on sharing our SEO secrets with you so you can format your eCommerce product pages to increase their search engine visibility.

Build Site Architecture Conducive to SEO

Before we get into the product pages, it’s important that talk about the architecture of your eCommerce website. Most eCommerce sites have a huge number of products and equally sprawling product pages. This doesn’t work.

Your eCommerce website needs to have appropriate architecture so that your customers can navigate through and find what they are looking for. The easier the navigation, the more the traffic will convert. Additionally, search engines need to be able to crawl your website easily if they are to rank your pages. So make it easy for them.

The trick is to keep things as simple as you can. Create a flat, scalable structure, whereby, your homepage is never more than 2-3 clicks away from any page. This makes navigation easy, plus whenever you are in the mood to expand your eCommerce business, you will have ample room to do so horizontally without complicating the structure whatsoever.

Here is what Jodi Harris says about the importance of keeping architectures simple, “Say you are searching for new jeans. Wouldn’t you prefer to search on sites that you can purchase from directly rather than go down a rabbit hole once you’ve tracked down the perfect pair? Tomorrow’s search engines prefer the simpler option too and will reward content that enables users to complete their desired transactions quickly, conveniently, and in as few clicks as possible.”

Product Pages Should Have Keyword-Rich URLs

Are you one of those people who dismiss URLs as technical, unimportant text? You couldn’t be more wrong. URLs are incredibly important for SEO, and you need to optimize them if you want your product pages to have any chance of ranking in searches.

Keep your URLs short. Granted that this might seem daunting for an eCommerce site which is probably dealing with a large number of categories and sub-categories, but keep it as short and to the point as possible.

You want your URLs to be keyword rich with keywords placed prominently and intelligently within the link. You don’t want to end up with a long URL with your keyword being the last word in that long chain. This kills the impact of your keyword, making it useless for SEO.

Here is a sample URL that you should avoid at all costs:

www.xyz.com/pets/dog/food/buscuits/productid=2154682

This is one better, but can still be improved:

www.xyz.com/pets/dog/food/the-greatest-dog-food-yummy-treats

Go for something more along the lines of this:

www.xyz.com/pets/dog-food/yummy-treats

Let’s take a minute to compare the examples. Say the keyword is ‘yummy treats.’ The first one has no keywords and is too long. The second one has the keywords appearing, but since it is so long, the keywords you want to rank for appear too far back. The search engine will think that those keywords aren’t important to you and act accordingly. The last example is the best one in terms of SEO. It is as short as it can be and the keywords highlighted correctly.

SEO Practices for Product Descriptions

It is widely known that longer, keyword rich content ranks in search engines. Search engines tend to think of content as information about the page and the keyword. So for them, the longer it is, the more useful it is to a reader.

Of course, other factors like quality and relevance to your eCommerce business also matter. But our point is that writing long, detailed product description pages is a must if you want to rank for them. Aim to write between 500-1000 words of content for every product. Now, that may seem too much, but see if it is possible. This is one investment that will pay back.

In case you feel that writing long descriptions is impossible, target your top-selling products and write long descriptions for them at least. Make sure that you have included your target keywords and additional keywords in the text. (Or hire a professional digital agency to manage this for you)…

If you don’t know what additional keywords are, think of them as keywords that are closely related to your main keyword, and could also bring relevant search traffic to your product page. There have been many cases where a product does not rank for its main keyword but does rank for its additional keywords, which results in good traffic and conversions. So don’t ignore these.

Optimize Your Product Images

The role of a product image is twofold. Primarily, they show your customers what they are buying, and help them make a decision. But they also have a role to play as far as the SEO of your product pages goes.

It would be safe to assume that most of you have never given a second thought to the image file name of the product images you upload or their Alt tags. You should know that search engines recognize images as text. The Alt tag text is also the text that shows up on your page in place of the image if your image fails to load. SEO requires you to incorporate your keywords in both the image name and Alt tags. This makes it easier for search engines to index your webpage and consequently your eCommerce site.

Also, since we are on the subject of product images, keep the image file sizes reasonable. If they are too large, they will slow down the loading speed of your webpage. Page loading speed is a major ranking factor for search engines.

Setting Up Your Title Tags

Title Tags are as important a factor for SEO as any other that we’ve discussed today. You need to keep them readable, sensible and keyword rich. We mention sensible because too often you’ll find eCommerce sites stuffing their Title Tags with keywords, making them almost unreadable.

You want your keywords to appear in the Title Tags but come across as organic. The best way to do this is going with your primary keyword first, followed by a secondary keyword. The secondary keyword will also give you the chance to create different Title Tags for two similar products with the same main keyword.

Another way to optimize your title tags is to use words or a combination of words that can help you rank for long tail keywords. Searching for the “best” goose feather bed or “cheap” spring mattresses is quite common. Try and incorporate these favorites where possible. Other popular word choices include sale, discount, free, etc.

SEO for Your Ecommerce Store With 1 Digital Agency

SEO is perhaps the single most important part of eCommerce businesses today. Our team at 1 Digital Agency includes experts in SEO and experts in eCommerce who are ready and willing to take your business to the next level. With our hands-on approach and never-say-die attitude, we make sure that every project we undertake is a success. Call us on 888.982.8269 or contact us at https://www.1digitalagency.com/contact and let’s get to work.

Source: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/03/future-content-rankings/