If you have a website and follow eCommerce trends, you know how important SEO is to your search engine rankings. Product pages are an essential part of eCommerce websites. After all, this is where you are selling your products and making the money. With that in mind, we have compiled a list of ways you can optimize your product pages.
- Page URLs
Page URLs give you a great opportunity to enhance your SEO efforts by correctly creating friendly URL structures. The page URL should be written as if you were outlining a navigational structure which anyone could read and understand without knowing your product lines. Your URL should simply state exactly what a product is and should make the explanation short and simple.
For example, the URL www.choosehope.com/product/cancer-gift-basket is much more informative than a URL filled with random characters, such as www.domain.com/product-ID=du2ks&37#.
- Breadcrumbs
Similar to page URLs, breadcrumbs are a great way to help site visitors visualize where they are on a website and navigate through with additional ease. Though it can be complicated to effectively establish a breadcrumb for each product (products can be in multiple categories and/or sub-categories), breadcrumbs are a great way to improve user experience and enhance SEO while maximizing internal linking.
- Product Descriptions
The days of simply adding a generic, off-the-box product description and be fine in regards to SEO are long gone. You now need to stand out from others selling the same or similar products by adding your own content and descriptions of the products on your website.
If you do not spend the time to differentiate your product descriptions, you will be overlooked by search engines and essentially overlooked by future customers as well. To put it bluntly, if you don’t spend the time and resources to create unique and engaging content, don’t expect to receive an edge in SEO on your website.
- Product Images
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so be sure to use images to their fullest potential on your eCommerce website. Not a low quality clip art photo, but a high resolution, crisp image which will grab the attention of visitors and become a call-to-action within itself.
That being said, you need to label your images using targeted keywords in the filename correctly to receive the highest level of SEO benefits as possible. For example: If you are selling red t-shirts for men, a filename of …/mens-red-t-shirt-02215.jpg has more SEO value than just …/02215.jpg as you’ve added more descriptive keywords into the mix.
Additionally, every image you are trying to rank in the search engines should include ALT attribute text using product-oriented keywords. You can get a better in-depth explanation of how to correctly label images by reading Mistake #7 in our post 7 Common SEO Mistakes Made On eCommerce Sites.
- Product Videos
With enhanced video programming and new ways to embed video in your website, there are more benefits to using video on your eCommerce site. Videos can be great calls-to-action and help convert your visitors. They can demonstrate how products look and work without having the ability to touch and feel like you do in a brick and mortar store.
Similar to images, you can fill the videos with SEO labels targeting specific keywords to describe products and use videos as another resource for additional SEO benefits as well as a great conversion rate tool.
- Product Page Reviews
Product page reviews greatly influence shoppers and the decision to buy. In fact, 63% of visitors are more likely to purchase from a site with customer reviews. However, reviews not only benefit conversion rates, they also generate large amounts of unique content on your website. If done correctly, you can greatly improve click-through rates and conversion rates based on a well-balanced and correctly utilized reviews module.
To learn more about how to leverage product reviews, read our article Online Reviews – Turn Your Online Shoppers Into Your Sales Team.
- Search Options
Search is an important resource on your website as people often want to go directly to what they are looking for and not have to click through many pages to find it. Though it is not ideal for people to have to use search on a website, it is hard to avoid on eCommerce sites which have hundreds to thousands of products to filter through.
By having search on your eCommerce website, you can greatly increase your click-through rates and improve your conversion rates as well. Search allows you to track what people are searching for, which in turn helps you refine how you present the information to better match visitor wants and needs.
- Social Sharing
There is a lot of debate around having social sharing on the product pages, as it pushes people away from your site while you are trying to convert your visitors. However, having social sharing buttons as part of the buying process on your site is very important to include and should be tested frequently.
Some areas you may consider testing the social sharing buttons are on the confirmation page, all email correspondence, requests for reviews and even allow people to share their reviews on their own social networks. People want to share their experiences, so be sure to give everyone the opportunity at various points throughout your website.
- Page Speed
Page speed has increasingly become more important to SEO rankings as faster loading websites will be seen as better by Google compared to slower websites. Though page speed helps with SEO, it more importantly can greatly improve the conversion rates on your eCommerce website as people do not want to wait for slow sites.
This KissMetrics infographic does a great job of showing how a website’s page load speed affects your company’s bottom line.
- Trust Signals
If you want people to trust your website and enter their credit card information, you need to show and prove that your website is safe and is going to protect your visitor’s information.
By adding security logos to your website, such as Norton Secured or McAfee Secure, you can help build trust and have a better opportunity at converting your visitors. Be sure to include these logos throughout your product pages and website to ensure people continually see the trust signals on your site and are reminded that their information will remain safe during checkout. - Add to Cart
- Checkout
- View Cart
We have identified 11 elements of your product pages that can be optimized in order to improve your online sales and SEO site ranking. Utilizing a robust and intuitive eCommerce platform and having a company representative who understands these tips, put you at a definite advantage than trying to do this yourself.