6 steps to optimising your e-commerce product detail pages

Selling heaps of products online? Make sure search engines ‘see’ your offerings. CHRIS THOMAS

By Chris Thomas

The most daunting prospect for any shopping cart owner is SEOing every single product in their shopping cart.

If you’ve got thousands of products in your site, you can be forgiven for not even attempting to optimise your product pages. Sometimes when a job seems too big and too daunting it can paralyze all initiative!

So this week’s tips to improve your online sales will be short, easily digestible, and (hopefully) actionable.

1. Break the job down into small, easy bits. Start by targeting and optimising the top 10 best selling products in your cart. Then do the next best 20 and so on.
2. Make sure you include the name of the product or service in your page title tag. You need to format it so you keep the name of the product or service first, the name of your company second.
3. The next important page element for SEO is your heading tag. Include your product or service name in your H1 tag.
4. Obviously every product or service needs a description. I’m often shocked by how little effort online retailers take to describe their products. Given that Google needs at least 250 to 300 words per page to create a complete “relevance” picture, it’s in your interests to make sure your description is fully optimised and that the benefits of the product or service are blindingly obvious. My 10 cents? Hire a copywriter.
5. Product images should also be optimised, so name your image with the product’s actual name, like “blue-widget.jpg”. Make sure that when you include the picture on the page that you use an image “alt” tag that also uses the product’s name.
6. If you’re reselling products that are not your own, don’t copy the exact same content from the original manufacturer. Substantially rewrite your copy to avoid having your page penalised by Google’s duplicate content filter. If you have substantially similar content as the original content creator, Google will stop your result from appearing in the search results.

Honestly, if you get into the habit of ensuring your detailed product descriptions are fully optimised with engaging copy which encourages conversions (purchases), you’ll be a long way ahead of most your competitors!

Chris Thomas heads Reseo a search engine optimisation company which specialises in setting up and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns, Affiliate Programs and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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