How To Write Search-Friendly Ecommerce Product Pages
Product pages are vital for converting visitors into sales. They’re the final step before the checkout phase, and outstanding product content can convince even the most skeptical online shopper to part with their hard-earned money and place an order on your store.
That said, securing sales isn’t the only role of the product page — it can also be used to help your website be found in relevant searches. Ideally, your product pages should be optimized for human readers and search engines.
Since online consumers know they have plenty of options, the average online retail adventure starts with a visit to a search engine (like Google) and a review of the results.
Knowing this, how do you write an Ecommerce product description that competes for highly-relevant ranking positions? Let’s run through some essential tips:
1. Include primary keywords in your metadata
Every web page should have a meta title and a meta description at the very least. This metadata is important because they give search engines valuable information about the goals and contents of a page. For instance, if you make a page for selling a toy truck, a title saying something like “Toy Truck For Sale” would help search crawlers identify it as a sales page.
Primary keywords are the search terms that are most relevant (and valuable) for the product on your page. In most cases, the main keyword should be the type of product, the product name, or possibly even the brand (depending on which is most popular). If you don’t include a clear page title with your primary keyword, search engines will need to work harder to guess at the purpose of your page.
A meta description, meanwhile, is intended to give a more well-rounded explanation of what someone can expect from the page. Including the primary keywords here will confirm to the reader that it’s the right page for them.
2. Configure relevant structured data
Structured data is relatively new to the ecommerce world, but has enough relevance to warrant inclusion here. In the same way that metadata provides context about a page, structured data provides context about page content.
Your product page is about a product, but a search engine can’t understand human language very well — using structured data, you can tag the various elements of the product (name, price, brand, etc.), making it simple for search engines to parse the page and present it accordingly in results (reviews, for instance, will show up in results if tagged correctly).
To learn more about this, check out Google’s official guidelines of product markup.
3. Provide useful internal and external links
Search engines are supposed to provide searchers with the most valuable and relevant results. They can’t always do that, of course, but that goal informs their design, and how their algorithms work. Pages that provide relevant links (both internal and external) simply offer more value than pages that don’t.
Internal links have value because they offer useful context (search engines can figure out the structure of your site through seeing where links lead and using that data to piece everything together), and make it easier for visitors to navigate your website.
External links are useful because they demonstrate that you’re willing to send people elsewhere for more information — and because linking to strong resources shows that you prefer to associate with good websites. You need to be careful to avoid linking to any domains that might drag yours down by association. Here are some specific tips.
4. Aim for natural-sounding copy
By knowing the importance of keywords, digital copywriters can sometimes get excessive with forcing them into their content. This is a problem for two reasons: it makes copy a lot less compelling (it feels very robotic), and it risks getting the site penalized by Google. As time goes by, Google’s ability to parse natural language keeps getting better, and sites that have clearly been over-optimized can have their ranking potential slashed.
In essence, you need to cover the most important keywords to a suitable extent (a handful of mentions at appropriate times will suffice), spread out to secondary keywords and synonyms, and otherwise write in way that sounds natural. You should try to adopt the language of the average reader, and if you’re writing about products (such as apparel) that demand some personality, then you can get even more informal. Do it well, and your keywords will all come across as justified by the context.
Here’s an exercise: once you’re done with your draft, leave the copy alone for some time, and return to the page later for a full review. You may find that it comes across as artificial if you’ve tried to force keywords, in which case you should take out some of the keywords and generally rework it until you’re happy with it. Always ask yourself one question: is this worth linking to? If you can’t honestly say that it is, then it needs more work.
5. Write using digestible blocks of content
Subheadings aren’t just handy for breaking up content so readers can better understand the structure of a page — they’re also essential for SEO purposes. The more clearly your page can be divided into meaningful chunks, the more easily a search crawler can interpret it — plus, subheadings provide valuable opportunities for including popular queries.
For example, instead of just lumping together all your product copy, you can split it into distinct sections with keyword-optimized headings. Use a tool like Answer the Public to find the most common questions posed about the product, and use those questions as subheadings. That way, when someone searches for answers, your content will stand a decent chance of being selected to rank highly.
Use all these tips, and you’ll end up with a product page that stands a much greater chance of appearing in highly-relevant and actionable searches. The more organic traffic you bring in, the more chances you’ll have to convert, and the more your business will profit in the long run.