If you want to improve your search engine rankings for an eCommerce platform, your product pages are the first place you want to look.
Without them being optimised, they can’t get crawled or indexed for the right keywords and the right target audience.
What is Product Page SEO?
Let’s start with the simple stuff. Product Page SEO refers to the process of optimising individual product pages on an eCommerce website to improve online visibility, attract targeted traffic, and drive conversions. It includes technical SEO, on-page SEO, as well as UX enhancement.
Key Elements of a Well-Optimised Product Page
| Element | Description |
| Crawlability | Ensures search engines can index and rank the page. |
| Page Title | Clearly conveys the page's purpose and includes keywords. |
| URL | Uses concise, meaningful URLs. |
| Breadcrumbs | Provides hierarchical navigation for better user experience. |
| H1 Tag | Defines the main heading to improve SEO and accessibility. |
| Product Images | Displays high-resolution images showcasing the product. |
| Product Video | Includes a video demonstrating the product in action. |
| Pricing & Reviews | Shows pricing, availability, and customer feedback. |
| Call to Action | Encourages users to take action, such as purchasing. |
| Delivery Information | Offers delivery timelines, costs, and shipping details. |
| Product Description | Gives an informative overview of the product features. |
| Product Specifications | Lists detailed technical specifications for clarity. |
| FAQS | Answers common customer inquiries about the product. |
| Related Products | Suggests similar products to boost cross-selling. |
| User-Generated Content | Includes reviews, testimonials, or user-uploaded content. |
| Schema Markup | Uses structured data to enhance search engine visibility. |
16 Ways to Optimise Product Descriptions
1. Search Engine-Friendly Crawlability
Before you start performing SEO for product listing, you want to see whether your product page can be crawled and indexed by search engines.
Some things you should check are:
- Whether it’s blocked in robots.txt
- If it has a no-index tag on the page
- If it has a canonical tag in the of the HTML
- Whether it’s included in your sitemap.xml file
You can check all of these for free on Google Search Console. However, some may find it easier to use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush.
2. Descriptive and Clear Page Title
A page title, title tag, meta title, or whatever you want to call it, is a piece of HTML code that is the title of a specific web page.
Alongside showing on the taskbar of a web browser, it also appears in the SERP results.
When writing a title tag, it should include words from your eCommerce keyword research and clearly describe your product.
3. Short and Simple URL Structure
A product page's URL is a unique address from that specific page.
For it to be SEO-optimised for online stores, you should:
- Use relevant keywords
- Keep them concise
- Use hyphens to separate words
- Be consistent with the URL structure
- Keep more important keywords higher in the URL hierarchy
Though this is very important regarding SEO for product listings, it’s still somewhat of a low-ranking factor. There are still product pages with messy URLs that rank high.
4. Navigational Breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs are internal links that showcase to the user where they are on your site and its hierarchy.
These help both users and search engines. They help search engines with crawling and help users navigate around your website.
5. Proper H1 Heading Tag
The H1 heading tag is the primary heading of your page. You should only have one, which should clearly tell search engines and the reader what the page is about.
If you’re doing an audit for your product pages, using a free plugin called Detailed is a good idea. Once downloaded you can see a list of your headings and their structure.
6. High-Quality Product Images
You know what a product image is, so we won’t describe them. However, what you should know is they should be of quality.
They shouldn’t just show off your product, either. They should further enhance the product description. It should show how the product is used, the colour or size, etc. Anything that may be difficult to describe or visualise through text.
Not only that, but your images should have alt text (this describes the images in text format), descriptive file names, compressed for load speed, and, most importantly, be responsive for mobile users.
Plus, a well-optimised image can show in the SERP results via structured data or image search.
7. Engaging Product Video
Videos aren’t a must. However, they can improve the user experience and increase on-page time, thus sending signals to search engines that your page is valuable.
It’s also important to know that videos aren’t for all products. Search engines know what product pages benefit from a video, and if your product doesn’t, it won’t benefit SEO.
Suppose your product has been recognised as benefiting from video. In that case, the video can also show up in multiple areas on Google: Standard Google Search, Google Image, Google Videos, and Google Discover.
Before uploading the video as well, it should meet specific requirements to get indexed. We recommend you follow this Google guide and use the Video Indexing Report to track its progress.
8. Pricing, Stock Status, Ratings, and Reviews
As you can imagine, pricing, stock status, ratings, and reviews are also essential to the user's experience. Therefore, it’s a good idea to show them on the product page.
Plus, you can add product schema. This uses schema markup (more about this below) to help search engines understand your product page as well as show details like pricing, reviews, etc., on the SERPs.
9. Compelling Call to Action
A call to action or CTA is what the purchase or add-to-cart buttons are. It gets people to take action and make the next move to complete or get closer to completing their purchase.
Really, you need to experiment with this and perform conversion rate optimisation (CRO). This is when you use data and A/B split testing to determine the best colour or text for the CTA button.
Remember, however, this doesn’t impact SEO directly. They impact user experience, which will indirectly impact SEO performance.
10. Shipping and Delivery Information
Shipping and delivery information should also be easy to locate. It shouldn’t be on another page. It should be on the product page itself.
Ideally, you’ll want to place this next to the CTA buttons. It can increase conversions (if the delivery times are decent), lower bounce rates, and much more.
11. Detailed Product Description
A good product description informs the reader about the product as well as sells it to them.
When writing a product description, make sure it’s unique, factual, descriptive, and includes some keywords from your eCommerce SEO strategy.
12. Comprehensive Product Specifications
Product description and product specification are two different things. While descriptions detail some specifications, they are usually the main ones. Product specification, however, really goes into the small details.
13. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
FAQs should answer any common questions that your users may have about their purchase.
In all areas, you’ll be able to find the most common questions your clients have about their orders.
14. Suggested or Related Products
Displaying related products not only improves the user experience and encourages upsells, but it also helps search engines crawl your website and pass on PageRank through internal linking.
It’s important to note, however, that you shouldn’t be trying to get backlinks to individual products to pass on PageRank. You should be sending them to category pages. See here for more category page SEO best practices.
15. User-Generated Content (UGC)
UGC has become very popular recently in industries such as fashion, as it clearly showcases your products in real life from real customers.
This not only helps sell your products, but it keeps people on your website, increasing on-page time and lowering bounce rate.
16. Structured Data (Schema Markup)
Schema markup is code that’s organised in a familiar way, so search engine crawlers can easily identify what’s on the page.
Using schema markup also allows you to get more real estate on the search results, as it allows you to show extra features like the rating or price of your product.
There are many different types of schema. However, most of them are for advanced SEO for eCommerce. If you just stick with product schema, this should be okay.
Just take note, however, that you have schema such as breadcrumb schema, review shema, video schema, etc. For a better understanding of what’s available, see schema.org.
Wrapping up
When optimising product pages for SEO, follow each of the 16 steps mentioned above. This will put you ahead of many eCommerce stores out there.
Alongside this, ensure quality and other technical and off-page SEO factors. The content (text, images, and video) should all be of quality, the technical areas of your website should be sound, like website speed, and you should be building your authority through backlinks.
If you can focus on all three areas—on-page, off-page, and technical SEO—your product listings will quickly start outranking your competitors. Let us show you how.
