Your product pages need love and attention just like your category pages if you expect them to perform well in organic results. Customers who are further down the sales funnel are typically looking for the products they want rather than performing general searches.
By following basic SEO best practices, you can help your products appeal to Google and stand out from your competition. These top eight product page SEO optimization tips will help get you started.
1. Product Page SEO: General Tips
Product pages should have:
- Unique and appealing titles that are consistent in structure.
- Original meta descriptions.
- H1 tags that are included correctly (one per page) and based on keyword research.
2. Featured Images
Include at least one featured image, but make sure that images are optimized so that they don’t slow down the page speed. Always include alt text to provide a basic description of your images. This helps both product page SEO and screen readers for the visually impaired. To learn more about ensuring your website’s SEO complies with the American With Disabilities Act, see our ADA compliance checklist.
3. Copy
Create entirely unique copy for the page, if possible. If you have too many products to create new copy for every single one right now, consider revising them a few batches at a time starting with your most popular or those with the best margins.
4. Structured Data Markup
Add structured data markup (Schema) to gain rich snippets and stand out in the organic search results.
5. Related Products
If you have signature products that customers often look for or link to, link to them from other parts of the site or your less popular – but related – products. When a page on your site gains a link, it gets something called link equity – value that is passed from the linking site to yours.
By linking a page that has high link equity to one that has less, you share some of that value to the less popular page. This can help improve the performance of the less popular page, both in organic rankings and in driving more traffic to it.
6. Mobile
Always test to see how the product page looks on mobile.
7. Reviews
Include reviews and ratings if you can (and use Schema to highlight them).
8. Discontinuing Products
If a product is permanently discontinued but there is a similar product elsewhere on the website, then 301 redirect the URL of the discontinued product to the URL of the similar product. This allows customers to easily find a good alternative to the product that you no longer carry. If there are no similar products, then redirect the URL of the discontinued product to its most relevant category page.
If you want to further shape up your SEO skillset, check out some of our resources below:
- Complete Local SEO Checklist
- The 4 Pillars of a Successful SEO Mindset: Building Strategies for Concrete Results
- SEO Superiority on the Amazon Marketplace: 4 Seller Strategies
- Search Engineering: Google RankBrain, Artificial Intelligence, & the Transformation of Organic SEO
- 10 Steps to Master SEO Layered Navigation on Your Website