Tips

Product Page Must-Haves

URL

Make it short, easy to read, and use your main keyphrase in it.

Title

Add a great title, focusing on the product name and its main features. Optional: include the manufacturer’s name, size, SKU etc. If your product is, for instance, a small part of a larger machine (screw, tube), include the SKU as well. People might search that specific.

Image

Use images that show your product in its best light, and choose the right image name, format, quality, and size. Add high-quality, well-optimized images with proper ALT text. Include the product name in at least the main product image. This will help you do better in visual search. 

Reviews

Build trust by featuring honest and authentic customer reviews.

Cross-selling

Help customers find other products they may be interested in.

Stock

Show if the item is in stock to manage expectations and show the amount to create scarcity and urgency.

Call-to-action

Make your call-to-action button stand out.

Delivery options

Be transparent about the delivery speed and options. Never lie!

Description

Write a unique description and highlight the problems your product solves. Make it unique and state the problems your product solves. NEVER use the manufacturer’s generic description or one you found on another website.

Metadata (SEO title, meta description, slug and featured image).

Add an inviting meta description. Usually, a product page contains a lot of general information as well, varying from dimensions to terms of service. To avoid Google using that unrelated text in a meta description, you want to add a meta description to your product pages, even more than to content pages. Ideally, all meta descriptions are unique.

Product page SEO: Things to improve

1. Add structured data for your products and get rich results

Structured data is an essential part of a modern SEO strategy. You can’t do without structured data for your product pages anymore. There is specific Product Schema that helps you get highlighted search results, so-called rich results. In addition, you’d better mark up the reviews of your customers with Review structured data. All of this will make your product page stand out and increase the chance a potential customer clicks on your link in the search results. 

For more details see Google’s page on product page structured data to see what that search engines expect in your code and what it can do with it.

2. User test your product page 

Looking at numbers in Google Analytics, Search Console or other analytical tools can give you a lot of insights into how people find and interact with your page. 

Content ideas for boring products

By SEO for boring products, we mean SEO for products that are impossible to write exciting content for.

SEO for boring products is about making a product less boring by focusing less on the product and more on the visitor/customer and the reason they need your product. These stories, combined with a solid SEO base and an engaging social media strategy will help you a lot.

Here are some content ideas:

1. Check social media for ideas 

What is the competition doing? You are not the only one in your niche or industry, so you’ll probably get some good ideas on what to do and what not to do. See what the competition is doing, see if something similar fits your brand and create your own stories, blog posts, product pages based on that. Learn, but don’t imitate. Improve what your competitor is doing.

2. Talk to your users and get their stories, so people can relate to that

Think similar social groups, age categories, etcetera. Talk to your users, tell their story about your product. What have they gained by it, what did it bring them? How did their lives become better after purchasing your product or reading your website?

3. Write an extensive how-to or manual 

People are always looking for how-tos, right? If you are selling travel insurances, your visitor wants to know what they have to do when they actually need that insurance. Will it be hard to reach you and talk to you? I can imagine a lot of them want to know how to do that upfront. And why not go overboard: how to make an elephant out of a paper clip. I’m sure it can be done. But that’s a whole different angle.

4. Add videos

Perhaps even more than written howtos, people watch videos and the product and preferably live reviews. 

5. Create a user story and start storytelling

Storytelling is hot, you see it more and more. ‘Create’ users and share their experiences online. An article about testimonials that “stories have a positive influence on a customer’s perception of a brand, as well as the willingness to purchase. Stories can affect behavior, given that the story resonates with your visitor.” 

How to Paraphrase | Tips and Examples

Paraphrasing means formulating someone else’s ideas in your own words. To paraphrase a source, you have to rewrite a passage without changing the meaning of the original text.

1. Read the passage several times to fully understand the meaning.
2. Note down key concepts.
3. Write your version of the text without looking at the original.
4. Compare your paraphrased text with the original passage and make minor adjustments to phrases that remain too similar.
5. Cite the source where you found the idea.

Paraphrasing example:

Original passage

“The number of foreign and domestic tourists in the Netherlands rose above 42 million in 2017, an increase of 9% and the sharpest growth rate since 2006, the national statistics office CBS reported on Wednesday” (DutchNews.nl, 2018).

Paraphrased version

According to the national statistics office, the Netherlands experienced dramatic growth in tourist numbers in 2017. More than 42 million tourists travelled to or within the Netherlands that year, representing a 9% increase—the steepest in 12 years (DutchNews.nl, 2018).

Paraphrasing tips:

• Start your first sentence at a different point from that of the original source
• Use synonyms
• Change the sentence structure (e.g. from active to passive voice)
• Break the information into separate sentences
• Use plagiarism checker tools (for more details see “Tools learning section”)

Critical Errors You Should Avoid

1. Duplicate or Not Optimized Product Page Titles

Having a unique title tag for each page on the website is the fundamental rule of the SEO book. It is difficult to have a unique title for each page on the eCommerce website if you are offering lots of products from the same brand or the same product from different brands. 

The ideal title tag structure could be like ‘Brand – Model – Item Type’. For example, the “Honda Accord Sports Coupe”. It is also important to understand how users search for a specific product. You can add generic long phrases in the title to improve the organic search traffic.

2. Missing or Duplicate Product Description

Many webmasters miss the trick by not at all adding the product description or by adding the same description as the manufacturer’s website. 

Copying the product description can cause the content duplication issue and can lead to website penalty. Search engine always looks for the original content while crawling. 

3. Lots of Duplicate Content

Content duplication is one of the critical issues to solve while optimizing the eCommerce store. Make sure you block all the duplicate URLs from being indexed using the robot.txt file. 

You can also use canonical tags to indicate which URL you wish to keep as the original. This can help you solve on-site content duplication issues. The canonical tag indicates a search engine about which URL they should be paying attention.

4. Thin content on the page

Not enough substantial content that actually gets used or consumed, or that is crawl able by the engines.

Images, description, meta descriptions, related products, reviews, related blog posts, ebook style guides etc. All of these can be taken advantage of. Just because it’s a product and you just want the user to hit that “add to cart” button, that doesn’t mean ignore they’re buying process. 

5. Keyword stuffing product pages

Stuffing the product description with keywords instead of actionable content, sizes, fitting, usable details.

This ones is simple enough, don’t stuff product pages with useless keywords.

6. Not Optimized Product Pages Based on the Search Terms

Make sure that you properly research the key search phrases users type while searching for the specific product and optimize for those long-tail keywords. Don’t stuff the page with the repetitive keywords and make sure your content is readable by the search engine.

7. Lack of Product Reviews

Having product reviews not only helps you drive user’s attention but it also helps you having user-generated unique content on the product page. According to recent research, about 70% of users look for product reviews on the online store or in forums before making a purchase. So, if you have not included the product reviews on the product page you are diverting a large percentage of your probable customers to another platform.

8. Low-quality Product Images

Most of the time users make the purchasing decision looking at the product image. A picture speaks a thousand words. So it must have high-quality product images on the product page. Having a single image is also not enough. You must display product from the multiple angles and in different variations of the colours.

Image optimization is a crucial chapter of the eCommerce SEO book. You must make sure that images load quickly on both desktop and mobile. 

But the most important of all is to have unique and proper image alt tags for each image on the page. You just can’t miss adding unique and descriptive image alt tags for each image on the page.

9. Not Optimized URL Structure

Non-optimized URLs are the URLs, which are not properly optimized or structured.

Here is the example of the non-optimized URL and User-friendly URL. “http://www.mystore.com/productid43?ASDFFEK4“. This URL is difficult to read as it contains the dynamic characters in it. This can’t be called the User-friendly URLs.

While user-centric URL looks like “http://www.mystore.com/16-gb-apple-iPhone6“. User can easily identify what they can expect from the page seeing this.

If you have included the product name in the URL, chances are higher that you can rank better for that product in SERP. “Shorter is Better” is the thumb rule of the URL optimization. 

10. Slow Loading Speed

Users are getting impatient nowadays. Search engine prefers the websites that load quickly.  You can optimize the images and videos to reduce the size of the page and make the load faster. 

Copywriting Psychological Triggers That Convince People To Buy Stuff

1. Focus on solving the user’s pain

It’s easy to list a selection of plusses that you think are a good fit for the product. Maybe add some specifications while you are at it. 

You should keep in mind the following while writing a description:

• What are they gaining from using your product? 
• What’s the solution? 
• How do you plan to solve the user’s pain?

Remember, you are not selling dental picks, but you are selling a solution for bleeding gums. 

Sometimes, consumers don’t even know the name of the product they are looking for — they want to get their problem fixed. 

Focusing on the user intent makes it possible to uncover those problems and helps you offer solutions with your product.

2. Stay away from cliches and avoid using superlatives

Calling every product the best will achieve the opposite — nobody will believe anything anymore.

Words have power, but you need to learn how to wield that power. Omit needless words. By using stripped-back language, that single power word can do the job. 

3. Make it personal

You can use your voice and make it more personal. Develop your tone of voice and stick to it

Keep in mind that you are not simply selling a product to a person, but you are selling an experience.

4. Always focus on your customer

Step number one in almost everything SEO is doing keyword research. The same goes for improving product descriptions. You need to know the product, the customer, and how they write or talk about this particular product. You need to know how the customer comes from realizing a need to buying a product from you: the user journey.

5.  Feeling Of Involvement Or Ownership

Ownership is when someone uses a product and gets an idea of what it’s like to own that product. That can also apply to your offer. Anyone who looks at your product or uses it to any extent is much more likely to buy it. That’s because they get a better idea of how it can improve their life.

6.  Honesty

You can’t advertise the best bananas in the world if every bunch is either bruised or still green.

7.  Value And Proof Of Value

One of the best ways to prove value is to compare your offer to similar offers. What’s important is to focus on what makes your offer better than the other guys.

8.  Greed

For better or worse, people are greedy. That means they’ll likely jump on a deal with a good discount — more bang for their buck. That’s why one of the best ways to evoke the feeling of greed is a combination of a discount and a countdown.

9.  Satisfaction Conviction

A guarantee can instill confidence. Customers tend to trust your offer if you’re confident about it. They need to believe you’re 100% behind whatever you sell or do. The more your guarantee benefits the customer, the better.

10.  Curiosity

As the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity is a natural, powerful feeling, after all. People want their questions answered and they don’t want to feel left in the dark.

11.  Sense Of Urgency

Nobody likes to miss out on good things. They even feel like they can’t afford to miss out if it involves money. That’s why a sense of urgency can drive sales.

Even an artificial feeling of urgency can give people that extra push. That can look like a low amount of stock, a limited-time bonus offer, or a regular old sale.

12.  Exclusivity, Rarity, Or Uniqueness

People want unique things so they can feel exclusive or special. That value often comes from the fact that those things are exclusive or rare. There’s only one or a few of them, so their value increases.

13.  Hope

The more convincing your offer is, the more hopeful someone will be about it. The more hopeful they are, the more likely they’ll make a purchase. It’s easy to instill that hope, but many people sell false hope. That’s why it’s important to back up whatever you claim your offer does.

BAD product descriptions

The horror of any consumer browsing through or looking for a specific product is:

• Absence of product name
• Incomplete product name
• Irrelevant product name
• Inappropriate product name
• Abrupt product descriptions
• Missing product descriptions
• Misplaced product descriptions
• Extremely long product descriptions
• Extremely short product descriptions
• Small images
• Crowded images
• Too many colors
• Small thumbnails
• Unclear images
• Irrelevant images with no details
• The content is too big, too small, unclear or irrelevant
• Fake trust badges
• Unknown names associated with trust badges

Examples: