6 Steps to optimising your e-commerce products pages

The most daunting prospect for any shopping cart owner is SEO’ing 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 250-300 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 ten cents; hire a copywriter.
   
   
5. Product images should also be optimised, so name your image with the product’s actual name ie: blue-widget.jpg. Make sure that when you include the picture on the page that you use an image “alt” tag which 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 penalized by Google’s duplicate content filter. If you have substantially similar content as the original content creator, Google will stop your result from appearing the 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!