eCommerce SEO: Optimizing Products

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can be tricky when it comes to ecommerce websites considering how many pages and products they typically have. Before you hire a costly outside SEO firm to help optimize your website in order to boost search engine rankings, here are a few tips to help you optimize your product pages and subsequently make your ecommerce website more SEO friendly.

Scrap the Default Description – Never use the static product description that comes from the manufacturer. You will have the exact same copy as other merchants who sell the same products and the search engines will view your site as duplicate content (which can be detrimental for your rankings). Write a unique description for each product – it may sound tedious but the result is well worth the effort.

Be Unique – At the risk of sounding repetitious, write unique product descriptions for each and every product, even those that are similar. Just changing one or two words isn’t going to cut it – be unique!

Optimize New Products – As soon as new products are added to the website, optimize them! Do this is in weekly or monthly batches, depending on how often you add new products.

Keep Only the Product Name in URL – To keep all of your site’s products URLs clean and unique, simply use the product name: www.yoursite.com/productname. Avoiding using the category name in URLs is a good idea for a number of reasons. First, it can make it unnecessarily longer and create messy duplicate content. In addition, what happens if a product is categorized under several categories or you move a product from one category to another? Don’t create loads of unnecessary work for yourself – things will be a lot easier if you just simply use the product name in the product URLs.

Stick to Product Names – You don’t want to have to be constantly changing product URLs so wisely choose each product name and stick to it!

Setup Product Optimization Defaults – ecommerce SEO doesn’t have to be entirely manual. When new products are added to your site, have some defaults in place so a product page is somewhat optimized automatically when it is added. For example, have title tags pulled automatically from the product name or automate the meta description by deriving it from the first 100 characters of the product description you wrote.