Product Page SEO: 5 Steps to Boost Your Search Rankings

All signs point to a growing e-commerce market. Projections by eMarketer predict that e-commerce sales will rise to $4.058 trillion by 2020.

Still, there’s a lot of competition out there, and only 10 slots available on the first page of search results.

But if you take the right steps, you can maximize your product page SEO – and bring more search traffic to your business.

Step 1: Eliminate duplicate content and pages

Duplicate content is probably the biggest SEO problem I see for e-commerce sites.

Google does not like duplicate content. They don’t want thousands of identical pages ranking in search results, and they will penalize you for it.

Some e-commerce sites make the mistake of copying product descriptions from manufacturers. Make sure all your descriptions are unique to your site to avoid a potential “thin content” manual action penalty from Google.

There’s also the problem of cannibalization.

Say you sell cell phone accessories. You probably have many different kinds of iPhone 6 cases, all with their own page – and all of them are competing for a very competitive keyword (iPhone 6 cases).

By optimizing for the same keyword again and again, you’re hurting your overall search ranking by competing with yourself.

To fix the problem, you should:

• Remove any unnecessary duplicate content
• Use rel=”canonical” tags and no-index pages to show Google which pages to not pay attention to
• Identify and stop multiple pages ranking for the same keyword

Step 2: Optimize your URLs

For SEO and user experience purposes, canonical URLs are a must. Just compare these two sample URLs:

• yourstore.com/category/id438792011/
• yourstore.com/product-name/

Including the actual product name instead of just a product ID will help improve your search rank (“Keyword in URL” is a known rank factor). On top of that, you don’t want to give searchers any reason to think your link might not take them to the product they’re looking for.

E-commerce sites often struggle with how to organize products on their sites. One option is to include your product’s category (women’s or men’s, brand categories, etc.) as part of the URL.

But most, if not all, of your products, will belong to more than one category. Making separate pages (and URLS) for the product for each category it’s in creates another duplicate content problem.

So, I think the best and simplest way to structure your URLs is by only including the product name.

Then there’s the problem of variants on a product (color, size, etc). In general, it’s best to use one configurable URL to cover all these variants.

However, you might have some product variants with SEO value (e.g. blue Nike Air Max).

If necessary, you can create separate URLs for these different product variants and use rel=”canonical” tags to point the different URLs to one master URL. This shows Google that the variant pages are copies of the main URL.

Step 3: Make the most of the images

You probably already know how important relevant product visuals are for encouraging sales.

Over 90% of consumers consider visual appearance to be the key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

And as it turns out, images are a great opportunity to get more real estate in search results as well. E-commerce sites have tons of images, but you should optimize each and every one of them for Google Image Search.

Here’s why:

When someone searches for a keyword that has many relevant results in Image Search, Google will include an “Images for [your keyword]” section in regular search results.

So not only will your product pages show up in organic results, but searchers will see a range of your product images as well to encourage interest and clicks.

Here’s how you can optimize for image search:

Optimize the file name

Before uploading the image to your site, delete the ambiguous IMG_4598.jpg filename and replace it with something descriptive and relevant to your product (e.g., Nike-Air-Max-Blue.jpg).

Optimize the alt text

Google can’t “see” your images, but it uses the alt text to understand what the image is about and rank it in search results. Alt text is also used by screen reader software to describe images to the visually impaired.

Make sure every image has descriptive, relevant alt text – no more than a few words long.

Include image URLs in your sitemap

After you’ve optimized your images, create a new sitemap and send it over to Google, including the new URLs.

Step 4: Use the right structured data markup

Include structured data in the HTML of all your product pages. Google uses this extra information you provide about your products and pages to create “rich snippets” in search results.

Rich snippets include extra details about a link in search results before people click, such as product ratings, prices, and availability.

Appearing with rich snippets in search results can help improve your page’s click-through rate. If a person is searching for product reviews, for example, and sees that they’re available on your site, they’re more likely to click through.

Google may or may not use your structured data in search results, but include them on every page to increase your chances of standing out from the crowd in a search.

Step 5: Improve your site speed

Site speed is another important rank factor that will affect your user experience as well. E-commerce sites tend to be image-heavy, which can do some real damage to your load time.

Google is paying attention to site speed more and more, especially for mobile-optimized sites.

And since 50% of the US digital commerce revenue will come from mobile purchases by 2017, you should worry about it, too.

To see where your site stands, head over to Google’s PageSpeed Insights page. Type in your site URL and click “Analyze.”

The analysis will rank your mobile and desktop site speed from one to 100, and offer suggestions on how to improve it. Maximizing your site speed will help you rank better in search – and help your customers navigate your site in the process.

Know any other important factors to improve product page SEO? Tell me in the comments:.

About the Author

Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content, and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, including Salesforce, Coca-Cola, Target and others, to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online, his blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.