Introduction.
How to optimize your product pages for Google search ? Product detail Pages with good SEO provide the best ROI on click throughs.
We know that if a google search delivers a searcher on to a specific product page it is better than a list of products. This is because niche search has a better return on investment. You have heard the saying the “riches are in the niches”.
Our mantra is that once a user is on the Product Detail Page all questions about the product should be answered on the same page with no need for a screen refresh to find more information. So when a visitor lands here they are to be looked after.
This helps mobile users mostly as they do not have to wait for another screen to load for more information.
Usability versus SEO performance.
So we have the balancing act of making a site beautiful but also making it perform well in search results. If google had its way I think all pages would be black and white and plain content. Maybe that’s not a bad design aim? However there are products that are helped by beautiful design and presentation. Some would say all product is enhanced by beautiful presentation.
Tabbed panels.
Tabbed panels are built using javascript. Javascript tends to make it harder for a search engine robots to read your page. We have noticed where we remove tabbed panels that organic ranking improved. We achieved this by removing the javascript tabbed feature and reworking it into a basic html internal page anchors and top links that linked to the top of the tabbed area so the next link was available.
Insert Frequently Asked Questions on your Product Detail Page. We know from SEO experiments it helps ranking for the page. It helps the shopper too, makes them stay on the page longer and this results in Google knowing they served a good result to their searcher.
If the Frequently Asked Questions are the same for all pages, then maybe have this information in a tab as its not SEO important.
Any Javascripts that contain content should be examined carefully for accessibility in Google Indexing.
To see how google is seeing your page go to use fetch and render in google webmaster tools. If some of your content is not showing in fetch and render then google cannot see this content and is not using it for ranking your website.
Page Auto Loaders adn infinite scroll.
Some sites will load the rest if the page content later so as to render the page as fast as possible for the visitor. This has a positive impact for the user but it has a negative impact for SEO. Basically you are hiding the content from Search Engines as they will not manually scroll down the page to reveal all the content. Javascript is usually controlling the page loader and this is the issue. Robots find it difficult to traverse javascript and spend a lot more time crawling your site when there is a lot of javascript present. So the advice here is to do some live tracking on your site to see if customers are using the lazy load. If they are not then our advice is to get rid of it and let all the content display in one page load.
Links on Product Detail Pages.
All links should be rel=nofollow. The links on your product page are to other products or pages that should be in your site map already. There is no need to let robots go crawl every link from every page. If you have 10,000 products and each page has 30 links. Then you are telling a robot to go visit 30 x 10,000 which is 3 million links to follow. Bare in mind all 3 million links are duplicates and are in the sitemap already. Doing this reduces the crawl budget dramatically on a site and reduces the amount of time search engines spend crawling your site. The more efficient you make your site for a search robot the quicker it can index new and existing content. You also free up resources on your web server for real human visitors whom are spending money on your site.
Live help.
We have seen where live help slows down a page load speed. We know that page speed is a ranking factor on mobile. This is more of a human thing as we do not want to wait and will quickly move onto the next search. When you place Live Help on a product screen it means you get more specific requests for help and you can use this to offer dynamic discounts and get conversion rates up. Maybe consider only having the live-help on product detail pages and contact us pages. Generally paid live help tools are lighter in terms of page load, than free ones.
Reviews.
Always have reviews of the product on the product detail page. Make sure these are real reviews that you can vouch for. Reviews build customer confidence in a product. The more reviews the better. If there are negative reviews make sure you provide an answer to show that you care about your customers. Customer comments on some systems contain star ratings. If they do it’s an easy visual for your customer to understand. Some stores are allowing customers post and tag products in use in social media photo sharing applications. Using offsite trust gathering services have no extra SEO value. Once you have the ratings meta tagged correctly on your page google should pick these up. Using outsource trust services should be used with caution because it gives your business intelligence away.
What if you use the same review on every page? If you use generic customer reviews about your business and replicate these on all pages on the site, then you need to put the text into an image. There will be duplicated content across the site on all the pages. Google does not read content from images yet, but its got to be something they would do in the future. So this image method is a temporary measure. The best way to do the same review on every page is to link to the review page from the product detail page. Make it a rel=nofollow link.
To enhance your business listing and ratings read more on our Google My Business Listing Tips page.
Meta Description
Make sure all the Meta data is filled for the product detail page. The meta description should contain a call to action be under 120 characters. E.G. “Dewalt Hammer Action Drill €345.00. Free Shipping, Visit our site now !”
The quality of the meta description coupled with review stars has a huge effect on the click through rate from Search Results Pages. Meta descriptions that are copies of the full description crudely chopped off at the 120 character point are the worst and provide no incentive to the searcher to click through to the your site.
Avoid the temptation to install plugins that automatically fill the meta descriptions from the content on your site. Meta descriptions are too powerful to leave to a script to auto generate them. If you have no meta description google will take the first 120 readable chars from the page and use these in the snippet in the search results. It is better to leave meta description empty then to fill it with automated junk.
The same applies for auto generating meta titles. However its more likely that your product h1 title on the page will be your meta title too.
Auto generating Meta Tags from the content is also a waste of time.
Generally speaking all content has to be hand crafted and generating content automatically is easy for a search robot to spot.
A good tip : before investing hours into content insertion and create one product page and perfect it in terms of SEO, render speed and meta data. Once you have this perfect you have a good template to insert all product. The ranking and quality of a page the first time google indexes a page has a high impact on the future ranking of that page. Improving the ranking on poorly constructed pages is the biggest SEO waste of time ever. Better creating new page for google to index and redirecting the bad one to the new one.
Sources.
Dr Marie Haynes for the Tabbed Data Tip. @Marie_Haynes
Kyle Blanchette for the rel nofollow tip @kgblanchette
Cyrus Sheppard for the Links Tip. @CyrusChepard
Sean Owens for all the other Tips. @willows_web