3 practical SEO tips to optimize your ecommerce product listings

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Optimizing your product listing’s SEO presents a unique challenge for ecommerce merchants. You need to present product descriptions to sell your merchandise, but unless you are selling something very niche, there might be thousands of other websites that have the exact same descriptions.

Why would search engines display your website instead of any of the other thousands? How can you optimize your product listings to help your website rank well? Below are three practical action items to give your product listings an SEO boost and help you get the sales you are looking for.

Paint a picture

Visitors to your website are either looking to buy something or are researching something. If your product descriptions are boilerplate, you are not giving your visitors the whole picture. Without this, they will be less likely to purchase or feel they have gathered useful data for their research, which results in lost sales.

Use manufacturer product descriptions as a starting point, then provide additional personalized information. Provide colors, dimensions, sizes, and information about suitability (i.e. makes a great gift for grandma). These help provide both additional context to your product and can assist with long tail keyword searches.

Having trouble adding unique content? Write down up to ten questions a customer might ask about the product. Incorporate the answers into your product listing.

Canonical URLs

Ecommerce websites will often use tracking codes to identify the source of their website traffic, however, these URLs will often add the tracking data to the end of a URL on the site.

Here’s an example. A visitor arrives on a page selling birthday hats from a twitter feed. The regular URL for the birthday hats might look something like this:

http://www.partysupplies.com/party-hats

However, the URL for the visitor from the twitter feed would look like this:

http:///www.partysupplies.com/party-hats?utm_source=twitter

This second URL is now seen by search engines as a completely separate page on your website. This same issue can occur when products are found through different search strings (i.e. color, size, price, or others). Each returned result will create a “new” page. You do not want these new pages to be indexed by the search engines; you want search engines to focus on your one “main page.”

To accomplish this, you will create canonical URLs for the page you want search engines to index. Add an element to the section of the pages with a canonical attribute. It looks like this:

Product feeds