Product Page SEO: 17 eCommerce Best Practices

eCommerce spending is higher than ever—and everyone’s looking to profit from that. The competition is ruthless. If you slip up, your competitors will happily take your coveted spot in Google’s search results. And if you don’t grab SEO opportunities, your competition will.

There’s also a big misconception in eCommerce: lots of folks think visitors come in through the homepage or a category page and then make their way down to a product page. This assumption is wrong, and it’s a missed opportunity.

Product pages often get a lot of organic traffic from visitors who already have their credit card handy. If your product pages aren’t playing a central role in your SEO strategy, you’re missing out.

Keep reading, and you’ll learn how to leverage your product pages to boost your SEO performance—and your revenue.

Why optimizing product pages is tricky

In SEO you can’t just look at product pages in isolation, because search engines don’t view your store that way either. Pages affect one another (positively and negatively), so you need to look beyond product pages. Search engines evaluate your entire store; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Optimizing product pages requires you to focus on these pages without losing sight of the bigger picture—how your product pages work together—or the rest of your site.

When it comes to the bigger picture, think for example about dealing with:

• Category pages and product pages competing for the same queries
• Very similar product variants
• Products available in multiple categories
• Discontinued or expired products

Now this may feel overwhelming, but don’t worry—we’ll explain in detail how to tackle these issues further down in the article.

Applying the Pareto Principle and a growth mindset

In eCommerce SEO you’re likely working on larger sites. And that’s different from working on smaller sites. For instance on a large site you won’t be able to tackle every issue. But the beauty is, you don’t have to. As long as you focus on the product categories and products that drive most revenue and have the best margins, you’re good.

You’re likely to find that 20% of your categories are driving 80% of the revenue, so focus on those. Then once you find you’ve got a handle on those, move on to the next categories that are worth your time.

When it comes to your roadmap with improvements and changes you want to get done, apply a growth mindset that forces you to focus on the things that have the most impact. For example improving the way product names are generated, the way product detail templates are structured, and how you can leverage Product Schema.