A Complete Guide to Product Page SEO for Your Shopify Store

Ecommerce revenue is set to exceed $550 billion by 2025 — and that’s in the US alone. So for anyone with an online business, it’s a call to action for some product page SEO strategy implementation. To help you get started, we’ve put together this complete guide to follow when optimizing your ecommerce store. We’ll start by explaining what SEO is and how it works. And if you’re eager to start implementing product page SEO tactics, you can get a head start with the top Shopify and Yoast alternative SEO app, Plug In SEO. 

SEO Explained

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, refers to the various actions you can take to convince search engines (like Google) that your website is the best resource for a specific search phrase. So many factors determine how optimized your website is, including your:

• Domain authority (reputation)
• Chosen niche
• Credit accrued from past traffic (bounce rate, etc.)

Sadly, these three factors are often easily overlooked because they’re taken as being too simple to matter in the face of Google algorithms. This guide will help you understand and enforce a healthy SEO strategy for your online store. Let’s get started.

Steps to Improve Product Page SEO

1. Start With a Product Page SEO Keyword Strategy

A keyword is that one word or short phrase that describes what your shop is all about. Let’s say you’re selling keyboards and keypads. You’d have to think of how someone that broke theirs would search for a replacement on Google.  Not sure what your keywords are? Start with what your successful competitors are using as their own. You can find out common keyword phrases in your niche using a service like Ubersuggest.

Starting with a keyword helps set a direction for your product page SEO strategy. If you have two different ecommerce stores, they’d have different specific keywords. At a high level, the keywords would basically tell us what each store sells. Once you have established a keyword strategy, you could go organic or paid when using it to promote your ecommerce store. The remainder of this guide will help you make the most on the organic front. However, it’s a good idea to look into your paid marketing options at some point down the road.

2. Create Impressive Product Descriptions

Another way to improve your page’s SEO is by including your target keyword and its variations in your product descriptions. To create awesome descriptions that will convert customers, follow this format:

• Include a brief introduction to the product
• Describe the benefits of the product and why people should buy it
• Explain what makes your product different from other products on the market
• Mention any notable features that make your product stand out from others
• Give instructions for using or caring for your product, if applicable
• End with a call-to-action (i.e., “Buy now!”) and include links to purchase options (if applicable)

3. Write Every Meta Description from Scratch

When publishing content for customers to see, be it product related or even a blog post, make sure to use fresh meta descriptions and keyword variants. This way, your pages don’t compete against each other. A meta description is what search engines tell searchers (organic traffic) about a page when showing search results. It’s also your best shot at convincing potential site visitors that you’ve got what they’re looking for. Taking the time to write a unique meta description yields results as customers are more likely to click on your link in the search results. There are also Shopify SEO expert services like ours where a team will help you right high-converting meta descriptions for you.

4. Add a Customer Reviews Section

The quickest way to gain the trust of consumers is to have excellent and authentic reviews on your website. There are several Shopify apps that you can download to add user generated reviews on your site. This also helps with SEO because it increases the word count of your product pages and encourages people to interact with your page, which keeps them around for a longer period of time (bonus points for your bounce rate!).

5. Display Related Products on Cart and Product Pages

Speaking of keeping consumers on your website for longer, another simple way to do this and increase your average order value is to show them more of products on each page! You can do this with the help of an app, like Cross Sell, which allows you to display related items on your product and cart pages.

6. Create an FAQ Section

Including an FAQ section on your product pages is an excellent way to optimize them for search rankings. Not only are you answering common questions that people are typing into Google, but you’re also helping potential buyers resolve their questions and concerns about your product, making them more informed and likely to add the product to their cart.   Advantages of a FAQ section include:

• You can resolve customer complaints or concerns before they escalate too high.
• FAQ points can be search terms around your niche, which boosts your SERP (search engine results page) rankings.
• Having good responses give visitors the assurance they need to trust your business.
• The FAQ section reduces your site’s bounce rate.

Instead of going off in your competitor’s direction, your FAQ is an opportunity to keep visitors on your platform. The longer a visitor stays on your website, the more likely they are to engage with a call to action.

7. Use Media to Grab Attention

When it comes to grabbing customers’ attention, you’ll have a better shot with images and video than with just sections of written content. Here are some benefits to including media between wordy sections of information:

• You give your readers’ eyes some time to rest from the strain of reading.
• Pictures say a thousand words and more, in one glance.
• You’ll get visitors thinking about your products (through the images you show).
• Pictures and videos tend to be easier to remember than paragraphs of text.

Not sure what kind of pictures to use? Each platform has the perfect type of images fit for various placements. For example, you cannot use the same image as both a product picture and an icon. It’s worthwhile to spend some time learning about image best practices for your store. Having good images is just one thing to consider. They’ll all need to be optimized for discovery before being published. Remember the keyword(s) you chose in step one? You’ll want to use your target keywords in images’ file names and alt tags, which are words that tell search engines what your images depict. Keep in mind, having images with a blank tag is as good to search engines as not having the photos in the first place. To make the process easier, you can install Plug In SEO to make sure you always optimize the needed elements on your website.

8. Keep Your Website Load Time Low

Although images and videos are great for your website, it’s easy to overdo it. The more files your website has to render, the slower your site may become.  The problem is that low-sized videos and images, accordingly, have low resolutions. So, you need to make sure your media files are of the best quality, while at the same time not negotiating on page load speed. The best way to do this is with a plugin like Plug In Speed installed on your Shopify store. You could also consider other methods to improve your store’s overall functionality.  With automatically adjusted images, Plug in Speed for Shopify ensures you maintain both the high quality and performance that your store’s visitors will enjoy.

9. Write Content Around Your Products

If there’s one strategy that’s tried, tested, and true for optimizing ecommerce websites, it’s content creation. The easiest way to explain its efficiency, again, lies in keyword optimization.  The more content you cover around your product line, the more traffic you’re set to attract. A few hours of research and writing can get you what other shop owners are willing to spend thousands on: traffic. This traffic could at first be new people learning about your business but, soon enough and with some effort, you can turn them into customers.  To get started, go back to your keyword strategy and create titles for blog posts. If we stick with our keyboard store example, you can start your research with a quick Google Trends check for popular search terms around this product. Once you have published content on your chosen titles and keywords, you can use Plug In SEO to optimize it for discovery.

10. Display Trust Badges

Trust Badges are simply icons you can add to your store to give customers more information about why your business is reputable and, well, trustworthy. There are apps that allow you to add these badges directly to your store and include options like:

•  Money-Back Guarantee
• Returns
• Payment Methods
• Customer Service Information
• Etc.
•  Trust badges are great for reducing bounce rate, which is an important factor in product page SEO.

11. Include a Social Media Strategy

Every ecommerce store benefits more from having a social media presence than not. You should look into creating a social media strategy so that a community grows organically around your brand. When done right, the follows, shares, and likes from social media end up being free traffic sources for your business. They allow your content and product links to further spread to potential customers.

12. Maintain an Archive of Past Season Pages

After a sales season, it’s tempting to turn off campaigns and unpublish pages that would now be out of context. However, you’re better off saving them and creating an archive that stacks as far back as you can. When ranking for a keyword, search engines often look at the age of a page. The older and more attention a page commands, the better it ranks. Make those old and often deleted content links work in your favor.

13. Optimize Your Store for Mobile Device Accessibility

Over 90% of the world’s internet users use mobile devices to connect with resources. This means that optimizing your store for mobile users is not an option. The easier your shop is to navigate, the less likely that visitors will leave before thoroughly going through the products they need. There are a variety of ways to optimize your shop and target mobile buyers through things like push notifications, too.

Bonus Tip: Schedule SEO Audits

When all of these steps have been completed, you should make it a habit to circle back to #1. Product Page SEO is not a one-off event. Remember that your competition is working just as hard to take that page 1 search result spot. SEO is a process much like eating. You can have your fill now, but soon you’ll need to eat again. Schedule regular optimization audits. It’s one way of maintaining and improving your rankings in the search results. Better yet, install Plug In SEO so you’ll know when there are shortfalls in your overall SEO.