More often than not, many companies either overlook or struggle with product page optimisation. Consequently they then fail to maximise traffic to these important pages. Below are some tips on how to best optimise your product pages to gain more traffic.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the critical steps you must follow before optimising your content. Once you have come up with a list of good volume keywords you then can craft web copy that reflects what your product page is about.
2. Optimise Meta Data
Meta data are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. They are used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page. Meta data is very important in gaining user click-through from SERPs and title tags are important for improving the rankings. To ensure that your meta information is optimised you need to use relevant keywords that describe your product. These need to be used in the meta title, meta description, alt tags (for images) and headings.
3. Optimise Your Product Description For The Long Tail
You can further optimise your product pages by using key phrases on the product description. This will result in the improvement of the long tail performance of the page.
4. Avoid Duplicate Content
When there are multiple pieces of identical content on your site, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. Therefore, you need to create unique descriptions for each product page and keep all variations of a product (i.e. colour, size) to just one URL. Canonical tags can be utilised to deal with duplicate content as they will tell search engines that certain similar URLs are actually one and the same. Sometimes you have products or content that is accessible under multiple URLs, or even on multiple websites. Using a canonical URL (an HTML link tag with attribute rel=canonical) these can exist without harming your rankings.
5. Correct Schema Mark-up
Schema mark-up is a code that you put on your website to help search engines more effectively understand your content. This data helps the search engines to interpret the information on your web pages more effectively so they can return more relevant results for search queries.
6. Site Speed and Performance Through Image Optimisation
Site speed is important for your site’s user experience and conversions. A common issue is big image files taking a long time to load therefore images should be compressed and formatted (for example it is best to use JPEG for photos and PNG for images with less colours) as well as the dimensions (check the maximum width and height that the image will be displayed).
All Response Media Viewpoint
As always, it is imperative to remain up to date with the latest trends and apply best onsite optimisation practices. Category and product pages can drive high levels of targeted traffic and are a key optimisation element that should be for your site too.
