So, you’ve done a killer job making sure your Ecommerce site’s homepage is optimized to rank well in Google. You’ve got a smoothly functioning on-site search and have a helpful site map. What more is there to do? Optimize your product pages. Yes, optimizing every single one of those product detail pages really does matter. In fact, this is one of the most important, if not the most important, tasks when it comes to getting a real return on the effort you put into Ecommerce SEO. First, this is the place your customers will come to find information on your products and, hopefully, purchase them. On top of that, online searches for specific products are much more likely to turn into sales than more generic queries. A consumer searching for “omega 8005 juicer” is probably much closer to making a purchase than someone simply searching for “juicer.” The first searcher already knows what he wants, while the second is probably still researching.

So what can you do to improve customers’ chances of finding your product pages? Here are just a few simple tips to help you get started.

  1. Write good, original product descriptions. Don’t just rely on the boring old descriptions from the manufacturer. Search engines prefer unique, helpful content to reused and will rank accordingly. Have your marketing folks write up some good descriptions, or put some time and thought into them yourself.
  2. Tag your page properly. Make sure that your META tags all make good use of keywords likely to lead consumers to the correct page. It’s important to not just use keywords because they’re popular, but rather because they’re relevant.
  3. Make sure that customers can reach your product pages quickly. Keep them only two or three clicks away from your homepage.
  4. Include customer reviews on each product page. This is a great way of generating free, unique content and will also help your customers to evaluate your products.
  5. Create short URLs that contain keywords. The URL for a product should contain the keyword determined by your SEO specialist to be the most relevant and important for your company.
  6. Make sure that your product images are optimized. Don’t neglect providing ALT text for each.
  7. Include links to similar or related products. This will help your internal linking campaign plus help customers to find what they want.
  8. Make sure you have only one URL per product. You don’t want duplicate URLs any more than you want duplicate content text.