Marketers waste search engine opportunities when they publish basic product detail pages.
The practice of ranking a product page in organic search results is subtle and detailed. While you can focus on dozens of technical aspects, the content makes your product detail page unique.
Here are five content tactics for better product page rankings.
Questions answered
Questions on ecommerce product detail pages typically take one of two forms: “frequently asked questions” or “user-generated.” Both fit well into Google’s Experience, Knowledge, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) framework and otherwise provide critical long-tail keywords.
The FAQ approach makes it easy to mark up structured data, like Schema.org, to help search engines understand the purpose of a page. It can also provide product specifications and other detailed information.
Newegg, for example, deploys user-generated questions and answers.
Newegg deploys user-generated questions on its product pages. Click on the image to enlarge.
Product Reviews
User-generated reviews can also differentiate a product detail page for search engines and shoppers.
Reviews are similar to questions in that they can (i) employ structured data markup, (ii) encourage trust, and (iii) insert long-tail keywords. Reviews are also eligible for rich snippets in organic listings, which increases clicks.
Search optimizer Bruce Clay reported in March 2024 that at least one user-generated reviews campaign increased search traffic to an e-commerce site by 80%.
Huckberry, the men’s clothing website, places customer reviews on its product pages.
Huckberry includes user-generated reviews on all of its product detail pages. Click on the image to enlarge.
Guides
A detailed guide on a full-funnel product page can take shoppers through the typical stages of a purchasing journey: attention, interest, desire, and action.
Apple uses tabs on its product pages. For example, a shopper browsing the long MacBook Pro product details page finds a section about the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips used in that laptop. Buyers can “dive deeper into M3 chips.”
The guide helps guide shoppers through the purchasing journey while boosting search engine rankings.
Apple uses detailed guides on product detail pages.
Tables
Tabular data can differentiate a product detail page for shoppers and search engines. An informative, easy-to-read table can keep the buyer on the page and discourage bounce.
Additionally, tables with product specifications and features provide essential keywords for search engines and facilitate structured data and rich snippets.
Wayfair organizes product specifications into an HTML table. This format is good for both buyers and search engines. Click on the image to enlarge.
Descriptions
Product descriptions are last on this list of ideas, but first in their ability to impact search rankings.
I’ve written several thousand articles for practical ecommerce. One of my favorites is a post from 2016 titled “How to ‘Craft’ Product Descriptions for Ecommerce,” which features through the process of creating a tablespoon description, concluding with this:
Hungry for chicken noodles or creamy clam chowder? This soup spoon has a large bowl for delivering crackers and broth to your mouth. In fact, this soup spoon can hold about three times more soupy goodness than a standard table spoon. You can take three times as many bites or buy this tablespoon and drink it well.
Product descriptions are an excellent opportunity to include key phrases in a very natural way.
This Star Trek t-shirt includes a detailed description of the television episode it depicts, adding specific key phrases. Click on the image to enlarge.
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