Think about the last purchase you made. No matter where your interest in that book/4K UHD TV/holistic health supplement/vegan cat food/VR headset for the metaverse (products listed in order of usefulness and importance) came from I’ll place a sportsman’s bet (because I prize honour more than cash…plus I’m risk-averse) that search was a vital part of your buying process. 

Whether you stumbled across said product on a marketing blog (VR headset you’ll use once but always keep in shot on a shelf for when you’re on a Zoom call with people ), on a video in the depths of YouTube (that health supplement that apparently all legendary billionaires consume as their sole source of food twice a day, before and after the 20 minutes of sleep they get, because it’s the one thing which only the truly great 0.2% of people on the planet do – and that video has 3 billion views so it must be legit) or a friend told you about it, you will have at some point turned to Google, or your preferred search engine, to do a bit of research, compare your options, find the best price and so on. 

Ecommerce SEO is a big deal for this very simple fact: search is an absolutely essential part of the buying process. And we use search at different parts of the journey, dipping in and out as our needs and intent shift. The middle is very messy as Google has explained to us all in detail. 

Some journeys might be quite linear from a search perspective, we may have had our interest piqued outside of search and we’re now just going straight for a price comparison between some known retailers. Other journeys might be super complicated with customers reading articles, skimming through product pages, watching videos, and then spinning off to look at a related but different product that might better suit their needs. 

How do you make sure that you have the best chance of being in the mix? By having the best optimised site you can. And well written eCommerce SEO content is essential to this optimisation. Which isn’t easy when you have 50 different styles of red running shoes to sell…

User intent and its importance in retail SEO

We all know that Google cares a lot about users and what they are trying to do through their search engine. They want to match up the most relevant content to a user’s search queries, so understanding intent is vital to Google. So by extension it also has to be important for any brand creating retail SEO content. 

What does this mean practically? 

Don’t see product pages as just about a transaction. Yes, for sure, a customer is eventually (hopefully) going to be on a product page and click add to basket and then go through to buy. And you definitely want your product pages to be optimised to aid conversion. But people use product pages for more than just buying. 

A product page is where they’ll want to delve into benefits and features of the product. They may very well then disappear somewhere else for a bit to do further research, maybe do some comparisons with other products, or check prices elsewhere. 

When writing content for a product page think about the different scenarios a customer might be in when they arrive here. Are they just browsing? Doing research? In that final stage where they are considering exactly which VR headset they want to use to explore the metaverse as a fancy paperweight next year? 

Your job should be to provide as much rich information as possible to deal with as many user needs as you can. Without completely swamping the customer and creating a monstrous page so deep that the Loch Ness monster could hide in its furthest reaches and never be found. 

Content that works well for ecommerce SEO should be heavily focused on the user and what they need, because the more relevant the content is to the user the more favourably Google will view it.

SEO for ecommerce product pages

So what should go on your product pages? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this. But if we keep our customer focused hat on, from a content perspective good product pages should be made up of:.

• Optimised page title and meta description – Including relevant information about your product, such as the name, model number etc. in the page title is essential. And try to make the meta description benefit-led with a call to action, to compel users to click through.  
• Unique product description – Google has said previously that it doesn’t apply any negative consequences to sites that use manufacturer’s descriptions , or the same description for products where there is some small variance (e.g. different colours for a model of toaster). But nonetheless offering unique descriptions for products can be useful to users. 
• Answers to common questions – There are a couple of ways to approach this. You could weave answers to common questions into the product description and supporting content. Think about the five or six most common questions a customer might have about this product. It could be about the materials, manufacturing details, use cases, benefits or anything else. Then put these into the content almost like preemptive objection handling. The other approach is to have a separate FAQ section of the page.
• High quality images (don’t forget the alt tags) – Good product images will help customers get a feel for the product and entice them to buy. Make sure they are properly optimised for the web so that they don’t negatively impact your page speed and make the page dirty from a CO2 perspective (lots of big images = lots of data transfer which makes your page carbon intensive). Remember to include alt tags to aid in optimisation and for accessibility. 
• Use of structured data – This is a technical point for when it comes to implementing the content, but using structured data will help search engines better understand the content of the page. It will also improve the likelihood of your pages featuring in rich results which can improve impressions. Clicks, CTR, and ultimately sales. 

Don’t forget category level pages

From an SEO perspective category level pages are really important. From a customer perspective, many customers will start out with a broader level search and then narrow down during their journey. So a well optimised category page can reach people early in the journey and bring in high levels of traffic, even if the customer isn’t in ‘conversion mode’. And of course these higher level pages are important in terms of helping users and search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of your site, and move around efficiently. 

Making sure that category level pages have good content on them is important, just as much as on those product pages that people convert on. 

Content on a category level page should help orient the user and provide information that may be of use to them. As always consider under what circumstances a user would end up on this page. The tendency can be to see this sort of supporting content as simply a way to bung in a load of extra keywords to the page, but that really helps nobody including you.

It is also an ideal opportunity to provide more context for search engines as well, so that they better understand the focus of the page. And of course some relevant internal links should feature in the mix. 

Quite often these bits of text are found at the bottom of the page, like a footer. But if you’re creating content that is genuinely of use to the customer then having them at the head of the page might make more sense, as many people may not scroll down and see the copy. 

Good content for retail is just good content

When writing content for retail SEO you can definitely overthink and over-egg things. With solid keyword research in place and a customer-focused approach it’s best to just write naturally and think about what customers would want. Because in the end, that’s who the search engines are trying to help. 

So just write good content and don’t think that retail SEO, from a content perspective, is really all that different from any other quality content.

As seen in Performance marketing world.