On-page SEO for E-commerce

On-page optimization is one of the 4 pillars of e-commerce SEO. The goal is to help Google understand the relevance of a page for keywords and user intent by optimizing elements like meta titles, text, images, and videos.

In an ideal world, just writing naturally (“write as you speak”) and creating content that users want would be good enough for Google to reward your site with high rankings and lots of traffic. Despite its growing sophistication, however, Google still lacks a good understanding of implicit meaning.

In other words, we still need to optimize content to perform optimally in search.

Title tags - the heading of your search result on Google - are some of the most important ranking signals to Google and the first element from your site that searchers will see.

Technically, title tags are not on the page, but we include them in this section because they often match the H1 heading (the headline of your page). In fact, Google might automatically rewrite titles that venture too far away from H1 headings, which can lead to suboptimal titles in search results.

Good titles help users quickly understand the context and value of a page. Write a title that appeals to the user intent behind a keyword.

Look at the titles of pages that perform in top positions for your target keyword and think about how to stand out within the best practices of title optimization:

1. Stick to a limit of 60 characters to avoid Google cutting your titles off
2. Avoid generic titles like “homepage”.
3. Aim to include at least the main keyword.
4. Add unique selling propositions like “cheap,” “deals,” “shipping price,” or “free returns” when applicable.
5. Optionally, add your brand name at the end of a title.

When starting out, creating a template you can use to define titles for your product and category pages makes sense. Over time, optimizing these title templates allows you to quickly make an impact on a large number of pages.

Templates include different elements like your brand name, keywords, and value propositions. An example of a page title template for a category page could be:

“Premium {category name} | Free shipping | {brand}”

One resulting title from this template could be “Premium women's slippers | Free shipping | The Slipper Store”.

Start building title templates in Google Sheets or Excel and test different variations over time to find the best one. You can carry learnings or templates over to meta descriptions and headings as well.

The text on a page tells Google what the page is about, and how relevant it is for a keyword. The goal of on-page text optimization is to provide information that makes it easier for users to make decisions.

For example, good product descriptions carry key pieces of information like size, price, or fit. Google understands the relationship between such parameters and products. As a result, having more information on a page generally improves its rankings in organic search.

Good e-commerce content is customer-oriented: it helps users make decisions and answers their most important questions about a topic. Since buyer journeys are rarely linear, you should include links to other products, categories, or blog articles in your content and use descriptive words to help users and Google find all pages and understand their relevance to each other

When optimizing on-page text, keep in mind that requirements vary depending on the type of page you're optimizing: product page, category page, or blog article. When creating or optimizing text for product pages, think about all the questions customers might ask about the product and try to anticipate them.

The structure of your content, expressed in headings (h-tags), is a representation of breadth and depth. They tell users and search engines how many sub-topics you cover and how deeply you cover them. When writing on-page text, you should consider expanding on both of these qualities.

The most important heading is the H1, because it defines the page's topic. But headings 2 through 6 help users and search engines understand the structure and sub-topics of your content. Aim to include keywords in headings, as long as they are useful to the reader.

Google understands what formats users expect to see for a specific search, so you should try to format your content to meet those expectations. For example, searchers looking for “the 13 best buttoned-down shirts for winter” expect a list. Add a snappy list of products at the beginning of your article and then elaborate on each item.

Keep content light and easy to skim using bullet points, tables, and bolding. Avoid extravagant analogies, stories, or metaphors. You don’t want to sound mechanical, but SEO content is about answering a searcher’s questions by writing simply and clearly and getting to the point.

Google has been moving towards making search results more visual, which means images have become very important for SEO.

However, Googlebot — the program Google sends to your site to download, understand and rank content — can’t “see” images. It relies on other indicators to understand visual elements. Optimizing these indicators is known as image or video SEO.

To infer what an image is showing, Google looks at the image file name and alt tag. So make sure to include your main keyword in the alt tag and write a descriptive name. Videos don’t have alt tags, so you should give them a descriptive file name.

Both images and videos benefit from specified dimensions and large resolutions. Google supports BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG for images and any provider for videos besides Youtube.

The relevance of your images and videos to the content is important. Like it does with internal links, Google evaluates how the images and videos relate to the surrounding text.

For example, placing a video about cats in an article about mattresses might not be a good idea. But it’s a very good idea to include a video about choosing the right mattress size in a buying guide for mattresses. Ask yourself how the image or video adds to the content.