What are optimized product pages?

Optimization is one of the hottest buzzwords in the ecommerce world because of fast-paced growth at which the industry moves. The fluidity of customer demand and the rapid development of technology have forced ecommerce business owners to stay on their feet, optimizing their sites for SEO value and to improve customer engagement.

Newer ecommerce business owners may not be familiar with product page or landing page optimization, though. Even tech-savvy business owners may not fully understand the extent of what product page optimization is.

What is an optimized product page?

An optimized product page is simply one that is designed not only to be found via search engines, but also convert browsers into buyers.

Search engine optimization will greatly help your ecommerce business, especially if market competition is tough. Appearing in the top results of any prominent search engine is the end-goal for optimizing product pages. There are a handful of ways to optimize these pages for better search results:

• Use high-quality images to sell products
• Add more than one image
• Include keywords relevant to the product in the page's title tags and product descriptions
• Share testimonials and customer reviews
• Make sure image spacing is good so things aren't too cluttered
• Incorporate video descriptions and views
• Consistent branding and logo placement

While driving traffic to your homepage is important, it's arguably more critical to get customers to product pages. These pages are the parts of your site that are actually doing the selling, or at least working toward converting visitors into buyers.

Without these visual elements, customers aren't as likely to convert. A recent industry study found more than three-quarters of Web users failed to buy a particular product or item when they didn't recognize the logo (1).

What should you avoid?

If you're not entirely familiar with optimizing product pages, you'll need to avoid the following pitfalls:

• Poor product descriptions, including generic ones written by manufacturers
• No reviews, case studies or testimonials
• Not optimizing keywords based on search results and demand
• Titles that aren't unique to your website
• An anonymous URL
• Duplicate content
• No internal linking or improper backlinks

What metrics can measure success?

If you're looking to drive traffic to your product pages specifically, you'll need to determine a handful of metrics to gauge how these sections of the website are performing. You can use the following units of measurement to determine the success of a given product page:

• Daily, weekly and monthly unique visitors
• Active users for the same amount of time
• Average session time, or how long customers are on a particular page
• Bounce rate
• Daily, weekly and monthly retention rate
• Average customer spend
• Customer acquisition cost
• Customer lifetime value

By optimizing your product pages specifically, you have a greater chance of driving conversions on your website. While it's important to develop traffic to the home page, ecommerce business owners must optimize product pages for higher search results. Once product pages are designed for SEO, more customers are likely going to visit these specific pages and have a higher chance of making a purchase since they were directed to what they were originally shopping for.