How to Optimise a Product Page for SEO
The only page type that begins with text you did not write. A product page usually starts with a manufacturer description sitting identically on every other site selling the item. That single fact determines everything else about the page.
The Description Came From Somewhere Else
Most product pages open with copy the retailer did not write. It arrived in a supplier feed or was pasted from a manufacturer sheet, so the same paragraphs appear on every competitor's page for the same item.
How it gets there. Automatically, usually.
Supplier feeds populate descriptions, specifications and images at the point a product is added. That is efficient, it is how stores with thousands of items are possible, then it produces identical pages.
Why nobody notices. The page looks complete.
There is a description, there are specifications, there are images. Nothing signals that the words belong to somebody else. The page reads as finished.
Why this is unique to this page type. Everything else is yours.
A landing page, a service page and a blog post are written by the business. Only a product page starts with text the business neither wrote nor can claim, which is a different starting position entirely.
What it means for effort. The work is replacement.
On other page types the work is improving what you wrote. Here it is replacing what somebody else wrote, which is a larger and more valuable piece of work.
Why suppliers write it that way. For everybody.
Manufacturer copy is written to suit every retailer selling the item, which means it addresses no particular customer and makes no recommendation. That neutrality is why it reads as competent and persuades nobody.
What this page does not cover. Running a store.
Category structure, merchandising, feeds and checkout are covered in our ecommerce material. This is the on-page fundamentals applied to one product page.
Which Means You Are Competing With Identical Text
A page indistinguishable from a hundred others has nothing to compete on. Where every retailer shows the same words, whatever decides between them is not the description, because the description is the same.
What the situation actually is. A tie on content.
Everybody selling the item has the same paragraphs. Nothing about your page is better or worse on that material, so it cannot be the reason anybody chooses you.
What breaks the tie instead. Everything except the description.
Site standing, price, delivery, reviews and whatever the retailer added themselves. Only the last of those is on-page work, which is why block three matters.
Why rewriting is the highest value work. Nobody else will.
Most retailers leave supplied copy in place, because rewriting is slow and unglamorous. A retailer who does it on their important products is doing something the competition has declined to.
Where to start. Not everywhere.
A store with thousands of items cannot rewrite them all. Rewriting the products that actually sell is the whole of the available return. The rest can wait indefinitely.
What rewriting is not. Rearranging.
Reordering supplied sentences produces a variation on the same text. Writing about the item in your own terms, from what you know of it, is the thing that produces a different page.
What Only You Can Add
Five things a competitor selling the identical product cannot obtain. That unavailability is what makes them worth the effort, because everything else on the page can be copied from the same source you got it from.
Your own photographs. The most obvious and most skipped.
The item as you actually have it, photographed by you, including angles and details the manufacturer shots omit. Every competitor is using the same supplied images.
Who it suits and who it does not. Your judgement.
Which customer this is right for, which it is wrong for, then what they should look at instead. That is a recommendation the manufacturer will never make.
What you know from selling it. Accumulated experience.
What people ask before buying, what they get wrong, what comes back and why, what pairs with it. That knowledge exists nowhere except in your business.
Delivery and returns detail. Specific rather than general.
How this item ships, whether it needs two people, how long it takes, what happens if it does not fit. Genuine information for somebody deciding, unavailable elsewhere.
Genuine reviews. Yours alone.
What your customers said about this item. That is content nobody else has, which is block six.
Why these are defensible. They cannot be lifted.
A competitor can match your price and copy your layout. They cannot photograph your stock or reproduce what your customers told you, which is the only durable material on the page.
Variants Create Duplication
Options generate pages. A product in six colours and four sizes can produce dozens of addresses, each carrying nearly the same content. The decision about how to handle that is not automatic.
How the addresses appear. Platform behaviour.
Many systems create a separate address for each combination, else append the selection to the address. Nobody chose that and it happens as soon as options are configured.
What the problem is. Near-identical pages.
Dozens of pages differing by one word. None is clearly the definitive version, which is the same dilution described on our cannibalisation page arriving through a different route.
The decision to make. One page or many.
Either one page with the options selectable on it, else separate pages where the variants are genuinely different products. Both are defensible and the choice needs making deliberately.
When separate pages are right. Genuinely different searches.
Where people search for the specific variant rather than the product, a page for each is justified. Where they search for the product and then choose, one page is correct.
What the wrong choice costs. Diluted or thin.
Too many pages divides whatever the product has earned across all of them. Too few means somebody searching for a specific variant finds a general page. Neither is fatal and both are avoidable by deciding rather than accepting a default.
How the technical side works. Nomination.
Where you keep one definitive version, the other addresses can indicate which one that is. Our technical material covers how that works and its limits.
Products That Sell Out Or Retire
A product page has an end. Unlike every other page type in this set, the thing it describes stops existing. The decision about what happens then is commercial as much as technical.
Why deletion is usually wrong. The page earned something.
A product page that has been live for years may have links, standing and searches arriving at it. Deleting it discards all of that along with the product.
The options. Three.
Keep the page and state the item is unavailable, redirect it to the replacement, else redirect it to the category. Which is right depends on whether a successor exists.
When keeping it makes sense. Seasonal or returning stock.
An item coming back does not need its page removed. Marking it unavailable, with a date if you have one, serves the customer and preserves the page.
When redirecting makes sense. A genuine replacement.
A newer model of the same thing is what somebody arriving actually wants. Sending them there is more useful than a page explaining that something no longer exists.
What not to do. Send everything to the home page.
That is the default many stores apply, so it strands somebody who arrived for a specific item. Our site migrations material covers handling addresses properly.
Reviews On The Page
Genuine reviews add content that exists nowhere else, on a page type where almost everything else is shared. They must be real, which is a condition rather than a caveat.
Why they matter more here. The rest is identical.
On a page where the description is shared with every competitor, customer reviews are among the few genuinely unique things present. That makes them unusually valuable on this page type specifically.
What they contribute beyond selling. Language.
Customers describe products in the words other customers use, which frequently differ from the manufacturer's terms. That vocabulary is useful and it arrives without being written.
The condition. They must be genuine.
Written by people who bought the item, unedited except for obvious abuse. Anything else is fabrication. Our structured data material treats that as one of two fixed refusals.
How to get them at all. Ask, once.
Most retailers have no reviews because nobody asked. A short request after delivery, at the point somebody has formed a view, produces more than any incentive. It also costs nothing to set up once.
Why negative ones help. Credibility.
A product with only praise reads as filtered. A mixed picture is believable. It also filters customers for whom the item is wrong, which reduces returns.
What not to claim. That they affect ranking.
Reviews add content and assist decisions. Nothing here asserts they improve position, because that is not something we can support.
Do Not Mark Up What Is Not True
Structured descriptions of a product are an assertion made on your behalf. Price and availability must be current. Stating otherwise is a claim rather than a formatting error.
What markup does here. States facts.
It declares a price, whether the item is in stock and what the reviews say. Those are assertions about the world rather than descriptions of a page.
Why stale figures are a problem. They are wrong.
A declared price that no longer matches the page is a false statement about what you charge. Availability that says in stock when nothing remains is the same.
Why it happens. Markup and page drift apart.
Prices change in one system and the declaration is generated by another. Nobody is deceiving anybody and the result is the same.
The ratings rule. One fixed refusal.
Ratings must come from real reviews. Our structured data material argues this in full and we will not implement otherwise, which is a position rather than a preference.
Where this is covered. The schema material.
What to mark up and what not to is a subject of its own. See also service pages and landing pages for the other page types. The full series is on the on page SEO guide.
Rewrite the products
that actually
sell.
A store with thousands of items cannot rewrite them all, nor does it need to. Most retailers leave supplied copy in place because rewriting is slow and unglamorous, which is exactly why doing it on your important products is worth something.
What only you can supply:
A competitor can match your price. They cannot photograph your stock.
Every guide.
One practice.
What a page says about itself, headings, keywords, search intent, images, page types, user behaviour, credibility and how to review an existing site.
