What's the best way to optimize product pages?

[MockoB]

Everybody knows content is all. But it seems it is not the case with ps and tb I believe. From my experience with my current ps 1.5 shop it is hard to optimize product pages for search engines. The only thing that google sees is the meta title and description, nothing about long description. I made my short description as rich snippet but what about the description, google doesn't care about it. For my products I have decent unique descriptions, some are more than 1000 words. Submitted manually the pages in webmaster tools etc. My competitors are using other ecommerce platforms and they got 1/10 of what I got and rank way better (and it is not link building). All they got is 20 lines of text per each item and everything is on one single CMS page! For example if I sell vegetables, for every single one I got description on the product page with explanation about the uses of it etc. My competitors have 1/10 of my description for every vegetable, but all descriptions are written on one single CMS page. And that way believe it or not they rank better for all known vegetables... It seems the blog topics are ranking better but it is not like landing on product page after all, you have to count on links within the page to redirect the customers... And if I now decide to convert all my descriptions to blog topics I am pretty sure google will complain about duplicate content...

Is there right way to optimize product pages? If someone has success, please share your experience.

[wakabayashi]

How old is your site? How old are the sites of your competitors? In our case category sites are much more important than product pages, so my focus is there. Does your site rank well in general (not product pages)? Better than the competitors?

[nickon]

Funny this came up today. Yesterday I was trying to convince a fiend to setup an eshop with tb, but as soon as I mentioned that it was a clone of ps I got a big fat no. He insisted to use magento because it handeled seo much better. As I have never tried magento I was going to ask someone here on what their opinion is.

[MockoB]

My site is 4 years old, not very competitive niche. After some optimization and 6 months I was on the first page for most important keywords, now I'm stuck on third place. The most important is that it is behavior I noticed not just with my site and competition. I really think if I make category for every single product it will rank better ... @nickon from that I read about magento (never tried it) it is way ahead tb concerning SEO. Not to mention basic things as snippets, reviews, canonical tags, pagination ... nothing is solved on ps. And I don't think it is solved on tb excluding the default template. So your friend got point but there are many more things which tb is better in I think.

[moy2010]

Don't optimize for search engines, optimize for your e-commerce users. Giving your customers a wonderful commerce experience is far more important, the positioning in the search engines will follow that.

[alwayspaws]

@moy2010 said in What's the best way to optimize product pages?:

Don't optimize for search engines, optimize for your e-commerce users. Giving your customers a wonderful commerce experience is far more important, the positioning in the search engines will follow that.

Excellent advice!

[wakabayashi]

I really have to disagree with you @nickon and @MockoB. We have really good google rankings with in some niches. It was already good with ps. The time when SEO was a technical thing is over. Sure you have to follow the most important guidelines. But nowdays you get the rankings with great content. If you have valuable content for your customers, you will rank well. If you don't rank, these could be the reasons: - Give Google time. I always calculate with one year, till I expect good rankings. It's depending on the niche of course. - You have no quality links. Links are still important. They can boost a lot. - Your content is not as good as you think. It's very important to understand the user intention. Take them as early on their customer journey.

Let me show you an example from our latest project: https://www.spielezar.ch/blog/spielregeln/backgammon-spielregeln

We sell boardgames, but this article does just explain the rules of backgammon. Nothing else. We invest a lot of time, to write better articles than the competitors. Put nice pictures in it. Look for good internal linking. Will this raise our conversion rate? Surely not. It goes down. 99% of the visitors of this tutorial won't buy anyting. 90% of the readers even leave the page immediately after they found their needed information.

Still all these articles are making our business working. People get to know our brand. You generate trust. Google understands, that we are an authority in boardgames. It will not only help us to rank for "backgammon rules" also in general. You can hope for some links with such content. In short: your revenue will go up!

This shop is only online for 6 months. The rankings are still modest. But we have already overtaken some five year old competitors in google. This guys are on magento. But that doesn't matter. They could be on ps or tb or whatever. They don't have any great content.

[MockoB]

@moy2010 i do exactly that, but you know what? Those ungrateful customers just refuse to link my site, and leave reviews! I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here experiencing same. And please tell me if I don't receive links and don't try to be more google friendly, how will the customers find my site after all?

[wakabayashi]

That's normal. Our customer don't link us too. Or at least 99% of them won't like us. But in the example above, I will search for backgammon federations and clubs. I will write them, that we have made content about backgammon and asking for a link. I take time to write this things. I always write personal. Make custom compliments for their website and so on.

You are right. It's really hard to get quality backlinks. Still for your competitiors it's not easier. So in a niche you don't have to have hundreds of links.

Is it your first project? Then all is even harder. When you have done some projects in the past, you can get link from there, use the expierence and the contacts. Really most important is: Never give up.

What is your website?

[MockoB]

Sure @wakabayashi it's great example your article. I know from my experience that blog articles rank well after time. But my question was why not same article written in the product long description doesn't rank at all? I always do things from customer's perspective, I'm customer before being merchant. Yes it's my first project and I'm planning other stores with tb in future, just need to have some time ...

[moy2010]

Use social networks, paid ads, create great content as @wakabayashi says. There are just so many ways to get customers to visit your website, try not to focus on SEO and get stressed about not having a top position.

[wakabayashi]

Maybe it's about the search intention. I recently heard something like that: When google understands/believs, that the user want's to buy something, you can only rank with a shop site (category or product site for example). If google understands, that 99% don't want to buy anything, then you wan't rank with a shop site. With shop site I don't mean the domain, but the art of the site (cart buttons & stuff).

I really don't know, if this is true. It's surely not as strict, as this guy told me. But it's sounds somehow logical to me.

[wakabayashi]

@moy2010 said in What's the best way to optimize product pages?:

Use social networks, paid ads, create great content as @wakabayashi says. There are just so many ways to get customers to visit your website, try not to focus on SEO and get stressed about not having a top position.

Yeah this is true. I am not really strong with social networks. But what you can try: search for groups, which are talking about your topic and seed your articles there.

[nickon]

@wakabayashi I also disagree with you :-) Customers will have to find you first. To find you, you must rank in google (or pay ads). To rank in google you will have to give google what it wants. Google needs good metadata. Magento (they say, I have not even touch it) gives google better data. Sure you can take care of links write artciles etc but image you have 10.000 products that change every few days. That;s not easy to handle manually. But I am not that technical. I haven't compared tb(ps) to magento on that level. I am sure @lesley is an expert on this. I am very exited to see what we will read https://thirtybees.com/guides/ on these issues

[wakabayashi]

@nickon said in What's the best way to optimize product pages?:

To rank in google you will have to give google what it wants.

That's what all is about. And google mainly want's good content. I have never said you have to optimize 10000 products. I prefer to rank with category pages, if the search intention is about buying. Only if it's a clear brand search, I will invest time, to optimize a product site.

But to be honest 90% of my invested seo time, goes into our blog.

About which metadata are you talking about?

[nickon]

@wakabayashi Metadata. (don''t ask me what exactly) They told me that magento stores that data in a better way and google can access it better and get better data. As I said I am not that technical :-) A comparsion of tb and magento would be nice at some point Me, I am creating a wordpress site in a subfolder and start blogging :-)

[wakabayashi]

That's a good idea! Why don't you use the thirtybees blog module?

[nickon]

@wakabayashi because tb does not want to play with my server. There is an mysql issue. :-(

[nickon]

hey @mdekker https://forum.thirtybees.com/topic/634/migration-from-1-6-failed/28 remeber :-) no option to update mysql to a newer version :-(

[nickon]

I asked if we could upgrade the mysql server and since this is on a shared vpn that this option is not available atm

[nickon]

yes

[nickon]

At some point I will have to make the choise to eighter stay with this -decent secure- server. or move to something bigger and faster. Not realy thought about it before to be honest. Atm I have 15GB storage 4GB ram (shared I think) unlimited traffic,emails etc. It was a good time to mirgrate to tb (and was really exited about it) but after that failed I desided to do the best I can with ps (for now) and move to transformer theme. And by the amount of work I am putting in this theme to make the transision I am terrified of what might happened if I switched platform also :-)

[Traumflug]

@nickon

They told me that magento stores that data in a better way and google can access it better and get better data.

Can they also express this a bit less vague?

I mean, changing "storage" of meta data is pretty easy. But one would need a more precise description of what's needed. What exactly should go there.

[nickon]

As I said I never touched magento neigher am I an expert on this topic. At some point I guess @lesley who is an expert on this will write some articles about this

[DaoKakao]

@nickon When i've made a choise between PS and Magento, there was one thing which lead to edge PS over Magento: it was noted everywhere, that ANY Magento installation NEED to get additional coding. So, as a lazy man, i've decided to value my time and not to dive deeply in the coding.

Summarizing all that, i've chose TB/PS because it has not so high entrance price, having a lot of features at the same time.