Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do you make product pages unique when there are thousands of products?
-
When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each?
Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail?
Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing...
Notes:
- Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page.
- There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.
-
you can try any page editor plugin if you are using WordPress CMS. It's easy to use them to make the product design. You can see here some samples of product design.
-
Our dependent information is completed like katom and has the most records feasible which we thought is relevant article.
-
This is an amazing answer (if there was an option to mark it as such, I would have). Thank you.
You, sir/madam, are a machine and I'm not surprised this has taken you years. Unfortunately, I don't work in-house for this particular ecommerce site so I only have a few hours a month to work on this. The site's been around for a few years, the physical department store itself over a century, and I've only been working on it for over a year. There's over 10,000 product pages split across hundreds of categories and there are hundreds of separate landing pages based on brand, range, designer, sets, etc (I've been culling a lot of these...).
The vast majority of products contain duplicate descriptions across the whole brand range, so I've mainly been getting rid of those to strengthen the category page so that there's not dozens to hundreds of duplicate paragraphs shared with the category page. But the product pages look so bare with what's left of the description.
I think I'll take a leaf from your book though and go through the most popular categories, aiming for 100 words per product. With smaller ecommerce sites, this would seem obvious to me, but I just wasn't sure whether time could be better spent elsewhere with a larger site.
-
take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each?
If your website is already up and running this is a way to prioritize which pages to do first.
Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing...
We have thousands of product pages. All of our product pages have at least 100 words of unique content and at least one photo that we have taken at our office. Most product pages have a few hundred words of unique content.
When a new product arrives, I take one to my office and write a page about it. A lot of what we sell is unique tools suited for a specific industry and I write what this tool is used for, how it is used, how to select it. If you are selling something, you should be able to explain it easily to people. That is what we believe.
Our better selling products have 500 to 1000 words of unique content plus multiple photos. As we receive email questions from potential customers we often add them to the product description. We intentionally write information about characteristics of products that have resulted in a return. We believe that it is better to kill a few sales than accept a return, especially if the return comes back in less than brand new condition.
Our best selling products usually have the same description described above PLUS one or two separate article pages about how to select the product, how to use, how to maintain, how to repair. If the tool us used for a specific type of work we often have articles about that type of work. As an example, if we sell kitchen knives we might have articles about how to slice vegetables, hot to slice meat.
Our retail websites have more pages of content about the products that we sell and the activities that they are used in than they have product pages. These article pages pull in more traffic than product pages and we make money from ads that are displayed on those pages. About 1/3 of our sales arrive at our site through a content page, about 1/3 arrive on a product pages and 1/3 are people who directly navigate to the website.
Content is the strategy for producing all of our income. Our retail sites have large content libraries and our information sites have small stores. All pages display ads, even product pages, but ads from our direct competitors are usually blocked.
We are very careful about the products that we sell. We only sell products that we know enough about to write substantive content. We only sell products that will be around for a while. We can't justify writing content for temporary products. If we have a new product that we are uncertain about we write a short description, then after we have sold a number of them we get right to work on substantive content, that usually increases the sales because the rankings go up and more long tail traffic arrives.
None of this was built overnight. It has taken years. It has been built a few products at a time, a few pages each time we add new products. We are a small three person company with 1.5 people working to service sales and 1.5 working on content. We work on content every day, every day, every day. Content is the focus, sales occur as they occur.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will it upset Google if I aggregate product page reviews up into a product category page?
We have reviews on our product pages and we are considering averaging those reviews out and putting them on specific category pages in order for the average product ratings to be displayed in search results. Each averaged category review would be only for the products within it's category, and all reviews are from users of the site, no 3rd party reviews. For example, averaging the reviews from all of our boxes products pages, and listing that average review on the boxes category page. My question is, will this be doing anything wrong in the eyes of Google, and if so how so? -Derick
On-Page Optimization | | Deluxe0 -
Product content length & links within product description
Hello, I have questions regarding content length and links within descriptions. With our ecommerce site, we have thousands of products, each with a unique description. In the product description, I have links to the parent category and grandparent category (if it has one) in the main product text which is generally about 175 words. Then I have a last paragraph that's about 75 words that includes links to our main homepage and our main product catalogue page. Is the content length long enough? I used to use text that was 500 words, and shortening it I still rank when launching new products, so I don't think an increase in text length will have any additional benefit. I do see conflicting information when I do searches, with some people recommending a minimum of 300 words and some saying to try and go a 1000 for category pages. In regards to the links, I noticed a competitor has stopped following this format, so I'm unsure if I should keep going too. Is it too many links to have each of the products link back to the main catalogue and homepage? Is it good to have links with anchor text to the categories a product is in? There are breadcrumbs on the page with these links already. There are already have heaps of links on our pages (footer, and a right sidebar with image links to relevant categories), so my pages do get flagged for too many links. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | JustinBSLW0 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
NOINDEX, FOLLOW on product page - how about images indexing?
Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird12290 -
Should I add PDF manuals to my product pages?
Hello. A lot of the products I sell on my e-commerce site are very technical. I decided to add PDF data sheets, manuals etc on each of the product pages to improve the customer experience. Now I am not sure if it was the best thing to do. I have noticed a couple of times that the PDF is out ranking the product page in the SERP. For a few products, the PDF ranks but the product page doesn't. Anyone got any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Page rank check
Hello everyone, How long should I wait to see if page rank for optimized pages have improved? cheers
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Change in Product Name
My site - http://www.guru99.com/quick-test-professional-qtp-tutorial.html Currently caters to an automation testing product from HP called Quick Test Professional popularly know and searched as QTP Recently HP changed the product name from QTP to HP Functional Test. Considering this , what do I do with exiting QTP pages and how do I optimize the site moving ahead...
On-Page Optimization | | krishrun0