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
-
Page Optimization Error
Hi, I am trying to track a page optimization feature for one of my project, https://shinaweb.com but i keep getting this below error: "PAGE OPTIMIZATION ERROR
On-Page Optimization | | shinawebnavid
There was a problem loading this page. Please make sure the page is loading properly and that our user-agent, rogerbot, is not blocked from accessing this page." I checked robots.txt file, it all looks fine. Not sure what is the problem? Is it a problem with Moz or the website?0 -
What is the best meta description for Category Pages, Tag Pages and Main Article?
Hi, I want to index all my categories and tags. But I fear about duplicating the meta description. for example: I have a tag name "Learn Stock Market", a category name "Learning", and a main article "What is Stock Market". What is your suggestion for meta description of these three pages that looks great for seo google?
On-Page Optimization | | mbmozmb0 -
Is it better to keep a glossary or terms on one page or break it up into multiple pages?
We have a very large glossary of over 1000 industry terms on our site with links to reference material, embedded video, etc. Is it better for SEO purposes to keep this on one page or should we break it up into multiple pages, a different page for each letter for example? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | KenW0 -
What is on page links?
Hi - i would like to know exactly what an on page link is? i understand the linking system however cant work what exactly what an on page link is? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OasisLandDevelopment0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680 -
One site with one product or multi product website
Lets suppose that i have 10 NICHE products under me. Should i make one site for each product or one site overall. If i make 1 site for each product i get several advantages Domain name has keyword Title tags etc will be dedicated to one keyword only. Disavantage - Backlinking for each domain will become tougher. Advantage of one site onl Good management Seo / backlinks becomes easier Blogging to attract traffic becomes easier Can target a lot of keywords through business blogging Disadvantages Can become messy with unimportant keywords gaining importance. SO WHAT DO YOU THINK??? One site per product or One site for all products?
On-Page Optimization | | hith2340 -
Related products - random products or static
Hello, I was curious about where to get related products from. Currently I just grab some random products from the same category. Would there be any benefit to always linking to the same related products on a product page? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | nux0 -
Are blank Product Review pages bad for SEO?
Hi there, I'm running a new e-commerce site (BoatOutfitters.com) and have a question about our product review pages. On our current campaign, we have a lot of duplicate page content errors. When we export the data, it's almost all blank product review pages (since we are new, we don't have that many product reviews yet). Our product reviews aren't run through javascript, so we originally did not add them to a robots.txt file - however, I'm now wondering if it's worse to have all of these duplicate blank pages, or is it not affecting our SEO at all? Should we just wait until these products have reviews which will benefit our SEO and then they won't be considered "duplicate pages" - right? Sorry if this has been answered before - new here at SEO Moz and just looking for some help. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BoatOutfitters0