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.
- topic:timeago_earlier,5 years
-
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
-
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | Oct 9, 2019, 8:02 PM | Aaron.be1 -
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 | Dec 14, 2016, 2:14 PM | KenW0 -
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 | Mar 2, 2016, 1:46 PM | 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 | Jan 22, 2015, 3:23 PM | speedbird12290 -
Home page and category page target same keyword
Hi there, Several of our websites have a common problem - our main target keyword for the homepage is also the name of a product category we have within the website. There are seemingly two solutions to this problem, both of which not ideal: Do not target the keyword with the homepage. However, the homepage has the most authority and is our best shot at getting ranked for the main keyword. Reword and "de-optimise" the category page, so it doesn't target the keyword. This doesn't work well from UX point of view as the category needs to describe what it is and enable visitors to navigate to it. Anybody else gone through a similar conundrum? How did you end up going about it? Thanks Julian
On-Page Optimization | Mar 20, 2014, 12:39 PM | tprg0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | Feb 7, 2012, 8:03 PM | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
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 | Jan 10, 2012, 4:28 PM | nux0 -
Creating New Pages Versus Improving Existing Pages
What are some things to consider or things to evaluate when deciding whether you should focus resources on creating new pages (to cover more related topics) versus improving existing pages (adding more useful information, etc.)?
On-Page Optimization | May 28, 2011, 11:22 PM | SparkplugDigital0