Message the Team
Creating the perfect product listing requires planning. Knowing your target audience and terms they would use to search for products is essential to planning a keyword / key phase strategy that works. Getting it right first time is much more effective than trying to update, or edit, a product’s details at a later date. The more time you spend researching your options, the better the result, meaning more traffic and more sales.
So here are a few simple tips to ensure that you get the best possible exposure on the search engines for your product listings.
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Research Current Listings:
Investigate current listings for similar products on Google. To do this effectively, try several different search terms. View the titles and descriptions used by others and (on desktop or laptop) scroll to the bottom of the page and review the additional recommended search terms. These all give a good indication of what is commonly searched for and you can be relatively confident that the top listings (other than paid listings) have done their homework. -
Choose a Suitable Primary Search Term:
Be realistic about choosing a primary search term for your product, to use in your product titles and descriptions; it is very important at this stage to note which are the most commonly used Titles in Google's search results. You also need to pick a primary term that has a reasonable monthly search volume, but at the same time will not prove too competitive.
“A Mother’s Love” print
You will notice here, no mention of what is in the picture, the materials, medium, format or size (making this product a perfect example as Google has no idea what it is other than some form of print).
Choosing a strong Primary Search Term
This requires us to consider what our ideal customer would search for and also how Google will recognise and categorise this product (more on this later).
With the above considerations in mind, create a search term that identifies the product for Google (important), and that is a popular search term used by shoppers with reasonable expectations. Include the term within the product title and expand with a secondary term after the | pipe (or – hyphen if you prefer).
Bad Title Example 1: Framed Elephant Print (far too vague)
Bad Title Example 2: Elephant Fine Art Print | Black and White Mother and Baby Elephant Illustrated Drawing |Available in A4 or A3 Framed or Unframed (too much information)
Good Example: Illustrated Elephant Fine Art Print | A Mothers Love in Charcoal and Pencil
The Primary term : Illustrated Elephant Fine Art Print
Secondary Term(s): A Mothers Love / Charcoal and Pencil
So how does Google interpret this information?
The term “Illustrated Elephant Fine Art Print” tells Google that this is a fine art print featuring elephants from an original illustration. This effectively allows Google to categorise the product accordingly with a good understanding of what the product is and what it is all about…
For this term to be effective, and for Google to give the primary term the full weight of its relevance, this term must be used consistently throughout the listing.
Google will also understand that “A Mothers Love” probably relates to the title and theme, and that “Charcoal and Pencil” is the medium used originally to create the image.
Key point here is that Google can only interpret the additional information correctly if the product is categorised correctly in the first place.
Creating Your Google Opimised Product Listing
Now that you have identified your Primary Search term and established secondary terms, you are now ready to begin creating your listing. It is important to do the research first because once you create a product, you cannot change the link address for that product which you want to contain that primary search term. The URL address of your product page is automatically created using your product title when you first save your product.
Use the above information to create a suitable product title that is not too long and for which the Primary Term constitutes 50% of the content of the title.
Preparing your images:
Another prerequisite before creating your product listing; rename your images to include your primary term and to also describe your product. Most digital cameras and smart phone’s will save images in a numeric format which many of you will be familiar with (i.e. DSC7898970987_876823.jpg). Google is essentially blind, and we want Google to understand what the image is about and associate the image with the product. This is done in two main ways…
Rename the image to be descriptive and relevant to the title, using only lower case letters and hyphens to separate words. For example:
Rename to: illustrated-elephant-fine-art-print-a-mothers-love.jpg
Additional images can use the same format, but with -framed or -02 or similar appended to the end.
When uploading the image, use the Alt Text box to give a description of the item (again using the primary term). The trick here is to ensure that it is descriptive and human readable…
Alt Text Example = Illustrated Elephant Fine Art Print, “A Mothers Love” created from an original charcoal and pencil drawing, available framed in sizes A3 and A4
Descriptions:
And finally, in descriptions, embed the primary term as it is but use descriptive text around it. Try not to duplicate any words or phrases at all (less is more) as you may get penalised for keyword stuffing. The descriptions should read well and describe the elements we were unable to include in the title.
Final Note:
Once you are happy with your product listing, view the product page and find the Share buttons. Click on the Share buttons for every social media channel you are a member of. Sharing on social media raises awareness but also creates inbound links and traffic from alternative sources than Google. All of this raises the profile of the page and indicates to Google that the content you have created is relevant!
Good Luck and join us in the Sellers Facebook Group to share your experiences…