What is Product Descriptions SEO?
Product description SEO is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular product page on an ecommerce site by ensuring that the product descriptions represented for each product are both unique and relevant to what customers are searching for on search engines compared to other websites selling that same product. Good product description SEO results in the product pages appearing high on the list of results returned by a search engine when customers are making inquiries relevant to a product they can purchase.
A Simple Product Descriptions SEO Process
Product description SEO isn’t just a “once and done” project, so its important to put in place a data driven process that can focus your efforts on valuable optimizations proven to bring results. There are two main steps in the process that achieves that goal is this…
- Identify what product information attracts search traffic and converts the highest value products
- Optimize product descriptions with that information, prioritizing your highest value products
The tricky part for many businesses is that first one, but ecommerce merchants can ensure their identification process is data driven in a way that ensures the product description optimizations are relevant to customers and how they’re searching on search engines.
The process starts with insights where you customers are already engaging, in the questions that they currently ask about your products. Many of you may already be engaging your customers through product page Q&A, which gives you a great foundation for putting this process in place as long as you’re using the right tools. If you are, there is a straightforward product description SEO process within reach….so let’s dive into some details of how that should look.
What does product Q&A have to do with product description SEO?
In one word…..everything.
The reason product questions and answers are relevant to product description SEO is because customers are ask questions like this on Google:
You can see the above Google search result, the number one result is a featured snippet of a product question that has been asked by an Rvupgradesstore customer and published in a way that Google is loving. There are questions that are asked by people who are already almost sold on a product, but just need some final confirmation before they pull the trigger. You want to be the one supplying that kind of product information and converting that sale.
When you read posts about how to create relevant content online, one of the most common things mentioned is you need to find out what your customers are asking about…because that is where the content creation opportunities are. They typically suggest that you can source those questions from your sales and customer service departments, but there is a better way for ecommerce merchants.
The beauty of an ecommerce marketer’s position is the customers are already engaging with product page Q&A (If they’re not, they should be) and the solution should already be spitting out the data you need for your first step in your product description SEO process. This is a huge gift for ecommerce marketers because they can totally avoid the job (and it is a job) of coordinating with other departments to source that information and trying to identify the most relevant questions….and they can simply get to work with creating and optimizing great content.
The above page points to a specific product Q&A landing page (which we’ll cover a bit further down how that works to drive organic traffic as well), but let’s dig into how this helps with product description SEO…
This is extremly helpful in identifying what your customer is looking for. From there you can modify your video or description to answer the question before they need to ask. Also I noticed that this App is amazing for SEO because all the questions asked and the answers will eventually end up in the google searches. This in turn gives you more authority as an expert for your products.
Data Driven Product Description SEO
As you detect what product questions are drawing the most engagements, that activity highlights the content demand from customers and potential customers. In turn, that highlights the information that you can add to your product descriptions to enhance your product page SEO. There are three kinds of engagement that your Q&A platform should be able to recognize:
- The product Q&A attracting organic traffic from Google (and other search engines)
- The product Q&A in the highest demand from your current customer base
- The value of the Q&A content when it comes to converting sales
As your Q&A engagement is able to effectively identify the data above, those insights point you to content gaps within your current product descriptions as well as opportunities to to massage the current information consistent with the way customers are searching. That enables you to optimize your product descriptions to both drive the most organic traffic to your ecommerce store.
Answerbase has doubled the overall traffic to our ecommerce site, and increased our organic search traffic by four times!
Driving New Search Traffic
Product Q&A helps lay the foundation for product description SEO, but it also has it’s own way of optimizing your entire ecommerce property to get more organic search traffic. It does this in a couple of ways…
- Product Q&A adds more original content to your product page which also gets crawled and increases the number of impressions to your product page.
- Popular product question and answer pairs generate new landing pages which attract their own traffic as unique pieces of content
As customers ask similar questions about products on Google….Google shows the results out the pages with your product Q&A content on it are lead to your store to purchase.
On the example shown in this screenshot, you can see an Answerbase customer has the top two organic placements as customers search for products they sell and have answered questions about. This not only leads to year over year organic traffic growth but they are more valuable customers than you get through Google now. The average lifetime value of customers coming from searches landing on product Q&A content is up to 2x higher than those coming from normal Google search queries.
Below you can see the search engine traffic growth to specifically Q&A landing pages over a 5 year period for another Answerbase customer.
As most website owners know by now, Google promotes sites that are experts in their field. As the number of Q&A’s have increased in our database we have seen correlating increases in search placement.
Customers from Search with a Higher LTV
Customers acquired from search who find ecommerce stores through product Q&A content have a higher average lifetime value (LTV) than those from normal search.
Avg Lifetime Value (LTV) of Organic Visitors to Answerbase-Generated Content
than other customers acquired through Google
The average revenue lifetime value (LTV) per new customer acquired through Answerbase-generated product content is up to 2x higher than those from normal organic Google visitors, as customers searching for problems that your products solve find you through your product Q&A content.