Optimizing Product Descriptions with Headings and Keywords
Product descriptions hold a lot of valuable information about the type of products you sell, which mean that they are also a great resource for search engine bots to use when indexing keywords. Let’s take a closer look at this field and see what you can do to help improve your search rankings.
Killing Two Birds with One Product Description Field
Not only are product descriptions useful to search engine bots, but these fields are critical in making the sale. Shoppers will read product descriptions to learn everything they need to know about the product before adding it to their cart for checkout. When we optimize this field for search engines, we must also keep the reader (the buyer) in mind as well. This field is an opportunity to build a narrative that is rich with keywords that add meaning and value to the customer. Always keep that in mind. Not only do we want to rank higher in search results, we want to convert this web traffic to paying customers.
Your Headings Really Matter
Search engines weigh different sections of content more heavily than others and one signifier of importance is a header tag (that’s HTML lingo). A header tag breaks down to several levels of importance, starting from h1 (i.e., the highest of importance) and going down to h5 or beyond. On your Auctiva Commerce store, the most important content is stored in h1 headers. For example, the Featured Products heading on your homepage is enclosed in the h1 tag. This hints to the search bots that this is the most important part of the page. The hope is that the search engine bots will pay close attention to the products that you are featuring.
When it comes to product pages, there’s a different hierarchy for the importance of information. For example, the Page Header is enclosed in the h1 header tag and the Product Description is enclosed in an h2 header tag. So, search engine bots will weigh the keywords in the Page Header as more important. But it won’t stop them from crawling the Product Description for more keywords. Using the HTML editor in the Product Description field, you can add more header tags should you want to create more opportunities to signify levels of importance. For example, you could add another heading in the Product Description field and enclose it in an h3 tag.
The artist in all this header madness knows what to emphasize as important. Ask yourself, what is so important that it deserves a header tag in the Product Description field? Start to answer that question by remembering who your audience is. It’s not the search engine bots; it’s your potential customers. What would be important to them? Search engines do their job by connecting people to the content that they’re looking for. If it’s important to your shopper, it’s likely they’ll be searching for that keyword. Let’s take a look at an example.
Searching with Keywords
Let’s pretend we opened a storefront that sells collectables and our unique selling point is that we’ve got years and years of experience. We can spot a fake from a mile away and our customers trust that the vintage products we sell online are legit. In our Product Description field we might benefit from adding a “Product Authenticity” heading and enclose that in a h3 header tag. Then, we can follow-up that heading with 3-4 sentences that explain the product and how we know that it’s authentic. In fact, we’ll make sure to inject some valuable keywords. This is what the HTML code for this heading might look like:
<h3>Product Authenticity</h3>
<p>This vintage Care Bears lunch box is an authentic collectible dated 1987. Note the copyright date that is stamped on the bottom corner of the lunch box (please see images). We’ve compared this lunch box with other children’s lunch boxes from this era and its construction and design is consistent with the manufacturing techniques from 1987.</p>
In this example, we use the h3 header tag to inform search engine bots that this section is important. And we saturate the following paragraph with high value keywords that we think a customer who appreciates authentic collectibles would include in a search for this product. Take a look at the keywords we added: vintage, authentic, collectible, children’s, lunch box. These are all keywords that a buyer might include in the search for a product like this. Additionally, we added these keywords in a way that adds value to the reader (not just the search engine bots). A potential customer will read this section of our product description and hopefully feel much more confident that the product is indeed an authentic collectible. As a result, we are much more likely to sell this product to a person searching with these keywords.
Now it’s your turn. Spend some time thinking about who is searching for your products and what terms they will use in search engines. (Tip: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools can tell you what terms visitors use to find your store. If you haven’t set those tools up, now is a good time. Here’s the Analytics and Webmaster Tools Setups ). Then invest some extra time in writing compelling content in your product descriptions. Make sure to include headings that specify the importance of the information. If you’ve done a good job, you should see more web visitors to these products and ultimately more sales revenue. That should be worth your time.
UPDATE: One of our readers (thank you Dave) has made a great suggestion that we absolutely must include. In practice, header tags can be overdone if you simply add a ton of h1 tags throughout your content. This is bad practice. First of all, your headings will look out of place because they are formatted differently (the font is usually bigger) and the search engine algorithms will see right through this strategy. Adding a bunch of h1 tags won’t help rank your page any higher than a page with just one intelligent use of an h1 tag. So, be judicious with headers and the universe (your customers and Google) will thank you for it.
You just might have mentioned that H1-H5 were developed for font properties, not search engines, and refer to the relative size of the type used. That’s still their main use. Sprinkling H1 tags around the page will simply make it look funny…
@Dave Kearns
Dave, you’re right. The primary purpose of header tags is to format the text. It just so happens that search engines will also use it to interpret the meaning and importance of content. We added your wise suggestion of using header tags in moderation to the post. Thanks for your input!