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.

Share This Post

The Key to Keywords

The Google Keyword Tool is a great way to look at the words and phrases that are searched on Google. This can give you new ideas as to what words you’d like to emphasize in your product descriptions and titles or inject into your meta tags for a product. But, it’s relatively useless to you without qualifying the keyword results. In the end, we’re not looking for just any old keywords, but ones that bring in valuable buyer traffic. Let’s run through an example to learn how to use this tool and our 3-point Keyword Check to find the best keywords the Internet can provide.

Keywords Galore

Go ahead and point your browser to the Google Keyword Tool.

In this example we’re going to assume that we want to improve my search result performance for my Apple iPod Touch 8GB MP3 player. So far I’ve identified the basic keywords for my product and here they are: apple ipod, ipod touch, ipod, 8 gb, mp3 player. Basically, I’ve just broken down my product title into small bits of words and phrases that I assume people will be entering as search terms. In reality, that’s pretty effective, but we can use Google Keyword Tool to discover more popular keywords. Let’s do that now.

On the Keyword Tool page, enter ipod touch into the empty field labeled “Enter one keyword or phrase per line.” See Figure 1.

Now, you may need to enter in a CAPTCHA (the thing that makes sure you’re a human) field before proceeding, but what’s that’s properly entered, click on the Get Keyword Ideas button and a long list of keywords will return. What a treasure chest of data! Is there anything of interest to us in here?

Figure 1: Enter keyword for more keyword results

User Behavior Reveals the Best Keywords

All the keywords in the world won’t make us rich. The trick is to find the ones that bring in the high quality buyer traffic. So, looking at our Google Keyword results, let’s first indentify which ones have value

One of the first things I noticed in the keyword results is the “itouch” keyword (see Figure 2). This one is baffling me, because I know the product I’m trying to sell very well and to my knowledge it has never been called an “itouch.” Technically speaking, it’s an iPod Touch. So what’s the deal Google? Is this keyword of any value to me? Let’s take a closer look at these keywords using our 3-point Keyword Check process.

Figure 2

Keyword Check 1: Always check Google for Keyword Relevancy

Go to Google.com, type in “itouch” (without quotes) and click on the Search button. Now we’re seeing what searchers of “itouch” will see. Take a look at the search results. Does it return the product your trying to market? If so, then we pass the relevancy keyword check. And, much to my surprise, “itouch” does indeed return results for the iPod Touch product.  This is great news because it’s relevant and I didn’t have this keyword in my original list. On to the next keyword check…

Keyword Check 2: Check the Competition for Buyer Relevancy

What we know so far is that people are search for “itouch” on Google and they’re seeing a lot of iPod Touch results. But, we really don’t know if the people who are searching for “itouch” are looking to buy an iPod Touch. Let’s turn to our competition to see if we can find any hints as to whether or not this could be valuable.

Using a different tool, open the Google Search-based Keyword Tool in a new browser window. Type in your competitor’s URL in the Website field. Go ahead and type in http://www.walmart.com(See Figure 3). We’ll pretend we’re competing with them for iPod Touch sales. In the “With words or phrases” field, type in the original keyword we researched, “ipod touch” (without quotes). Click on the Find Keywords button. (Be patient, it may take awhile to load the data). What Google will tell us with this tool is what keywords Walmart.com is using and what pages are related to these keywords. If we happen to find that the “itouch” keyword appears, then we’ll know that this keyword is likely driving buyer traffic to their website.

Figure 3

Sure enough, you’ll see that “i touch 16gb” returns in the results (see Figure 4). While this isn’t an exact match, it does help confirm that it’s likely that some shoppers are searching for iPod Touch products using the “itouch” term. Also, Google tends to combine keyword phrases into groups. It’s likely that searchers of “itouch” and “i touch” fall into the “ipod touch” family of keywords. Who would have thought? You’ll also see that Google is showing that “i touch 16gb” is searched 190 times monthly. Click on the Magnify icon to see even more data. Don’t waste too much time here, we’ve got better things to do.

Figure 4

Now you can add “itouch” and/or “i touch” to your list of potentially valuable keywords. Run through more keyword options that you find in the in Google’s Keyword Tool. Research them thoroughly and add them to your list.

You’ll also need to find where the keywords fit. For example, “Apple itouch 16GB MP3 Player” will not work for a product title. First of all, that’s not the proper name and Apple would likely not be happy about that. Nor will it help customers who know the real name feel confident that they’re buying a legitimate Apple iPod Touch. So, this keyword would be best utilized in the meta tags, because consumers and Apple won’t see it, but Google will.

Keyword Check 3: Check Analytics for the Real Deal

Figure 5

Once you’ve put your new keywords in place, wait a couple of weeks to let Google’s keyword bots to crawl these new additions. Then, log into your Google Analytics account and view your Analytics report. Click on the Traffic Source link and then click on the Keywords link (see Figure 5). A list of keywords will appear in order of the number of visits per keyword. Review whether or not the new keywords you added brought in any visitors.

In the coming weeks will show you how to take a closer look and see if the keywords actually resulted in any purchases, too. This is the most important outcome. But for now, get to work on injecting potentially valuable keywords into your product titles, descriptions, meta tags and into the general copy of your storefront where possible.

Share This Post