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.
