How to Improve Product Detail Pages (along with search rankings and conversions)

Here’s the problem with product detail pages today. Content must be structured so that search engines can find it and deem it relevant. That means structured, tagged content to explain the products list, the prices, names, and descriptions of those products, the location of the products and the taxonomy of where those products live within the site. Sounds simple enough, right?

However, while product information may start structured in the catalog, the same level of structure rarely makes it to the frontend experience users see (the one that’s crawled and indexed by search engines). As a result, many product detail pages may not rank organically as well as they otherwise should. There are other big implications for search engine marketing (SEM), too. Without highly structured data, it is harder to achieve the relevance scores needed to win keyword bids. The same page without structure would be seen as less relevant, since the content must be inferred.

Even though this is a pretty pervasive problem, it’s highly fixable. Here are some of our recommendations for improving the product detail page (and product landing pages, too).

Get found: Create more structured product landing pages and product detail pages

As mentioned above, by adding content and structure to product detail pages, search engines can interpret the content of the page more readily — increasing their relevance for both organic search and SEM. You don’t want to rely on the search engine’s ability to infer that you are serving a product page - with structured content, you can explicitly tell the search engine its a product page and here are the key elements - product name, price, key attributes, description, etc. The question is, how do we make this process easier, so that structured information from the catalog makes its way to the frontend?

Using a solution like Elastic Path Product Experience Manager enables you to quickly extend product data from the catalog to the frontend, making it easier to create product pages that win for both SEO and SEM. With the structured data extensions in place within your templates in Product Experience Manager to connect your product attributes to your search keywords, it becomes much simpler to add structure to your product landing and detail pages, following Schema.org structure and using robust product content and detailed product attributes. These details enable search engines to interpret the content of the product data readily, providing the best possible opportunity to be relevant.

Convert: Find more ways to engage the consumer and organically collect first party data

Beyond some of the behind-the-scenes ways to improve search ranking, there are other ways to make your product landing pages more exciting and conversion-worthy. With the (oft-delayed) phase-out of third party tracking cookies, many marketers are looking for more and more ways to collect and leverage first party data. Making your product landing pages more engaging is one way to do so.

Interactive elements like surveys or quizzes (a la brands like Prose, Care/of or Stitch Fix) can not only help you discover more about your audience, but also develop more effective marketing segments for personalization. An easy-to-use, low code landing page builder like CX Studio can make it much simpler to build engaging pages. From there, using a commerce CDP like Twilio Segment can help you create customer cohorts, and effectively target the right audience with the right products and offers. Applying AI to your first-party data can help you drive more personalized recommendations based on your customers’ engagement patterns.

To sum up, today’s product detail pages and product landing pages are far from perfect. But, these are easily fixable problems with the right composable commerce system in place. Making these product pages perform better doesn’t have to be rocket science, or consume days of engineering time. It’s all about empowering merchandisers and marketers to extend your search keyword strategy all the way to the content on their product pages, making the best use of their data — whether the end game is to get found or drive more conversions.