Ecommerce - Product Titles
-
Hi
I want to find out how ecommerce sites optimise their product names:
1. When they have thousands of products
2. When some of their products are identical
I notice on some sites, like this for example, they have no key phrases in their product titles http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/6249346.htm
How can this help for SEO?
At the moment we optimise the titles as best we can for key phrases relevant to the products and differentiating attributes.
Where we get stuck is, if their are 2 identical products - how can the content team quickly add a title which is useful for customers and search engines?
Some products have no differences for us, but longer tail phrases are where we could get some good returns if the research is put in - it's just very labour intensive.
Thank you
-
Hi Chris
Thank you for the detailed response, would you say have more subcategory pages is better? I wanted to make sure the product titles were in some way relevant to the category to help with optimisation.
I'm trying to improve category page content, but at the moment it's a struggle. The focus is on the products so its not a priority for the business to have lots of content on the page.
Becky
-
No problem Becky.
Something I shoud have mentioned about taking this approach with the page titles is that having multiple templates can sometimes be a good idea to break them up so you don't have a thousand pages with very similar titles.
That could be something you apply in this case as well. If they have a product name that makes no suggestion of what the product is, for that list of products you could change the template to also include a common term for it. Similar to my example above where the word "Tyres" was used after the product name.
Of course, the dangerous part of this is if you're using it on hundreds of pages, that's hundreds of page titles using the same word(s) in the same place each time so it does have to be used sparingly.
Don't forget that people likely to come across the individual products in the SERPs are either looking for it by name or some other very specific search that suggests they probably know what the product is anyway so just having the name isn't inherently bad. If you're wanting to rank for broader terms, that's what your category and subcategory pages are for.
As an example, I'm a cyclist. If I'm searching for a new set of tyres, I'll know what the vast majority of the products are by name in the SERPs so the results make perfect sense to me without having to say "cycling tyres" in the title.
-
HI
We have actually started to do this, the brands are not very well known which can be the issue with some of them.
Even if this is the case would you suggest still optimisation the page/titles/H1 with the brand included?
-
Great thank you. I think this is a great idea, the only problem I have found is that the suppliers have some strange names for their products, which are sometimes not even relevant for the customer.
Some require alterations, but as you said this is not possible for thousands of products.
Thank you for the tip, this is something we could look to implement to save us some time,
-
Looks like other comments have covered the duplicate pages so I won't go into that but to answer your other question about page titles for thousands of products, templates are your friend.
I'd suggest manually crafting the page titles for your key landing pages, categories and potentially sub-categories depending on how many there are. The below info is for the individual product pages.
Just set them up in your CMS to use descriptive variables. It won't always be perfect but short of writing thousands of titles and constantly writing new ones for new products, it's the most viable.
For example, if you sold car tyres, the page titles for your product pages would look something like this:
[Product Name] - [Product Number] | Your Website Name
What you end up with is auto-generated page titles like this (details clearly fabricated):
TreadMax Pro Tyres - XVN90P | Ed's Tyre Warehouse
Performax Ultra Tyres - PUH862 | Ed's Tyre WarehouseLike I said, these aren't ideal. A good page title should be far more compelling but we have to reach a reasonable compromise. The thing to remember here is that if these individual products are showing up for someone in the SERPs, they've probably searched for something like an exact product name or product ID. Since they're toward the end of that sales funnel already, simply showing the product name and ID can be all they really need.
Hope this helps!
-
Hello,
You could create categories based on manufacturer even if same product IE:
www.domain.com/manufacturer/ product/
And as the poster above, focus on including the manufacturer in on page optimizations to differentiate between the two. Now, in all honesty if you are a reseller of a popular product, you want to do a search online for duplication of the manufactures descriptions to avoid duplicated content across the Internet- which can be a negative as well.
-
Well, then, since it's important that those products are from different manufacturers, emphasize on it. Build content, product titles etc around manufacturers name, I guess. Otherwise it will be simply duplicate content.
-
Identical as in, everything is the same apart from the manufacturer - which isn;t very well known or unbranded.
They are from 2 separate suppliers so they wouldn't want to put them on the same pages.
-
Hi there.
How would you have two identical products? If they are truly identical, then why are they on two pages?
As for the link you posted - how do you know they even do SEO? And they kinda do have keyphrase there - "mirror"
As for how to fix identical pages - canonical link, I say.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Looking for opinions on structuring meta title tags/page title/menu title/H1
Hi everyone I am hoping a few of you can share your opinions. I have been having conversations (okay, healthy debates) about how to write/structure meta title tag and how to compliment them with the H1, page title, menu name. To help explain the thought processes I will use a pretend keyword. How about "screwdriver". Case: (I made this up) we are redesigning a website for a construction tools manufacturing company (pretend name: ABC Tools) targeting OEMs who are interested in purchasing large quantities of tools. The product categories (to become main menu items) are Screwdrivers, Nails, Drills, and Hammers. (bear with me .... this is just an example I am making up on the fly) K. Circling back to screwdrivers - let's say we have one landing page (a primary category page and in the main menu) listing products and great details about screwdrivers. Focus keywords are screwdriver manufacturer, screwdriver supplier, construction screwdrivers Below are questions being debated. If you are willing ... how would you address these questions? And, can you explain WHY? QUESTION ONE: How would you structure the meta title tag (feel free to write one of your own) Screwdriver Manufacturer - Construction Screwdriver | ABC Tools ABC Tools - US-based Screwdriver Manufacturer Supplier Near You High-Quality Screwdrivers for Construction with ABC Tools QUESTION TWO: how would you write the H1 on the page? Would it match the meta tag? OR, would you write something different using the primary keyword? QUESTION THREE Remembering this is not a blog post ... it is a primary landing page linked to the main navigation. What would the menu title be? (remember the product categories above are how the main menu items are bucketed) Screwdrivers Screwdriver Manufacturer Typically in WordPress, the H1 and the menu title is auto-populated using the page title (not the title tag)... So, if we use Screwdrivers as the page title but we want the H1 to match the meta title tag, would we manually change the H1? Or, have the page title and title tag match, but manually change the menu item?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brenda.Haines1 -
How important is it to rank for a product category?
We make a product in a category of products -- let's say "donuts". There are really only 4 major donut companies (lots of artisanal donuts out there, but they're not really competitive yet). One of our competitors has systematically achieved top rank for "donut" and lots of adjacent keywords like "donuts" and "buy donuts". My question is, does their success ranking for the product category keyword "donut" influence their success ranking for long-tail keywords like "powdered donuts" and "tastiest donuts"? Or, to flip that question, should we try to compete for "donut" before worrying about "decadent delicious donuts"? Other factors: In terms of search volume, as you would expect, "donut" sees 10 to 1000 times as many searches as most of the other keywords adjacent to it. We can definitely compete for "donut" -- just trying to figure out if doing so should be our top priority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Thin Content, Ecommerce & Reviews
I've been reading a lot today about thin content and what constitutes thin content. We have an ecommerce site and have to compete with large sites in Google - product pages in terms of content quantity are low and obviously competitors all have similar variations of the same product descriptions. Does Google still consider ecommerce sites as with thin content as low quality? A product page surely shouldn't have too much content which doesn't help the user. My solution to start was to get our customer reviews added to the product pages to help improve the amount of quality content on this page, then move into adding video etc when we have resource. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
With the New Panda update supposedly only weeks away, is it wise to No Index my products I have not had time to rewrite the product descriptions for ?
Hi Mozzers, I read on SEJ yesterday than apparently the Panda update was due in the 2 - 4 weeks. I still have a large of my products which I have not got around to rewriting unique product descriptions for. I know these product descriptions are duplicated on other affiliate sites so do it think it in light of the panda update coming , would it wise to put a NO INDEX Meta tag on these product pages until I get around to rewriting the descriptions. That way, I may not hit my Panda and it will buy me a bit more time. Just an idea , but thought I'd run it by. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Page Title Tag operands , - |
Hi, Anyone have any good suggestions about using commas, hyphens, vertical bar in the title tag and how it affects rankings? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Duplicate content on yearly product models.
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content? Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes. The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches. Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product. Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue? The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold. Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Duplicate titles got me stumped
Webmaster tools is showing duplicate titles for example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ and: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire%20/bands-in-lincolnshire/ What's the %20 all about? I didn't create that page and it is a duplicate of the first. I'm also getting them for some pages with capitialisation? Eg: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ http://www.musicliveuk.com/Lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ I have also installed buddypress on another site I work on (I use wordpress) and have since had duplicate title issues for members that have signed up: /members/admin/activity/friends/ /members/admin/activity/groups/ /members/admin/activity/just-me/ These pages are all showing duplicate titles? How can I fix this? I use all in one SEO pack and have <a title="Click for Help!">Canonical URLs checked.</a> Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How to prevent Google from crawling our product filter?
Hi All, We have a crawler problem on one of our sites www.sneakerskoopjeonline.nl. On this site, visitors can specify criteria to filter available products. These filters are passed as http/get arguments. The number of possible filter urls is virtually limitless. In order to prevent duplicate content, or an insane amount of pages in the search indices, our software automatically adds noindex, nofollow and noarchive directives to these filter result pages. However, we’re unable to explain to crawlers (Google in particular) to ignore these urls. We’ve already changed the on page filter html to javascript, hoping this would cause the crawler to ignore it. However, it seems that Googlebot executes the javascript and crawls the generated urls anyway. What can we do to prevent Google from crawling all the filter options? Thanks in advance for the help. Kind regards, Gerwin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footsteps0