Mild-mannered webmaster by day …
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For any e-commerce website, a perfectly optimized product name can be a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal. But how do you satisfy both your human and robotic visitors? Here’s one strategy that can help you get the most out of your product names.
For each product in your database, you want to create two name fields. I’ll call them Long Name and Short Name. The Long Name works well for your product pages and title tags, while the Short Name can be used in your section pages and other internal links.
In the Long Name field, you want to include as many relevant, searchable words as possible in roughly 65 characters or less (including spaces).
For example, my company sells a product that’s officially called the Plum A+ Infusion System. But on our website, we call it the Hospira 12391-05 Plum A+ Pole-Mounted Infusion Pump System.
This product name is great for search engine spiders, but what about your human visitors?
In addition to making your customers’ eyes glaze over, super-long product names can wreak havoc on a beautiful section layout, turning lovely white space into a text-heavy mess. By using the Short Name field, you can reduce the clutter to provide a concise, clear and ultimately clickable link to your product.
On section pages, our product name has been reduced to Hospira Plum A+ Infusion Pump. It’s long enough to be descriptive, but short enough that it’s not overwhelming.
photo credit: abbyladybug
In a perfect world, each product page in your store would be carefully constructed with SEO in mind. In the real world, e-commerce store owners tend to discover search engine optimization later in the game, when hundreds or thousands of products have already been added.
If you don’t have time to rewrite 3,000 product names today, don’t despair. Break the project into small, manageable chunks … an hour here, half an hour there. Start with your bestsellers and work your way slowly down the list.
I’ve found that using the concatenate function in a spreadsheet can save many, many hours of repetitive data entry. And if you lack time but not money, you can always hire a temp to do the grunt work.
Have a better strategy for optimizing product names? Let me know in the comments!
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23 Responses for "E-commerce SEO: Optimizing Your Product Names"
Your guidelines are very good, but I think a good way to optimize the short name would be to focus just on A+ Infusion Pump. I understand the point in having the brand name in there, but for SEO reasons you’d want A+ Infusion Pump to bring up Hospira A+ Infusion Pump.
I doubt it makes much of a difference as long as you have proper content and context on your product page, but just throwing it out there.
Thanks for the comment, Jacinda! I think that ultimately, it really depends on what your customers are searching for.
In our case, the manufacturer (Hospira) is very well-known, and the model (Plum) even more so. For an electronics store, for example, using the Sony brand name would be crucial. But for another store and another type of product, it might not matter so much.
This is a SWEET post for me. Direct Sales businesses are my target audience and my own physical product sites will be (back) up in the very near future.
Thanks for this, keep ‘em comin’!
Hey, thanks Dennis! I’ll definitely work on some more e-commerce focused posts.
That would be fantastic, thank you. May I keep you in mind as a possible guest poster?
@Dennis Edell: I’m flattered! But with a 4-month-old and a 2-year-old, I barely have time to update my own blog. I really appreciate the offer, though.
The door is always open, and I may ask again
That is actually a very smart way of thinking, internal links can get rediculously long when you have some super product name.
Thankfully I just do the SEO and not the product renaming, that would be a pain.
Great information about long names and short names for your products. I have a women’s large-size designer shoe site. I’m pretty sure I can put this information to good use to increase my shoe sales.
I have found short and long names to work well, also restricting longer names to a character limit which can be taken from the product name. Find this works well in a mod rewrite for URLs, just need to remember to keep your important words in the product name first.
I see it’s been a while since you have blogged, how sad! But with little ones running about I see that you are a very busy mother. Good luck and God Bless.
Thanks for the info - do you know if google is okay with two names or is that even a point to consider? I guess the spiders aren’t smart as humans yet…..(are they?)
Short product titles are good for keeping consumer interest since no one like a “not-made-from-wheat-made-with-oats-abix” (if youve seen the ad) product, however i think a long title will still work if you can reduce it to compressed version: The ultimate selling machine on automatic to USMA may spark more intrest becuase of its strange name..
Nice article but what I’m a little bit missing here is a real call to action in the title. If your 5 competitors using the same title (since hospira & plum are popular) why should they click on your listing..unless you have a good call to action.
I’m running a few e-commerce stores as well and noticed that the product name + call to action (showing the price for example) can have a big impact on your CTR.
Dave
This tip is extraordinary. I will tell you why. I am working in SEO too, so most of the time I do have a problem trying to optimize e-commerce sites. There are thousands of pages, so it can’t be done manually, except if I spend months on them … It is easy to optimize the section part with the products name, from a database and to make everything automatic. Thanks.
Thanks for tip. I am working on an ecommerce site, an online supermarket and this tip is great for it. I will use short names for products section and URLs and long names for titles and description. A very simple and practical idea.
I haven’t started selling my own products yet, but this is some good advice for when I eventually do. I think a product name needs to be short, catchy, and informative. This way the customer will remember the name, like the name, and know exactly what the product is for. Thanks for the tips!
Ironically,
I pull of a similar tactic for a dynamic database (with less customization than yours of course. I created a template for search results where my subheaders allow for the short optimization while the detail pages allow for database keywords based longer optimization. It is great for indented search results for longer keywords.
This is what worked for me. I come up with several product names and then create adwords campaigns mentioning them and then watch which campaign/name is doing the best. This product name is the one I then stick to.
Yeah, that’s the first thing an e-commerce store should do since people will eventually look for the exact product names.
I am not a web designer, but I think it’s a great tip for SEO; especially when the design does not allow long product names in the navigation bar. In this case, short names are perfect for design, and long names are perfect for titles and anchor text of links.
Just felt compelled to come out of my shell and say “Well done”. Another fine post. This one’s getting bookmarked.
As it happens, I’m currently working on a customer’s site which is an ecommerce store. This is one of the things I proposed that we tackle next week. Your post couldn’t have been more timely!
- Glen
How refreshing to find a SEO Woman blogger. I agree with the other commenter’s - I await new posts!
Thanks for the information, I hope you are well!
-Jolene
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