Ecommerce - Product Titles

[BeckyKey]

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

[DmitriiK]

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.

[BeckyKey]

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.

[DmitriiK]

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.

[TammyWood]

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.

[ChrisAshton]

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 Warehouse

Like 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!

[BeckyKey]

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,

[BeckyKey]

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?

[ChrisAshton]

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.

[BeckyKey]

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