Google shares tips on how to improve search visibility for product pages

Ranking product pages can be a bit different than ranking long-form informative blog posts.  Not everyone finds instant success with ranking high-value product pages.

In a recent SEO Office Hours session, a person who has been unsuccessfully working on product pages, asked Google’s John Mueller what he could do better.

The SEO mentioned that they have been doing SEO for an e-commerce website that has 30-40 products in total. They have been spending time on “regular back-linking process, on-page SEO, and structured data.”

According to them, their efforts on the company blog have yielded results, but it is the product pages that haven’t produced good results.

“It is just that the product page, they don’t rank well.  They don’t rank at all.”

The difficulty with ranking product pages

As we mentioned earlier, ranking product pages can sometimes be more difficult than ranking blog posts. That’s because promoting product pages and getting backlinks from reputable, industry-relevant websites can be significantly more difficult.

John Mueller also acknowledged the difficulty in ranking the product pages.

“I think that’s always challenging.  And I don’t think that there is a simple trick to make that happen.”

Having said that, John Mueller did share a few valuable tips and ideas to help rank product pages.

Google Shopping Feed

John Mueller suggested exploring the Google Shopping feed and explained the connection between Google Shopping Feed and Shopping Search results.

“The one thing I would watch out for is if these are products of this ecommerce site, make sure that you have all of the merchant center set up correctly because I don’t know if this is in every country yet, but we do have kind of the Google Shopping Feed where you can …submit your products for free and then we can show those in the Shopping Search results.

And sometimes we mix that in with the normal search results.

So that’s kind of a way to additionally get your products a little bit more visibility.”

Internal Links

Creating contextual internal links from relevant blog posts to product pages is another tactic that can help improve the search visibility of product pages.

“With regards to the … products themselves, if you’re saying that some of your content like the blog posts are ranking well, but the products aren’t, then sometimes you can help that by making sure that there is clear internal linking between those things.

So the pages where you are seeing that they’re working out well, make sure that there’s really a clear linking from those pages to your actual products.”

However, Mueller also asked to resist the temptation of linking to every product page, because that may dilute the importance of those links and the product pages you are trying to improve rankings for.

“If you have really long kind of blog posts that are ranking, the challenge there might be that it’s very tempting to link to a lot of different products from there.

And by linking to a lot of different products, you’re kind of saying, well, everything is a little relevant, but nothing is really relevant. Whereas if you link to a few products from those pages, then you can really say [that] these are really important products.”

Links from the home page

In addition, if you have a few very high-profile product pages, you can also link those pages from the home page. There are added benefits of linking to pages directly from the homepage.

“If you say that you have a few products at the moment, then it’s sometimes tempting to link to all of these products from your shop home page.

And if you can find a way to, kind of, funnel that a little better, then that can make it a little bit easier for individual pages to rank better.”

Conclusion

If you are struggling with ranking product pages, here are some tips that are worth exploring.

It is important to note that, despite using all these ideas and tips, you may still struggle with product pages and their search visibility.

That’s because, sometimes, it is just the competition, and the industry is a bit harder to crack in the SERPs.

“It’s sometimes just that the competition is quite strong, and it takes a while to grow,” said John Mueller.

You can find that conversation and more in this video.