Optimizing product content for search with an SEO strategy is one proven way to drive revenue. A search engine will eventually rank almost all product content built or syndicated for your website.
An SEO Strategy is Critical to Ranking on Searches.
Searches can be made on Google, Amazon, Bing, or whichever retailer or marketplace you’re selling on.
Ranking High on These Search Engines is Vital to Drive Revenue and Growth.
Many online resources will help you optimize content for product pages. If you’re selling more than a dozen products, manually identifying, ranking, and optimizing for all of their respective keywords is tedious and impractical for most organizations.
Remember:
- There are between 12 and 24 million e-commerce websites (source).
- Google uses at least 200 different ranking factors (source).
- Between 2015 and 2018, Amazon overtook Google by capturing 54% of all product searches (source).
A PIM Gives You the Tools You Need to Optimize Your Content for SEO at Scale.
But first…
What is PIM?
PIM is an e-commerce software solution for creating a single source of product content truth. It optimizes content for richness, accuracy, and completeness. Finally, PIM syndicates content to meet the requirements of the sales channel.
Think of PIM as a central repository for all the content you use to populate product pages to sell your products online. It’s important to remember that product content means two things. It’s information essential to descriptions, feature bullets, specifications, and digital assets, like images, videos, and CAD drawings.
What Does Any of this Have to do with SEO?
PIM’s foundation is a robust centralized repository for inputting, storing, organizing, modifying, updating, developing, optimizing, and syndicating product content.
PIM aims to drive sales conversions by presenting potential customers with fully optimized product pages. These must be bursting with all the information and images customers need to make strong, informed buying decisions.
Thus, in the e-commerce space, with the digital foundation PIM provides, your SEO strategy can accomplish what you know it’s supposed to and how.
Quite simply, PIM is the “how.”
The Four Keys of SEO
Minus all the fads, trends, and gimmicks, the correct practice of SEO has just three main points. All three are driven by the product content that PIM has been purposefully designed to manage.
1. Keywords
You need to know which keywords people are using to search for products in your category.
Remember:
- What you want people to search doesn’t matter.
- It also doesn’t matter what you think they should search.
- What they used to search doesn’t matter either.
It Only Matters What They’re Going to Search.
2. High Quality Content
You have to plug your keywords into high-quality content.
High Quality Content is:
Original
Search engines hate redundant content. In e-commerce, populating your product pages with content you copied from the manufacturer is poor SEO practice.
Informative
Potential customers want to read content that tells them what they want to know. That content has to be accurate, up-to-date, and directly related to the keywords you’re targeting with your SEO strategy.
Exhaustive
Both Google and customers want pages to tell them everything about the topic. Informed customers make strong buying decisions, reducing returns and increasing loyalty.
(Read everything you need to know about how high-quality content flows from clean data in the blog featured below.)
Why You Need a PIM to Make and Keep Your Data Clean
3. Digital Assets
You must break up text content with digital assets like images and videos to attract potential customers’ attention online. In e-commerce, the key is showing products from every possible angle to ensure their features are fully showcased. 360-degree images are the new minimum standard.
Bridging the Gap Between the Actual Product and What the Customer Thinks Increases Conversions and Reduces Returns.
These days, nothing drives conversions like videos. Product pages that feature unboxing, assembly, and installation videos provide customers with the information necessary to make informed buying decisions. Videos that show the product in use connect the product’s reality with the customer’s mental picture.
4. Tech
Finally, your product pages must load quickly and be optimized for the mobile devices many customers now prefer to shop with.
Let’s get to know how PIM makes this happen.
7 Ways PIM Supports Your SEO Strategy
1. Keywords
With PIM, keywords can be incorporated into product management from implementation to time. This means you can hit the ground running from an SEO standpoint. Because the content you push out to your product pages is already optimized for search.
Because a product launch involves multiple internal teams, coordinating and centralizing product content with a PIM allows everyone to contribute input. The result is a fuller, more robust, and better-thought-out SEO strategy.
This More Diverse View Means You’re Less Likely to Miss the Keywords Critical to Driving Views that Lead to Conversions.
Also, it should go without saying, but those keywords can be amended, adjusted, deleted, or changed. This way, you keep pace with changing trends. If your pages aren’t getting as many views as you’d anticipated after implementation, the solution is simple: adjust your products’ keywords in your PIM. It’s an easy way to bring in more traffic.
Further, with PIM, the keywords you choose to identify your brand most centrally can be populated across product pages to present a unified message. Savvy customers shop in multiple online marketplaces, and noticing your central message varies from site to site may give them the impression of carelessness.
PIM Makes Sure Your Product Pages Present a Unified Brand Message.
On the other hand, some product content needs to vary to match the buyers you target with specific channels. You can use buyer-specific keywords to target specific kinds of potential customers by target channel.
PIM allows you to tailor your brand message, niching your messaging where it most likely resonates. This is important because speaking your customers’ language, instead of trying to sell to them in sales speak they may find inauthentic and off-putting, is a recipe for success.
2. Product Tags
Product tags are short descriptors you attach to your products. They provide more detail than simple product names and are often reflective of broad categories. Consider the products you sell and the variations you sell each.
Different types of customers search for the products they want to buy differently. Product tags allow your customers to narrow their searches and find exactly what they want more quickly.
When Supported by a PIM, Product Tags Enable Easy Translation into SEO Keywords.
An individual customer might search for something like “pliers,” while a contractor with more knowledge and experience would be more likely to search for “5-inch needle nose pliers.” Building fine-tuned descriptions into your product tags allows potential customers to find your products much more quickly and easily via search.
Remember, search engines return results depending upon where you place keywords, so sprinkling them in various locations within your product pages will return better results. Simply incorporating keywords into product titles and descriptions is far too simplistic.
PIM Lets You Place Keywords in Every Possible Location a Search Engine Might Look.
3. PIM with Digital Asset Management (DAM) Functionality
PIM manages product information, but that information doesn’t mean much without the visual context that ecommerce experiences are built around. This means your PIM solution needs to store product information alongside digital assets, which comprise your product pages’ visual component.
Provide Your Customers with the Fullest Possible Understanding of Your Products
When you give your customers the information they need to make informed buying decisions, they will feel empowered. Rich digital assets, such as 360-degree pictures, unboxing and installation videos, and CAD drawings, transfer that power of information to your customers.
Because you need to include these digital assets to achieve sales success, optimizing them for search is the next logical step. You can attach metadata to digital assets with a PIM consisting of a DAM. Like product tags, you can write that metadata to include keywords your customers search online.
(Read everything you need to know about how PIM with data governance functionality drives revenue for your e-commerce operation in the blog below.)
5 Ways Data Governance Drives Revenue
4. PIM Supports Automatic Image Transformation
These days, a given page’s mobile compatibility heavily impacts search results. For many people, phones, tablets, and other mobile devices constitute their primary means of accessing the Internet. As such, search engines have begun to rank sites more highly if their content is optimized for mobile.
Your product pages need to display content dynamically to be optimized for mobile, regardless of what device a potential customer is using to search for and experience your site. As you might imagine, text transforms more easily for the mobile experience than images and videos.
Ultimately, this means you need to be sure that your product pages can display the smaller images necessary for product pages to display correctly on phones and even watches. At the same time, different retail and e-commerce websites require resized images to populate according to their specific requirements.
Product Pages that Feature a Full Complement of Images and Videos are More Likely to Convert Customers than Pages with Limited Digital Assets.
PIM, with DAM functionality, automatically resizes images and videos for smaller mobile screens and to conform to channel-specific requirements like aspect ratio and resolution. This way, no matter where potential customers find your product pages, your images and text tell the story of your brand that you know is most likely to drive conversions.
Remember, while a search engine can’t distinguish a compelling product page from one that does not drive conversions, it can see what potential customers are doing. If visitors find your product pages but leave them quickly without buying, search engines will assume the page did not provide the person searching it with what they wanted. Over time, pages like this will rank lower, hurting your overall SEO profile.
5. Sales Rep Feedback Integration
Customer feedback is essential for understanding how well your product pages perform or why they aren’t. Feedback allows you to shape your brand messaging and more fully optimize product pages to drive conversions.
But even more important is feedback from the sales reps whose job is to sell products, yours and others, to customers all day. These people, even more than customers themselves, know precisely what drives conversions and what doesn’t. Gathering their feedback and comments constitutes an invaluable resource.
Sales Reps Have Their Fingers on the Pulse of Today’s Sales Environment.
PIM gathers sales rep feedback through the search terms they use on your sales channels. This provides a consistent feed of the newest material to guide site updates and optimize pages for SEO.
6. PIM Allows for Competitor Cross Referencing
Knowing how your competitors succeed at any moment ranks among some of the most critical information you can collect, regardless of your business vertical. With an eye to ecommerce and SEO, it’s a significant win to draw sales away from competitors when potential customers search the keywords they’ve already cornered.
With PIM, you can do more than optimize your pages for searches of the keywords you already rank for. A little bit of research will tell you which keywords your competitors are outcompeting you with, and with PIM, you can plug them into your product pages.
More Traffic Necessarily Makes for More Conversions.
Instead of using your valuable time to build results organically with blogs and other lengthy content presentations, potential customers will see your products alongside those of your competitors. Combined with the different benefits PIM affords you to optimize your product pages, appearing in searches of your competitors’ keywords might be enough to redirect that traffic to your site.
To fully leverage this functionality, you should go beyond using the keywords you and your competitors are ranking for now and predict the ones you intend to corner in the future. This way, even if you aren’t able to rank for those keywords using more conventional approaches, you’ll still see the traffic when potential customers search those keywords of tomorrow, next month, and next year.
7. Persona Driven Pages
Manufacturers have diversified their sales channels by selling on as many platforms as they can, from e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon to retail sites like Home Depot to their own D2C sites and multi-storefront operations. Simple math tells us that with more stores, there are more chances of a potential customer finding one.
Simply put, more stores mean a greater likelihood of Conversions.
Because you intend to target a different, specific buyer with each of your sales channels, each will need a tailored SEO strategy. Different buyers exist in different online spaces, so targeting them with the same strategy is only going to be so effective.
Instead, PIM allows you to tailor content by buyer and channel to maximize traffic and drive conversions. With PIM, you can segment product content to feature the precise search terms a targeted buyer will use to find the kind of products you’re selling. Visitors empowered with the information they need to make informed buying decisions will most likely convert.
PIM Empowers You to Empower Your Customers to Buy.
Amp Up Your SEO Potential with PIM
A Product Information Management (PIM) system is important for achieving optimal SEO potential and staying competitive in search results. However, for companies with a smaller SKU count, a PIM may not be a necessity to succeed. When appropriately combined, PIM and SEO strategies may complement each other to streamline operations and increase product exposure.
What Is the Connection between PIM and SEO?
PIM is the centralized point at which product content is controlled, modified, and dispersed. To be visible, whether on an e-shop or a site, the same data must be consistent, correct, and keyword optimized across all channels.
PIM removes data silos and ensures that search engines will find the current and qualitative product descriptions, which, overtime enhances SEO potential.
Why will PIM get You Ranking?
Search engines prefer structured, informative, and consistent content. And a good PIM strategy helps you exactly with this, and here’s how:
- Optimizes product data accuracy and completeness across channels, which indirectly benefits SEO.
- Product pages are structured and supported.
- Facilitates prompt changes to be in line with the angle ranking strategy.
PIM Finder streamlines product and channel-specific optimization, ensuring accurate and complete product data across all lines.
PIM helps with SEO on Complicated Product Catalogs
When a company sells several types of products, optimizing content for SEO may be challenging with diverse SKUs. A PIM product allows you to unify product information, including relevant keywords, and edit content with ease.
The product experience software allows you to personalize content by segment and channel, which is crucial for optimizing products in niche categories for better visibility and relevance.
PIM Drives SEO at Scale
Individual products require carefully articulated strategies to rank high in search results. These strategies have to include content optimized not only for the ecommerce audience, but also for the search engines that audience uses to find your products.
It’s easy to sell a dozen products across a few marketplaces manually. But as the number of products and sales channels you sell across increases, the number of optimizations you’ll have to do to stay competitive will increase exponentially.
PIM grows with your operation, to ensure you stay on top of your SEO strategy as your operation grows into the future.
Now that you know how PIM can help optimize your SEO strategy, click here to see what Catsy can do for you today.
