Ecommerce SEO: Where Best to Put Your Keyword Content?

By Emma Grant  

| September 19th 2022

What’s more important for ecommerce SEO…? Placing keyword rich descriptive text above the products to let Google quickly know what the page or site is about, or putting the products at the top of the page to save users a long, frustrating scroll to get to what they really want to look at?

It’s a popular question, and a good one.

You see, what it boils down to, is the age old SEO versus user experience conundrum. Whilst SEO content is incredibly important for ecommerce sites (and in fact, any site), it’s essential to take user experience into consideration.

SEO versus user experience – which is more important?

Google does indeed place higher emphasis on content that’s higher up on a web page. But placing lots of text above product listings on an ecommerce website could seriously jeopardise user experience.

Say you’re looking for a pair of training shoes. You’ve clicked the most tempting link in the search results, but instead of landing on a page brimming with training shoe options for you to peruse straight off the starting blocks, you’ve waded into reams of text about trainers for this sport, trainers for that sport, running shoes, gym shoes, leather versus canvas, this colour or that colour, lace-ups versus slip-ons, etc., etc.

And so the scrolling begins. Hurdles, if we’re staying on the running theme. And if you’re on a mobile device, that scrolling could be near-on endless. To the point where most users are going to hit the back button and then head straight off to the next best search result. Potential sale lost. Potential long term, multi-buy, upsell customer lost. Potential great review and online PR lost. Bad news.

And that’s not all. Because your visitor, in doing their disappearing act, has now upped your website’s bounce rate. And that’s really not good.

A high bounce rate signifies to Google that a website isn’t delivering the experience or content it promised in the search results. As a result, Google is highly likely to downgrade that website’s rankings.

And this is precisely why, instead of playing SEO and user experience off against each other, we really should be looking at how to do both brilliantly. It’s why we should be looking at SEO and user experience as a relationship to nurture.

Is your ecommerce SEO content throwing up hurdles for website users?

So, where to place my SEO content on my ecommerce pages?

In the UK, a whopping 63.2 million individuals connect to the internet via a mobile device, accounting for 92.26% of all internet users in the country.

This means that when planning out your ecommerce website pages, you need to be thinking mobile first in terms of user experience. Because if your pages don’t work for mobile users, you are going to be frustrating a HUGE chunk of potential customers, the consequences of which are likely to be very damaging.

Ecommerce website users want to see products pretty damn quick after they land on the site or click on a particular product category.

That said, there’s really no issue with having a bit of keyword rich introductory content above those products to quickly reassure visitors they’re in the right place. But it needs to be kept to a minimum so that the product listings start ‘above the fold’. What exactly does that mean?

Above the fold basically means ‘before scrolling’. It’s what you see before you have to start the swipe-up action. The sooner you see the products you’ve been looking for, the sooner you know you’re in the right place, and are less likely to give up and hit that bounce-rate-boosting back button.

So by all means get your compelling overview intro in there at the top, but keep it nice and short and well laid out so that it doesn’t take up so much headroom that it pushes the products below the fold.

And then place the rest of your SEO keyword rich content below the products.

Why do I need SEO content on my ecommerce website?

Good quality content – helpful content – is one of the most effective ways for an ecommerce website to rank for more keywords and build backlinks.

If you think about it, your product and category pages only have so much scope to rank for particular keywords. Once you’ve maxed out on those, there’s little space left to attract the search engines by telling them what you’re selling.

SEO content will do that job, allowing you to rank for the short and long tail keywords associated with your products and industry. It will also make it much easier for you to build links to your site to give your domain authority a boost, which when done correctly, can significantly improve search rankings.

Good quality SEO content is one of the most effective ways for an ecommerce website to rank for more keywords and build backlinks.

This is why blogs are a great addition to an ecommerce website. You can deliver helpful content, without cluttering your product or category pages. You can also link into specific products and categories from those blogs, creating vital internal links that help the search engine crawlers better understand your site.

And as we’ve said, content on your product or category pages is fine, as long as it’s not at the expense of user experience.

A good way of approaching it is to include a sentence or two – max – ahead of the products, and then add a ‘read more’ link. If visitors are hooked and want to read more, they click the link and get transported to the rest of the content below the products. If they don’t, they get to carry on browsing the products, which they can see without the need for scrolling.

Need help with ecommerce SEO?

Are you looking to outrank your competitors and grow your online business with award-winning ecommerce SEO?

At Figment, we’ve been helping ecommerce businesses successfully boost their online visibility through customised, fully managed SEO campaigns for a number of years.

Want to learn more about how our team of experts can help your business? Get in touch with our SEO agency in London if you want to find out more.  We only wear white hats in this office.