Ecommerce Product Page Optimization & International SEO

[omnyex]

Hello,

I'm working on our website SEO optimization. We have a thousands of products pages with different structures for the languages (arg) and very depth folder path .com/[folder]/[folder]/[folder]/product1.hmtl

So now I have the happiness of working on the optimization of the website with themajor risk of impacting all current ranking. But anyway, here are a few questions I have on the way.

Part 1 - International URL

Our websites target people per country and languages. We do not have shops per countries (not enough resources_) but we try to get at least website per languages. What could be the best option?_

1. Url Parameters +hreflang

2. So we save one folder less and the proper setup. But I'm just scared it's gonna be too messy for Google

• URL:.com/product1**?lang=fr**
• Product page:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href=".com/product1" /

4. Language folder + hreflang

5. one folder more but clearer structure

6. URL:.com**/fr/**product1

7. **Product **page:****link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href=".com/product1" /

Part 2 - Product URL

Our website is structure per categories so the product comes after. However, I've seen a lot of websites recently removing the categories to save folders space. What should be the most efficient option?

1. Category folder

2. It's obviously a good practice but this + the language folder makes already 2 folders

3. URL:.com/categoryA/product1-{targetedKW}

4. {targetedKW} = cheap product, best price or else

5. All in url

6. I've never done it but it somehow makes sense

7. URL:.com/categoryA-product1-{targetedKW}

Part 3 - Keyword stuffing

As I'd like to get most of it automatically done, what could be the best places to add a few KW.

1. **Markups:**All the ones we can

2. **Meta Descriptions:**optimize one for Google + one for twitter + one for facebook

3. Longer to do but then from google shopping and other automatic links, we could have the perfect or, at least, best description possible

4. **All other option:**Reuse our product name + {targetter KW1 KW2 ...}

5. Product description_ex: content_

6. Buttons (click to buy)ex: button title="Buy product_name cheap" alt="Purchase product_name"Buy Product name/button

7. Images:same than above

8. Meta:Titles and meta description

9. Hn

[WebElaine]

First of all, a caveat: if your site is ranking even moderately well, I would not change the URL structure. Once search engines have indexed content, they really don't like it when you play around with the URLs later. The exception would be your language URLs - if you're not already consistent about those or you don't already have those set up, then by all means set up whatever works for you, thinking as much as possible about how you might need to expand in the future so you can solve for that now, and not be in the same boat of wanting to change URLs again later. At the very least, in your shoes, I would first dive deep into analytics and find out what the most-visited folder structure is. Then if you decide to standardize them all, at least go with that version of the structure, and make sure you're putting in one-to-one redirects so you can preserve as much link juice as possible.

As to your more specific questions - these are answers more to what I would do if I were setting up a new site, and not if I were thinking about optimizing by changing a ton of the hierarchy.

1. Language URL - I lean toward #2, language in a folder, for a couple of reasons. To me it intuitively feels like everything in that language would be in that folder - in your example, .com/fr/ - and thereby grouped structurally, a signal to both search engines and humans that they are in the (insert language name here) language version of your site. Another reason is that after a certain point, parameters can get truncated, so if you're using other parameters - some that come to mind are Google Analytics' utm_source, utm_campaign, utm_medium - you may end up exceeding the max characters if you go the alternate route of language in a query string.

2. I would stick with either option 1 or option 3. While search engines are getting smarter about parsing, just like with the language folder, I think there's a lot to be said for showing some sort of structure and hierarchy by using a folder structure rather than mixing category with product name. Option 3: I'd suggest .com/toplevelcategory/product-name/ - and not include any of the subcategories as in .com/toplevelcategory/childcategory/grandchildcategory/product-name/ because it makes the URLs so long. Some of the benefits of having long URLs are that your tech-savvy users will visually recognize the hierarchy more easily and can quickly jump up a couple of levels just by chopping off a couple of folders in their address bar, and of course you can include more keywords the more folders you have. Drawbacks, though, are that in SERPs the full URL gets chopped off and looks less appealing to end users. On a related note, using Schema breadcrumbs (which are also visible to the user) is a great way to give additional signals to both search engines and users about what all those various levels are.

3. Just the fact that you used the term "keyword stuffing" would make me quite cautious. It's not about stuffing, it's about optimizing for both humans and spiders. In your shoes, I would again go to analytics and figure out what is already bringing you the most success - a combination of pages with the most organic traffic along with pages that convert really well. From there, I'd see what traits they have in common. Do all of them have longer content? Do you have some sort of special tags or something that is clearly working well?

If you don't want to get into the weeds and start optimizing pages individually, look hard at your Product Detail Page template. Make sure it pulls a decent title and meta description from a template (but that you can override it later if you ever have time to do one-by-one page optimization). By far the biggest thing you can do on any of your pages, besides getting basic page structure clean and clear, is to add Schema markup. A few tweaks to your PDP template and you should be able to show price, reviews, etc. to both humans and spiders. If for some reason you can't edit the template, look for similar gains through Google Search Console. They have a content highlighting tool that will let you highlight a series of pages to show it where to find certain information, and they'll then understand (and presumably rank) your content much better.

It varies by site, but if you're using old markup (say an XHTML transitional 1999 doctype) or lots of tables or tons of nested divs, that type of optimization can give you pretty decent gains as well. Cleaning up the codebase is often a huge ranking signal because it affects a ton of pages and shows you care about modernizing and improving UX.