Last week a customer emailed me a question about his store. He included a lot of details so I'll summarize it here:
- the store sells one product
- the product can be called by different names by customers
- several people recommended creating multiple products in Shopify to target each name
- but then he'd have to manage the inventory and various other things to make that work.
He wanted to know if I had a better idea.
I do...
The advice of having more pages for your product around different keywords makes total sense from an SEO and advertising perspective.
The downsides are what was mentioned about inventory management as well as other things like keeping the products in sync, fulfillment, etc.
All manageable but there's a better way.
Google looks at page urls. They don't really care if you have multiple pages talking about the same product unless those pages have identical content on them.
The easy thing is to create multiple Shopify pages, instead of creating multiple products. These will become your landing pages.
Each page can then have different content, target different keywords, and have their own urls. On each one you'd then have a button to buy your product, as well as the price or anything else you want a customer to know. Or you can link to your main product page.
This setup would:
- give you multiple pages of content that you can start to rank for in SEO
- give you multiple pages for your ads to target based on the ad content
- give you a larger site with more content and more cross-linking, which Google likes
- but still just a single product to track inventory and keep updated.
This would also work very well with JSON-LD for SEO and meet Google's Rich Result guidelines. The product page would have the product structured data (for Product Rich Snippets), while the landing pages would get article data (for Article Rich Results).
There are a lot of people using this sort of technique.
In a way, I am too.
I have a couple hundred pages on my site but only four products. Different pages reference different parts of each product and attract different traffic. Those are all directed to my main product pages.
Anyone can do this too, all it takes is some time and some writing.
Another improvement you can make to your store is to get your structured data in order.
Google has been working on Rich Snippets so I bet there's going to be more search enhancements coming out in 2018 for stores with structured data.
And JSON-LD for SEO is the easiest and safest option in the Shopify app store to automatically add that data.
Already trusted by over two thousand stores, it's among the top SEO apps overall.
Eric Davis