How to Add Products to Your Shopify Store

Putting a product live on your Shopify store is easy, right? All you have to do is add your product image, description and price, and just like that, millions of customers around the world can buy your product. 

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The way you add a product to your Shopify store affects how it ranks in search engines, and ultimately whether your customers can find what you’re selling. 

Here are a few simple tips and tricks you can follow to boost your store’s SEO and improve your products’ visibility:

Product title

Never underestimate the power of your product titles, particularly for SEO. For the best results, each product title should be as descriptive as possible and should include important information about the product itself, such as colour, size, and manufacturer if possible. 

Here’s two examples of a product title for the same product:

Example 1:

Example 2:

As you can see, example 2 is longer and contains more detail about the product (it’s for women, it’s meme clothing, and it’s screen printed). This helps search engines like Google recognise how relevant your product is to a user’s search and ensures you rank for searches related to the keywords you have used in your product title.

Product descriptions

Product descriptions are your opportunity to help your customers understand as much as possible about your products. This includes fabric, fit, special features, place of manufacturing, and so on. 

When it comes to product descriptions, keywords are vital. But, be careful not to overdo it – no one wants to read content that’s jam-packed full of keywords and adds very little value. 

When writing your product descriptions, focus on originality and readability. Customers prefer easily digestible content, that helps them understand the product in as few words as possible. Also, it’s imperative that you consider your target audience and what they want most out of your product. 

We recommend using brief descriptions, followed by bullet points about the product’s key features. And why not go one step further and add reviews and user-generated-content to your product pages to make them really stand out? 

If you need some inspiration, check out our client, Cosatto’s fantastic product pages – they tick all the right boxes:

Product images

It’s surprising how many merchants overlook the importance of high-quality images on their product pages. Images should be professional, offer a 360-degree view of the product and uploaded in an optimised format. Then, the image size needs to be reduced as much as possible so it doesn’t affect your page speed (but, be aware not to sacrifice the image quality in the process). Compression tools like tiny.png are great for this.

Product image alt text

Again, an enormous number of brands ignore the product image alt text. It’s a simple and easy task, so there’s really no excuse for not doing it. All you need to do is click the ALT button where your product image loads, then enter your text, which can just be a brief description of your product. Do this for every product on your Shopify store and watch your rankings rise to the top!

Product variants

Product variants will differ based on your product offering in terms of size, colour, price, etc, but there are few things to keep in mind. It’s best practice to fill in as much information as you can in these fields. And, make sure each of your sizes has inventory tracked, so you don’t sell more products than you have. 

For SKU numbers, these can be made according to your internal system or Shopify can automatically generate these for you. If your product has a barcode (ISBN, UPC, GTIN, etc.) click edit on the variant and enter it into the proper field. 

Search engine listing preview

For every product you have, you must edit the search engine listing preview.  

The title can either be the same as your product title or you can make it more keyword focused. 

For your meta description, this can be the same as your product description, but keep in mind that it must be 160 characters or fewer.

And, your URL and handle should be short, snappy and include unique keywords from the product title. 

Sales channels

This section is where you can choose which channels you want to sell your products on. Luckily for you, Shopify comes out-of-the-box with some great integrations such as Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, which gives you more opportunities to reach your customers on multiple platforms. However, be aware that some channels like Amazon come with extra fees that will eat into your bottom line. 

Organization

This is where you keep track of your products internally. For example, if you’d like to keep track of product type (jackets) or vendor (Adidas), you can do it all here. Some Shopify themes will have options to show your vendor entries on the collection or product page, but it’s best practice to enter the vendor and product type if you show it or not. This allows your products to be easily categorised by type or vendor in smart collections. 

The organization section also tells you which collection the product is included in and has a tag field so you can add keywords. You can use these tags as a condition on a collection, for example, a product tag ‘footwear’ will automatically add the product to a footwear collection. 

The organization tab is essential for seamless site navigation. Get this wrong and it will seriously affect your sales. That’s why it’s imperative to take your time with this tab and put some thought into it for optimal results. 

Last word

While you might think the product editing page is simple, many merchants fail to take advantage of all its features and rush the process. However, if you standardise the process and approach your product pages strategically it will lead to better search engine results, boosted visibility and more sales. 

If you need support implementing the process or want to learn more about how you can boost traffic to your Shopify store, then reach out to our SEO experts, today!