You may already know that digital advertising costs have been rising in recent years. But it’s surprising to learn the range of these increases. For example, the average ecommerce industry search-based CPC (cost per click) for Google Ads has now hit around USD $1.16, as reported by WordStream’s 2022 Google Ads Benchmark Report. In comparison, the 2016 benchmark showed only $0.29 CPC. From 2016 to 2022, these figures show a massive 4x increase. Retail categories, in particular, are also seeing sharp CPC increases, such as the beauty category, seeing a jaw-dropping 41% increase last year, just in Q3 (as Statista’s U.S. figures show).

With the cost of driving traffic to your site hitting new highs, it’s more vital than ever to ensure that visitors to your online store are compelled to stay and shop around. So how can you do this? By delivering the ultimate shopper experience at every touchpoint. And this begins with your product metadata.

Before diving into the tactics to optimise your product metadata, though, we’ll look at how to bring even more organic traffic to your site to help minimise the cost of attracting customers.

Increase High-Quality Traffic through Organic Product Page Ranking

Search is the new personal shopper, with 59% of shoppers using Google to research a product they plan to buy either in-store or online. A study by marketer Brian Dean shows that the top 3 Google search results get 75% of all clicks. Not only that, the number one organic result is ten times more likely to receive a click compared to a tenth-place result.

Ranking organically for product pages is a vital source of high-quality traffic. Shoppers searching for specific products are also likely to be in the latter stages of their research and decision-making process. These are your long-tail keywords; highly targeted search phrases that serve searcher intent.

The other significant benefit of organic traffic is that it’s free! So you have the opportunity to bring high-intent shoppers to your site at zero cost and lower your Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA).

As CPC and paid advertising channels continue to rise, ranking organically for product pages reduces your COCA and increases high-quality and high-intent traffic.

[Think With Google]

How SERPs Handle Product Metadata

Original meta descriptions are shown in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) snippets in around 55% of cases. Sometimes a search engine takes a shortened version of the meta description and adds other text from the product page that it deems more relevant.

Regardless of how SERPs influence the descriptions being shown, carefully-crafted product descriptions are critical to attracting attention. Google and other SERPs want to serve descriptions that best match a user’s search intent – a description that answers their query. By enriching your metadata copy to demonstrate the value of products to your shoppers and effectively answer their questions, you’re helping SERPs and your customers.

How to Optimise Your Product Metadata

Optimise your product descriptions by explaining key features, and help customers understand how the product fits their needs. Attributes such as sizes, colours, styles, and use cases go a long way to assisting customers in knowing whether your product matches their search intent.

To ensure these attributes are accurate, however, your product data has to be logically and efficiently stored in one place. That’s where PIM comes in, centrally managing your product content (product data, images, videos and more). And that’s vital because you can’t have an effective SEO strategy without a streamlined data management process.

PIM systems make all aspects relating to product data, images, site structure, and video shareable efficiently across your whole commerce ecosystem. Essentially, you can’t have a good SEO strategy without a great data management process. Your PIM will help you effectively manage everything from the size and structure of the product title, image format, and category organisation, all the way down to the tone and approach used for marketing descriptions.

Finally, product copy should also include research-based SEO keywords. Boost discoverability and help drive conversions with keyword-rich product descriptions, and use attributes to help shoppers find exactly what they need.

By leveraging logically stored product data and SEO research to create descriptions that fulfil your shoppers’ questions and purchase intentions, you stand a much better chance of increasing click-throughs and getting customers onto your site.

The Difference Between Head and Long-Tail Keywords

Head keywords are the high-volume (and high-competition) words that form around 60% of search traffic, according to an Ahrefs recent study. These head keywords are terms such as “handbag”, “shoes”, or “latest fashion”. They often hold a much lower intent as users aren’t sure of what specific item they need when using head keywords.

The other 40% of search traffic comes from long-tail keywords – the more descriptive, specific queries, e.g. “Men’s red Adidas training shoes”. These shoppers know what they want and are looking for where to buy it.

More specific terms also see reduced competition, which means more opportunities to attract shoppers by targeting what they need.

Searchspring’s Top Tips for Writing an Exceptional Product Meta Description:

As paid advertising costs continue to increase, it becomes increasingly vital to have a robust organic strategy that incorporates well-managed product metadata. With more free traffic, you can reduce your COCA (cost of customer acquisition).

Once shoppers arrive at your ecommerce store (whether by paid or organic sources), serving exactly what they need ensures that your time and effort in attracting traffic pays off.

To deliver the ultimate shopper experience, your product metadata must be a critical part of your strategy. By providing that experience from start to finish, you can attract and convert more shoppers – without spending the big bucks on advertising.

If you’re looking for the technology to go beyond basic shopping experiences, Searchspring delivers the #1 search, merchandising, and personalisation platform built exclusively for ecommerce. The solution also works alongside Okkular.io, an AI-powered product tagging, product descriptions and visual search automation tool.

Searchspring delivers the ultimate shopping experience. As the #1 search, merchandising, and personalization platform built exclusively for ecommerce, Searchspring enables brands to get the right product, to the right person, at the right time. With Searchspring, customers such as 2XU, St Frock, Chubbies, Pura Vida, Moen, Fabletics, Peet’s Coffee, SKIMS, West Elm, Specialized, Wildfang, and Ripcurl are increasing cart size, conversion, and repeat customers. Founded in 2007, Searchspring has offices in San Antonio, Denver, Toronto, Krakow, and Sydney.