By Volusion
Your product names carry beyond your product and category efforts, and carefully crafted titles can have a remarkable influence in your SEO, PPC and channel marketing efforts. Our specialists guide you through your top product naming considerations.
Whether you’re uploading new products to your website or refreshing existing ones, the product title can have a significant impact on how your products are ranked for both organic and paid search results. To ensure your product titles have the most efficient impact in all your marketing efforts – from SEO to PPC and Shopping Feeds – be sure to consider the following:
1. Being Informational vs. Being Descriptive
Knowing your product and how people will use it will help you determine if you should take a more informational or descriptive approach to naming it. Industrial equipment might require information such as dimensions, usage or manufacturer information, but something like a t-shirt would benefit more from describing its color or cut instead.
Think about if your product comes from a well-known brand manufacturer. Popular branded terms often have high search volume. For example, “Levi’s” are a well-known brand of jeans. If you’re selling jeans, specifying if your jeans are Levi’s or another brand can help bring in more targeted traffic.
This Amazon product mixes the informational and descriptive approach. It informs customers of the dimensions, but also describes what the poster displays.
2. Placement in the Frame of the Site
Site architecture can help guide you in naming products. Work from a general focus toward a more specific one. Typically, your category pages listing a bundling of similar products will use more generic terms. However, the specific product page needs to use terms that set it apart from other products found within in that category. Try to include what makes the product unique, but also keep it simple, clear and extendable.
These products are found within the CD/Soundtrack category page. This information is extended to the product titles.
3. Audience
Always keep your intended user in mind. Is your product for men, women, children, or even animals? A specific local market? When you consider who is using your product, it’s easy to add a modifier to a more generic product title. If you’re a localized company, adding a city modifier or city-specific language might help increase product visibility. For example, different regions of the US use the terms “soda,” “pop” or “coke” when referring to the same product. If you sell products outside of the US, including metric dimensions might be more appropriate than using inches. Knowing who you’re targeting and where they’re located can help you choose the right term for your product title.
“High School Musical Mystery Date Game for Teens” is a more effective title than “High School Musical Mystery Date,” which does not specify the intended user.
4. Taxonomy
One of the easiest ways to differentiate product titles is to consider taxonomy, especially in the fashion industry. When carrying a specific product with slight variations or different styles, including unique attributes in your product titles can help differentiate between them.
“Red Wildcats Jersey” – Specifying the color of the Jersey title helps set it apart from the below Jersey.
“White Wildcats Jersey”
5. Front Loading
Placing the most important terms at the beginning of product titles can be very beneficial, especially with Shopping Feeds, where the number of characters that will display on a result page is limited. If you go over this limit, your product title can get cut off.
If this product title gets cut off, it is still likely to show the brand, feature line and type of product: “Disney’s High School Musical Pillow…”
6. Testing
Finally, test. Keep an eye on your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to make sure that the words and phrases you selected for product titles are bringing in relevant traffic. If something’s not working, don’t be afraid to change it.
It might be tempting to create a word or phrase in your product title, but sticking to recognizable, descriptive and informative terms are best.
Do you have another tip for naming products that’s worked for you? Comment and share!
– Bethany Smith & Adam Kirsch, Search Marketing Specialists
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