Those that stray to the dark side and use duplicate materials can be forgiven. Unfortunately, duplicating content can actually have a negative impact on the discoverability of your online store. Businesses, then, need a way to make SEO for each product easy.

Getting your products seen is one of the greatest battles of online retailing. Nailing SEO on these pages is arguably more important than on your homepage – it’s the product pages that are often the customer’s last stop before checking out.

Every unique product page must be optimised with its own metadata. That’s a huge workload. So why wouldn’t you save yourself some time and effort and make a template that will kind of work for all of the t-shirts you’re selling? Though it feels like a smart solution, duplicating content in this manner is actually counter-productive. From an SEO perspective, it’s confusing.

Imagine you went into the shop to buy apple juice, but the descriptions for apple, pineapple, orange, and cranberry juice were all the same. You’d be confused. The same thing applies to consumers, and to Google. When the search engine can’t delineate clearly between your product pages it sees them as duplicates, and that’s what harms your SERP ranking.

It’s vital, therefore, that every data set is regularly updated for every channel. But when the process is manual, human error can lead to incorrect, irrelevant, or missing information. Errors that don’t seem important initially could seriously harm the discoverability of your online store. There must be an easier, safer way of doing it for 1,000s of products, that doesn’t require laborious manual input. Right?

Metadata is the secret to getting your products found; powering the elements that make finding your products possible, like categorization, search, and product descriptions. 

Meta descriptions work by allowing users to see what every page is about. And if it’s descriptive enough, it can be what convinces the customer to click on the link and visit your page. Metadata also gives you the opportunity to insert a couple of secondary keywords related to your primary keyword of the page. It’s this which allows the bots to better identify with the relevancy of the page for users.

Powerful stuff. But still, a daunting amount of work to conduct manually. 

First and foremost, your data has to be logically and efficiently stored in one place. That’s where PIM comes in. It streamlines everything about your product data, images, videos and site structure. And that’s vital, because, without a streamlined data management process, you can’t have an effective SEO strategy.

Diligent data management also unburdens brand owners, allowing them to automate some processes relating to product metadata. Using the power of automation, product categories, titles and descriptions are optimised for search. By eliminating manual processes, brand owners and their workers have more time and flexibility to focus on other activities. Like improving marketing strategies and customer service.

First, you need structure. Without the ability to manage data across multiple channels, brands simply won’t get noticed above the competition. When you’re chasing better discoverability, look first at how well your site is optimised.

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.

Acting as the single source of truth for all of your data, a PIM lets you leverage existing content and create new, unique content to use across your site and product pages by helping you to adapt your product data to the specifics of each distribution channel. From the size and structure of the product title, image format, and category organization, all the way down to the tone and approach used for marketing descriptions.

The goal of the PIM is to drive conversions by presenting people with fully optimized product pages, wherever they touch your brand. Successful brands use PIM to keep their product pages bursting with all the fresh and unique information and images customers need to make strong, informed buying decisions.