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Product Titles Question
Is it worth putting descriptors in product titles? Let’s pretend I’m selling Wooden cooking spoons.
Smiths Wooden Cooking Spoon
OR
Smiths 10″ Premium Natural Oak Kitchen Cooking Spoon
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1 Reply
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Yes
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Def yes.
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Second option for sure. Just think of it from a user’s perspective. The more information you give the more they can easily decide if that is product they want/need. It also helps with organic search
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If you have enough URLs, test out a few different options and see which drives more clicks and hopefully conversions.
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I tend to be longwinded, but I do want to share a bit more of the story here because it is very pertinent.
And of course the obligatory: Search engine algorithms are complicated and sophisticated, so if I am stating something “simply”, it’s for heightening the importance of it, not because I don’t know SEO or don’t believe the Search Engines can handle sophisticated analysis.
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**You should have specific, detailed product titles, within reason. But you have to look at the nuances of it too.**
1. Titles should be descriptive enough that someone knows what it is, but not so detailed that it pigeonholes your products into a tiny category or causes unintentional misleading
2. Title structure should be conversion aligned
3. Titles across a full E-Comm store should be relatively and substantially similar in methodology (e.g. Brand, Product name, material composition, size, color/finish or some iteration of this depending on your products)
4. Titles should be geared towards providing a quick glance at the capabilities of the product, without being too wordy**There are a lot of reasons you would not want to just say ‘Smith Wooden Cooking Spoon’**
Some are as follows:
* This title is too generic to get competitive placement without a lot of extra work
* It doesn’t give enough conversion potential at a glance for a large portion of the visitors that might come to the page
* It doesn’t showcase your store as a place that takes the visitor’s needs seriously relative to some peers​
**There are also some reasons why being ultra specific might NOT be a good idea either:**
Some are as follows:
* Sometimes ‘Smith Wooden Cooking Spoon’ IS THE EXACT match keyword you want on your site/page/store because the company brands it that way – don’t fight millions of dollars in brand positioning for the sake of a cooler title if you are going to benefit from their work anyways
* People may not see some of the value in ‘Smiths 10″ Premium Natural Oak Kitchen Cooking Spoon’ as a title because it doesn’t describe the item the same way they might describe it (the perception is reality concept)
* Google/etc. may still be combining key word strings that negatively affect your placement and it may impact your organic sales
* ‘Smiths 10″ Premium Natural Oak Kitchen Cooking Spoon’ has the word ‘natural oak’ in it. And no one is searching for a natural oak kitchen cooking spoon. Also, natural oak finish? or? What is natural oak? is that the opposite of non-natural oak?
* It also has a kw string of ‘kitchen cooking spoon’, which despite being an actual search query with actual traffic, is not an accurate piece of terminology and duplicate words describing substantially similar tasks (kitchen + cooking) makes it seem like you are not a chef/in the food industry, etc. For smaller stores you need all the advantage you can get no matter how subtle.
* ‘Premium’ is an OK qualifier in some spaces, but may be better served in a product description or commentary
* I’d probably use (something LIKE) the following: “Smiths 10″ non-slotted cooking spoon hardwood with natural oak finish” instead of something like ‘Smiths 10″ Premium Natural Oak Kitchen Cooking Spoon’ and I would use it in conjunction with the intent that my buyers were normally searching withYes, I am aware you were shooting an off the cuff example out there to get feedback, I’m not knocking you, I’m stating that the bigger issue is not doing the correct amount of intent-based research to determine you are presenting the best possible title for your products. Nuance exists, and you want to be on the right side of it.
EDITED TO ADD:
Whether you sell other people’s/brand’s products or your own will have a HUGE impact on how you stage your product titles – if you are a brand that does not have the same legacy as others in the space, being as descriptive as possible if a key factor to compete on all levels, not jsut the cooking spoon level.
Best of luck!
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yes, but you may want to customize your SEO title in this manner and NOT your product title.
For example, I do not list jewelry designer names in my webstore product titles for aesthetic reasons online, but I do list the designer’s name on the SEO version of the product title for the search engine love.
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