Question on SEO, using variants for different lower priced items.

[Jim30]

I sell vintage used media, so I basically have one of everything, if I get another copy of something I previously sold I go in and change the product page to reflect the new condition I'm listing. 

So I have thousands of products, all different artists and titles.  Because of the time it takes me to take/edit pictures, do product pages and grade items I've arrived that it's not worth doing this full procedure for items that I can't sell for more than $10.  This leaves me the issue of what to do for the thousands of items I have valued at $10 or less.

I've struggled with two options, do an indivudal product page for these items but cut out the detail that I do on the higher valued items, for example using only stock photos, not as detail descriptions, etc.  From a navigation point of view this makes it easier for customers to find things and allows these albums to be catagorized by vendor which I use as the artist name.  It's also better suited for sharing of product pages on Pinterest which my pressence is rapidly growing.

On the other side I've tried doing product pages and putting these albums as variants, so each product page by genre that has 100 variants each variant indicating what artist and ablum it is.  This is less work, but isn't very user friendly, doesn't organize very well, and is even less detailed than it would be if I did do separate product pages, and the variants appear to have zero SEO help.  But my rationality behind this is I'm not creating thousands of less detailed product pages I'm limiting it for 1 page or every 100 albums.

So is it better to do a separate product page for each album, even if a lot of these lowered price albums are not going to have as detailed of descriptions simply for the sake of time, but will likely be easier for the customers to search and browse?  Or stick with lumping everything in fewer product pages with variants in the hope I'm not watering down my good SEO with a lot of product pages with less detail (even though they are for all different products.) 

Every other site in my industry does a separate page per album no matter the price, and they usually have less detail than I have in general, so in terms of my competition I'd still be doing more than them if I did indivdual product pages on these lower priced items with less detail.  I'm just curious from an SEO standpoint which is better.  I've switched back and forth doing both a couple of times, I want to settle on one way and stick with it.  Personally I think indivdual pages will incorpate better into my site with the related items app I have and just overall organization and browsing, but on the flip side I don't want to spend all that time and find out it's just killing my SEO...

[Nick]

Hi Jim, 

Nick here from Shopify. 

Great question as SEO can be difficult even on the best of days. Something to remember with SEO is that the more pages your store has with relevant keywords the better is for your SEO. By adding keywords to your content, including page titles, descriptions, and image alt text it will certainly help. How you decide to go about this is completely up to you, but if it was me in the same position, I would lean towards doing an individual page product page for each one. You can read in more detail about how SEO works within Shopify from the information guide here. Because SEO is focused more around keywords it is important to mention the keywords rather than having long descriptions if that makes any sense, so having a shorter description in terms of SEO is not so much of a dealbreaker rather mentioning the keywords. You can find out more about how to apply keywords for your store here. 

I would probably create a collection for all of the products in the lower price range which you mentioned and maybe even try to have two items packaged together to make it worth your while? There are some apps which can bundle products together. You can see some of the most popular bundle apps from the Shopify app store below:

• Upsell Bundles 
• Bundle Products 
• Bold Bundles
• Frequently bought together
• Bundles

Due to these items being cheaper than the rest, bundling or adding them to other orders is something which could help you sell these items. 

Hopefully, this helps and answers your question. Don't hesitate to ask any others should you have any. 

All the best, Nick

[Jim30]

Thanks for the reply Nick.  What you've mentioned is somewhat in line with what I thought.  I do have these items in a separate collection and currently have deals based on the amount of items from this collection that are purchased.  I currently do make use of all the keywords features you've mentioned and alt tags.

I've read conflicting information about SEO though that you ought to have detailed descriptions as Google is looking for useful content, and short descriptions wouldn't be as helpful as for example like a paragraph description.  And from my own experience my blog posts and my products with larger descriptions do get most of the search engine traffic.

I think ultimately what I'll do is focus on listing my main higher dollar items and continuing to build my blogs as this seems to be driving the most traffic to my site, then come back to the cheaper stuff later when my site is getting more traffic, that way at least my time is going towards what will likely make me the most profit and build the site up faster in the short run.

[Nick]

Hi Jim, 

There is so much information out there regarding SEO so I know exactly what you mean. It's hard to keep up sometimes with what's the best thing to do. Something I use personally in stores is an SEO app which I have found great. The one I like and have used mostly is SEO Manager. There is a cost to SEO Manager but I feel it's well worth it and their customer support team is great. You can see the other SEO apps in the Shopify App Store here, some of which are free too. It could be worth taking a look and seeing if adding an app to improve your SEO is something you'd like. 

I like your idea also about coming back when there might be more traffic. Plus it's something new to launch down the line, good thinking. 

Best of luck and any other questions, just ask. 

Cheers, Nick