Writing Effective Product Titles

Carefully crafted product titles can dramatically boost your inventory's visibility on the comparison shopping engines (CSE's). It can also help with SEO. Let's dive right in with some example product titles:

• BAD: Golf Polo, Plaid
• GOOD: Tommy Hilfiger Men's Golf Polo Shirt, Plaid

• BAD: Red Schwinn Beach Cruiser
• GOOD: Red Schwinn "Winwood" Beach Cruiser 3-Gear Bicycle

When consumers search for your products on shopping engines we don't know what search terms they will use. To counter this, utilize your product titles to cover as many keywords as possible without going overboard. In both examples above, the "bad" titles are leaving out extremely important data. In general, always include the following in your titles:

• What the product "is" — In the first example it's a shirt; in the second, a bicycle.
• The brand — Even if your ecommerce software has a separate area for brand, you should add the brand to the title unless your software automatically does this for you.
• The details — Examples from above would be "Men's," "Plaid," "Red," "Winwood," and "3-Gear."

On the flip side, don't list too many product details: this can get you in trouble with the CSE's for "keyword stuffing" and can make your product titles unreadable for consumers quickly scanning product results. In addition, you should aim to keep your titles 55 characters or less (and never more than 70 characters).

Shopping engines utilize the product title more than any other product attribute in the data feed. The shopping engines will also look at the (much larger) product description, but to a significantly lesser extent. Title your products carefully (using the guidelines above) and you will maximize your chances of success.

For an established retailer, making large-scale modifications to product titles can be a daunting task. VersaFeed can help by leaving your titles as-is on your website, but making automated changes to the titles in the data feed only.