The product page SEO checklist we run for every store

Most product pages lose rankings not to competitors, but to neglect: a manufacturer description pasted verbatim, a meta title that says “Home”, images named IMG_2048.jpg. Here’s the checklist our SEO engine walks through on every product page: you can run it on your own catalog today.

1. Title tag: keyword first, brand last

[Primary Keyword] | [Benefit or Variant] | [Store Name], under ~60 characters. The primary keyword is what the page should rank for: usually the product name plus its category or intent word (“beaker bong”, “silk slip dress”).

Test: could a stranger guess the page’s content from the title in a search result?

2. Meta description: the ad nobody pays for

Under ~155 characters, with the keyword and a reason to click (free shipping, sizing, a specific benefit). Google rewrites these more often than not, but a good one raises click-through when it survives.

3. H1: one, and it matches intent

The product name as the page’s single H1. Not “Welcome to our shop”. Not three of them.

4. Body copy: not the manufacturer’s

100-300 words of copy that answers what a buyer actually asks: materials, fit, compatibility, care, what’s in the box. Duplicate manufacturer copy is duplicate content: it ranks for nothing and converts worse.

The fastest way to write original copy: answer the questions your support inbox already holds. Every “does this fit”, “how do I clean it”, “what does it come with” is a sentence the page owes the buyer. Your returns and support history is the voice-of-customer file for the whole catalog.

5. FAQ block: the featured-snippet magnet

3-5 real questions with concise answers. This is the highest-value addition on most stores: it wins featured snippets, feeds voice search, and reduces support tickets. Structured data (FAQPage schema) is a bonus we add automatically.

Pick questions from real channels, not from your imagination: support tickets, chat logs, review complaints, the “questions about this product” section your platform already tracks. A FAQ nobody asked is filler; a FAQ lifted from real tickets is a support deflection tool that also ranks.

6. Alt text: describe, don’t stuff

Every image gets a real description: “clear glass beaker bong with ice pinch, 14 inches”. Alt text is an accessibility feature that also ranks in image search. In categories where buyers judge by image (glass, apparel, jewelry), image search traffic converts: it arrives already sold on how the thing looks.

7. Internal links: collection and related products

Each product page should link to its parent collection and 2-4 related products with descriptive anchor text. This is how crawl budget and authority flow.

Two anchors rules that matter: link with the words a buyer would search (“see all glass water pipes”, not “click here”), and never orphan a page. A product linked from nothing but the grid is a page search engines can find but cannot weigh.

8. Schema: the rich result kit

Product schema (price, availability, ratings), FAQ schema, breadcrumb schema. This is the layer that puts stars and stock status into the search listing, and listings with stars get the click at the same rank. Most platforms support it half by default; the checklist verifies each page ships the full set.

9. The score

We compress all of this into a 0-100 SEO score per product page, refreshed whenever the page changes. It’s how merchants see progress at a glance instead of reading a 40-row audit spreadsheet: and how our team prioritizes which pages to rewrite first each month.

---

The SEO engine: product rewrites, collection pages, keyword-driven blog articles, all scored 0-100: runs on every Trinacle plan from Lite up.

Collections and blogs: same checklist, different weights

Collections get the same treatment with one shift: category terms lead (“glass water pipes”) instead of product terms, and the intro copy carries the guidance a grid cannot. Blog posts get a lighter version: title, meta, headers, internal links to the collections they support. The point of the checklist is not perfection on one page: it is every page meeting the same floor, so authority flows through a clean structure instead of leaking through a weak one.

The 0-100 score: how a page ships

Every check above feeds a score: 0-100, computed before anything publishes. Under the bar, the page does not ship; it gets fixed first. That single gate is why catalogs we manage do not ship with manufacturer paste, missing alt text, or “Home” as a title.

The five fastest wins if you only have an afternoon

1. Rewrite the title tags on your 20 highest-traffic product pages: hours of work, weeks of lift
2. Add alt text to every hero image on the top sellers
3. Paste your last 10 support questions into FAQ blocks on the pages they concern
4. Fix the H1s: one per page, matching the product
5. Check every title that says “Home” or the store name on a product page: they exist on almost every store we audit

How it runs at catalog scale

The checklist is mechanical; the volume is the hard part. A 400-product store needs every page checked, plus collections, plus supporting blog content: month after month. That is what the SEO engine does: it drafts the rewrites, applies this checklist, scores the result, and publishes on a monthly volume set by your plan (35-70 pages a month on Pro and Enterprise). Your strategist picks the priorities; the engine does the page-by-page work; a human checks everything. See what each plan publishes.