“Optimize two productsfor Google”: whythat’s sometimes thewrong brief

In short

A merchant asked us whether we could optimize one or two of his products for Google. A small, clear job. But one look at the store showed that the foundation individual product pages need to rank at all was missing. We could have taken the job. Instead, we explained why it would achieve so little.

The request

The wish makes sense. Two bestsellers that should be easier to find, and a modest budget. The expectation: new title, new description, and the products climb on Google.

What has to be right first

A single product page doesn't rank in a vacuum. Google judges it in the context of the whole store:

• Indexing: Does Google even know the store properly, or are pages excluded?
• Structure: Are there collections that show what the store is about?
• Internal links: Do other pages link to the product, or does it stand alone?
• Tech: Speed, mobile display, clean URLs.
• Content: Does the store have any copy, titles and descriptions at all, or just product tiles?

Without that foundation, a better title on two products changes next to nothing.

Our answer

First we asked what already exists: Has anyone ever done keyword research, is there any copy, are titles and descriptions maintained, is the tech in order? And then we said it honestly: a foundation package would make more sense here than two optimized pages. It's the bigger job, but the only one that works.

What you can take away

• Optimizing assumes there's something to optimize. Where the foundation is missing, it's a first build, not optimization.
• SEO for individual products can make sense when the store as a whole is in good shape and one product needs a targeted push.
• Check the foundation yourself. In Search Console you can see which pages Google knows and which searches your store shows up for at all.
• A small job isn't automatically cheaper. If it achieves nothing, it's the most expensive offer there is.

Want to push individual products forward? First we'll tell you whether the foundation can carry it.