An argument could be made for the idea that no aspect of vape shop marketing is more important than having great product pages. When someone views one of your site’s product pages, after all, that’s the last step before that person becomes a customer. All that’s left is to click the “Add to Cart” button.

If someone finds a different page on your site though a search engine, on the other hand – like a blog post – that person would have to click over to your store, view a product category and click a product listing before adding a product to their cart even becomes a possibility. That’s several actions that have to take place before there’s any chance of a purchase occurring.

With those facts in mind, it’s no wonder that the organic search engine rankings of your vape shop’s product pages will always have a more direct impact on your bottom line than any other aspect of SEO.

If you’re new to selling vape gear online, though, you may not know where to begin when it comes to constructing your website’s product pages. Worse yet, you may try to take the easy way out and simply link your website to your distributor’s product feed – and then you’ll undoubtedly spend a lot of time wondering why your vape shop gets no web traffic.

You want to sell vape gear online, and we’re here to tell you that it all begins with great product pages. In this article, we’re going to explain exactly how to create great vape shop product pages that get noticed by Google and help your vape shop earn real revenue. We’ll start at the beginning by discussing the one thing you should never do with your vape shop’s product pages.

Never Use Copied Text on Your Product Pages

When people are new to the vaping industry – or new to running e-commerce sites in general – the most common mistake they make is underestimating the importance of product pages. They think the text on the page isn’t that important – and they haven’t got the time to write descriptions for hundreds of products anyway – so they copy the description text from their distributors’ product feeds or from the vape shops that show up first for those products on Google.

If getting web traffic were easy, every owner of an e-commerce website would be rich. Unfortunately, though, the reality is quite the opposite. If you copy your product description text from other websites, your product pages will most likely receive no traffic whatsoever.

If you really think about it, the reason for that should be fairly obvious. If your product pages have text copied from other sites, those pages look exactly the same to Google as potentially hundreds of other websites that all copied their product text from the same source. Why would Google select your page as the best result for any search when it could select the original source of that text instead?

To make matters worse, you don’t even own the copyright for that text – someone else does.

There’s simply no way around the fact that product page SEO for a vape shop – for any e-commerce site – is a lot of work. You can’t just copy and paste your way to riches, so don’t even bother trying. You’ll only end up creating more work for yourself later when you have to clean up the mess.

Take the Time to Understand Your Competition

The primary goal of any product page is to show up as high on Google as possible when people search for that product. Therefore, if you want to increase the rankings of your vape shop’s product pages, you need to know who your competitors are and what they’re doing. Select a product that’s important to you and search for it on Google. Look at all of the results that show up on the first page.

Analyzing your competition accomplishes two things. First, it tells you what Google’s ranking algorithm wants to see in a page that deserves a high ranking for a particular search. The other reason why looking at your competition is valuable is because it establishes a basis for comparison.

Look at your competitors’ websites from a consumer’s point of view and compare them to your own vape shop. Can you honestly say that your product pages are more useful, more helpful and easier to navigate? If you can’t say those things, what makes you believe that your vape shop should outrank those sites?

Write Informative and Helpful Product Descriptions

The description text is the most important part of any product page. Google’s AI and machine learning algorithms have come a long way in helping the search engine understand what content is and how it should be ranked. At its core, though, Google is still a search engine that works on text. If you want a page to rank for a particular keyword, you need to have that keyword – or something with essentially the same meaning – on that page. With that in mind, longer product content helps up to a point because it gives your page a chance to be ranked for a wider variety of keywords.

At this point, you might be scratching your head and wondering how you can possibly type hundreds of words about a product like a bottle of e-liquid – and then repeat that process for every last one of the hundreds or thousands of products on your vape shop’s website. Although there’s no denying that writing product descriptions is a lot of work, you’re probably overthinking things if the task seems impossible to you.

To create a perfect vape shop product description, we suggest following this simple checklist. If your description text answers all of these questions, it’s almost certainly as long as it needs to be.

• What is the product?
• What does the product do, and who is it for?
• How does the product work?
• What are the specifications of the product?
• What’s included with the product?
• What are the benefits of the product, and what problems does it solve?
• How does the product compare to similar products that the customer might also be considering?
• How can a user have the best possible experience with the product?
• How can a user fix the problems that might occur with the product?

As you write your product descriptions, focus on making the content as readable as possible by making liberal use of subheadings and bullet lists. You should also look for opportunities to add keyword phrases that relate to the product and may also receive search volume. A keyword phrase like “best mini vape” might be good for a description of a pod system, for instance, while “strawberry vape juice” might be a good keyword phrase to add to an e-liquid product description.

Add an Internal Link to Each Product Description

Before you finalize any product description, the last thing that you should do is create a link within the description text to another page elsewhere on your website. In a product page for a vape kit, for example, you might link internally to your main category page for vape kits or to the page for the replacement coils that kit requires. In a product page for an e-liquid, you could link to your main e-liquid category page or to the category page for that brand.

Adding internal links to your product pages is important because it does three things.

• It creates an easy way for customers to find pages that might be useful to them.
• It’s good for SEO because the pages that have the most internal links pointing to them will always be the most important pages on your site.
• It could help you earn free backlinks. If your product descriptions are good, someone is bound to copy them eventually.

Consider Taking Your Own Product Photos

One of the areas in which Google has greatly improved over the past several years is in its understanding of what pictures are and what they represent. As a result, Google’s image search now provides more useful results than ever. You’d be surprised how often people use Google Images when they’re looking for products to buy. It can potentially be a valuable source of traffic for you.

You’ve probably noticed, though, that you won’t just see the same picture over and over when you search for a particular product on Google Images. Google’s algorithm can recognize when images are substantially the same, and it’ll generally try to avoid displaying duplicate images. Therefore, your vape shop probably isn’t going to show up on Google Images if you’re using stock photos provided by your distributor.

If you use stock photos on your vape shop’s product pages, your website will also look largely the same as your competitors’ sites to many people. If a potential customer leaves your site without buying anything, they’re not going to remember you later when they are ready to buy something.

With those things in mind, you should strongly consider handling your own product photography. Any modern smartphone can take perfectly acceptable product photos; all that you need to worry about is setting up a backdrop and some lighting. Good product photography can really help a vape shop stand out.

Don’t Forget the Importance of Technical SEO

SEO for a vape shop’s website isn’t really as difficult as it sounds. Mainly, you just need to focus on making your content as useful and helpful as it can be, and the rest will work itself out. It doesn’t hurt, though, to make each product page’s primary keyword entirely clear to Google. Whether the item in question is a vape kit, an e-liquid or something else, the primary keyword phrase will always be the manufacturer and name of the product. You should make sure that the primary keyword phrase always appears in:

• The page’s meta title
• The page’s meta description
• The page’s URL
• The file name and alt text of at least one image

In addition to the above, you should also remember the importance of branding when you write the meta titles for your vape shop’s product pages. Your business’s name should always appear in the meta title after the manufacturer and product name. If you have some space remaining, use it for secondary keywords.

When writing the meta descriptions for your product pages, remember that Google will sometimes show meta descriptions in its search results. Therefore, you should strive to include something that entices potential customers to click through to your site. Do you offer free shipping on all orders? Same-day local delivery? Any feature that makes your vape shop special belongs in your product pages’ meta descriptions.

Enhance the Shopping Experience with Features that Make Your Vape Shop Stand Out

Once you’ve gotten a product page to the point at which it satisfies all of the advice given in this article, it’s safe to say that it’s a strong page and deserves a high ranking. However, it never hurts to put in a little extra work. Anything that makes your vape shop stand out from the crowd is going to help you earn business and may potentially help your rankings as well. Here are two ideas that can help to get your creative juices flowing.

• Can you add anything to your product pages to help make product discovery easier? Many vaping products require ancillary products like pods, coils, batteries and nicotine shots. A good product page helps customers understand what ancillary products they need and should make it easy to buy those products as a bundle.
• Can you add anything that makes it easier to understand the differences between products? Many e-liquids, for example, have flavor profiles that are very similar to one another. There’s no shortage of strawberry-and-cream or mango-and-ice vape juices, and it’s difficult to describe the differences between those e-liquids using text alone. Could you implement a chart that ranks different e-liquids on qualities such as throat hit, sweetness, coolness and vapor production?