How to Maximize your Ecommerce SEO Visibility with PIM

Refine Your Product Data SEO Strategy with PIM Software

Even in the realm of selling through Amazon or other third-party marketplaces, rich product information is essential to competing against those selling the exact same product.

If two sellers are selling the same product, the one with the most product information is the only one that is going to garner the most trust and the most conversions.

Figure 1 – Product Details Setup from Amazon Seller’s Guide

So, now that we’ve established the importance of PIM to improve your eCommerce SEO strategy, how do site owners manage product information?

Collecting product data

First, you must decide what product details are critical to your audience, and how to collect that information as efficiently as possible. Even when you’re selling only your own products and not those of other vendors, your product information may currently live in various sources, often siloed, often offline.

These places include the ERP, databases, spreadsheets, print catalogs, hand-written notes: long term memory belonging to product owners. All of these details can be easily centralized and used as needed, whether internally or externally, with a PIM solution.

Using a PIM Solution To Replace Spreadsheets

Many businesses still use spreadsheets to manage their product data. While this may work for a short time and in simple use cases, eventually you’ll want that data to be frequently distributed across multiple sources, channels, vendors, and in various formats or connection methods.

In that case, spreadsheets will fall short. Plus, a PIM solution can capture even richer detail, like videos, images, documents, and even customer reviews.

Even those with a master data system like an ERP will ironically discover the common short supply of information beyond the handful of basic product fields such as name, description, product number, price, and inventory.

Enriching Product Data

The next process that follows collecting information is enrichment – or adding data that build even more trust and conversions. This can be everything under the sun of product attributes that speak to your various audiences like dealers and consumers.

If your product is best appreciated with action shots, then photography supporting that will be essential. If you sell to other countries and languages, then a translator or translation bureau may need access to your PIM data, as well.

Rich media like videos, documentation, product spec sheets, etc. helps to enrich the product experience online with a PIM solution.

Intelligent PIM solutions let you harness AI to gain insights like “completeness” scores. This allows to grade the effectiveness of the product information supplied for each given product based on your goals.

Figure 2- An example of Completeness

Publishing and distributing product data

This is where all of the work in collecting and enriching can be shared with a larger audience through your various channels. Your own ecommerce store is just one place you can distribute your product data to. But with the help of third party marketplaces and social media, PIMs can also publish to these channels to almost instantly. This allows a brand to expand its reach to new buyers.

Not only can a PIM publish to these hundreds of different channels, but they can also decide what information to share on each one. If selling on Amazon or Wayfair, they nearly equally require the same loads of product details to build trust with customers while also keeping them engaged on your site and preventing them from having to continue their search.

Yet, as robust a selling platform as Amazon and Wayfair are, it’s not the same type of information that Instagram requires. There, the audience wants tantalizing images and multiple hashtags that reach interests. All of this information is available in a PIM for products and can be published to different channels with different content.