How To Use A Custom GPT To Produce Ecommerce Product Descriptions & SEO Meta Based On Top Competitors

Following on from our articles and tutorials on using GPT and AI tools to create and publish quality blog content, in this article we will work through step but step how we also do the same for ecommerce product pages and SEO meta.

Check out the other mentioned articles:

• How To Consistently Get 73 + SurferSEO Scores With Zimmwriter [VIDEO]
• Creating Content For Blog Posts Using AI – SurferSEO + Custom GPTs For 70+ Content Scores

1. The Goal: Generate / Update Ecommerce Product Pages Using Best Practice Publishing Guidelines & Processes To Rank In Google & Meet User Intent

Optimizing a product page in ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce, to a point where the product page is performing with it’s top competitors in Google and the other search engines, can be difficult particularly for new ecommerce stores.

It’s even harder when you have 100’s or 1000s of products to manually optimize and also update as market conditions or product information changes (such as a newly released seasonal version).

The goal of the following process is to semi automate this process with AI tools, and then scale it to update 100s or 1000s of product pages at once.

We use this process daily on our own ecommerce stores and also client stores.

This process works for any ecommerce store, regardless if it’s Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and others.

You can view the video below for the TL;DL version:

2. Ensure Your Topical Map & Structure Is Solid

This should go without saying, but the one of the first tings you should sort out is the topical map and structure of your store. There are 100s of articles and tutorials online on how to build topical maps, so we’re not going to go into detail here.

If your structure is not adequate, it’s going to be an uphill battle to rank and generate traffic organically. It’s a fundamental of any website, let alone ecommerce stores.

For ecommerce, it’s obvious, but make sure your products are in the correct categories and sub-categories, and that the categories and sub-categories are setup correctly.

What we generally like to do is build semantically relevant categories and sub-categories, and ensure each is correctly optimized, and internal linking is appropriate between the core category and sub-categories.

ie:

domain.com/collections/dogs/supplements

The above URL (for Shopify) is a solid way to build the URL structure. It’s succinct, concise and short.

What we wouldn’t do is:

domains.com/collections/dog-collection/dog-and-pet-supplement-collection

This is overly complicated and confusing for both users and search engines. Having the term “dog” in the URL twice is not necessary, and having “pet” in the URL is confusing. The term “pet” can mean many any other pets including dogs.

This broadens the types of products that could be in the collections. Common sense also indicates that only supplements for dogs, should be in a sub-collection of a core collection for “dogs”.

If you really want to dive into topical maps and semantic SEO, checkout https://topicalauthority.digital/. It’s exceptionally thorough and can be overwhelming, but it’s a superior course and philosophy on SEO in general.

Having your core collections and sub-collections fundamentally sound is important to ensure relevance and context to the products in those collections and sub-collections.

While in this article we are looking at using AI to optimize product pages, it’s very important to have these fundamentals in place as a pre-requisite.

This article: Shopify Silos – The Best Way To Create Them & Why They Work For Improved Rankings & Traffic provides more detail on structure for Shopify sites.

If you want a way to create optimized sub-collections in Shopify, checkout the OptizenAI app, where one it’s most powerful features in the ability to create true sub-collections using Shopify tag pages, that you can edit, and also control the indexability of these pages in the search engines. This article provides more detail on why you may want to do this: Why Optimize Tag Pages?.

3. Researching Your Product In Market

Before you begin to optimize a single product page, you should complete some research on how the product is appearing in the market. If you are selling a brand that is sold by others in the market, it relatively easy to research using tools such as ahrefs.com or semrush.com.

Example product: 4CYTE Equine EPIITALIS Forte

This example we will use through the rest of this article. This product is an “equine joint supplement”.

If we look in ahrefs.com we can see the top competitors ranking for this product. Make sure you set the region you are trying to gain exposure.

3a) Ahrefs.com

We can see if we use the actual product name, search volume is negligible. If broaden our request, we can see there is quite good volume (including variations).

Considering the difficulty is relatively low, we are going to optimize for this term: “4cyte equine”

3b) Competitor Research

We should also check out the pages of our top competitors provided by ahrefs.com, but also do a manual search in Google.

We can see that ahrefs and Google.com.au has slightly different results. When looking at competitors, the real live results are probably going to serve you better for obvious reasons. Make sure you use a chrome extension such as Location Guard or a VPN if your IP is not in the region.

If we open up some of the competitor pages, we can see that all are ecommerce sites, or at least sites that sell the product. The majority for the pages are standard ecommerce product pages, with a quality product description.

Using our tools, we are going to craft a product page, including all SEO meta information, to match these competitors pages in terms of quality and thoroughness.

4. The Custom GPT

The custom GPT we’ve developed is titled: OptizenAI Ecom Product SEO Content Optimization

To open it, you’ll first need a chatgpt account. Then head to this URL: https://chatgpt.com/gpts

In the search field paste: OptizenAI Ecom Product SEO Content Optimization

You can then open the GPT ready to use.

Other Tools You’ll Need

• SurferSEO

5. Open OptizenAI Ecom Product SEO Content Optimization – Custom GPT

To get started using our custom GPT to optimize a product page, follow these steps.

Login into ChatGPT (as mentioned above) and search for OptizenAI Ecom Product SEO Content Optimization from https://chatgpt.com/gpts

5a) Add Your Product Page URL

Add your product URL to the field in the GPT and hit run. It will crawl the URL and extract important information.

5b) Add The Information It Requires

It will ask you to add:

Next Steps:

1. Please provide the core topic/product keyword.
2. What type of product is this (e.g., joint supplement, grooming tool, etc.)?
3. Provide a URL of the main collection and the anchor text for the URL.
4. Input the 5 URLs from SurferSEO.

Add each point with information it asks for. Use the numbers to reference each point. Tip: Use Shift + Enter to add each point on a new line.

For our example:

For point 4, we need to head over to SurferSEO and run our product keyword in the content editor.

Run the editor and then chose your 5 competitors. SurferSEO will do a pretty good job of finding the best competitors. However check them manually and exclude any that do match the intent, and also enterprise sites such as Amazon or Ebay where we can’t compare apples to apples.

In our example we’ve choses these 5 competitors:

Paste these URLs as point 4 in the custom GPT.

Run the GPT.

It will work through each URL and extract the data it needs. Depending on the competitors, it may skip some if it has trouble accessing the page.

The GPT will then ask you to provide the NLP keywords from SurferSEO. Copy them and paste them into the GPT. Run the GPT.

6. The Custom GPT Output

The custom GPT will then output the product page SEO meta information and description including:

• SEO Title
• H1 Page Title
• SEO Description
• Product Description

The product description will be provided in HTML. You can then paste in the HTML editor of any Ecommerce CMS.

7. Validate In Surfer SEO

You can then go back to SurferSEO and paste the HTML content into the editor. In our example, when we pasted the content in the editor, our initial score was 62. This is adequete, however we always try and gain a score of close to 70 or above.

By using the new Auto-Optimize feature in SurferSEO, it can help increase the score by 5 to 10 in our experience.

After using this feature, we achieved a score of 69. While this is adequate, we normally would then spend 5 minutes manually editing the content to improve the score even further.

It’s also worth running the URL in the SurferSEO editor once you’ve update the product page in your store.

Automating This Process

Currently OptizenAI (for Shopify only), does not integrate with SurferSEO. However this is something we will look at in the future.

However you can use OptizenAI to update products in bulk, and still leverage much of the same prompt data included in the custom GPT. It allows you the ability to update 500 products at each schedule, based on tags, collections or product titles.

To understand how to do this, go to this article: Update Shopify Products At Scale Including Internal Linking In Descriptions – AI Prompt

Final Notes

This process has proved successful for us when updating products using SurferSEO and a custom GPT.

It should be said that this won’t automatically improve your rankings, but it does provide a process to help ensure your product pages are within market best practice. Other factors such as store age, trust, links and overall traffic will also play a significant role in any one product page ranking well in the search engines.