We often get asked if Men and Women should be added to the name of the products in your catalog.
Modern Retail does not recommend you stick the gender in the product name for the following reasons:
- Modern Retail almost always designs websites so consumers get dumped into Men and Women as soon as they begin their shopping experience, so repeating their gender over and over again can get overly monotonous.
- It makes the Product Names slightly longer on your website.
- Yes, some people would argue there's SEO benefit from having the gender added to the product name. However, we like to take a different approach on the website and marketplaces such as Google Shopping. Specifically, we want the Product Name to be different so organic search results are not the same as the Google Shopping results. Meaning, on the website we'll show the Product Name without gender but will add the gender to the Product Names when they are listed in the marketplace. This approach allows you to see the gender right there in the Google Shopping results but have it shown differently on your website. This approach is great for SEO.
- On Product Pages, we often will put the Product Name in an H1 tag and the gender or brand in an H2 tag.
- On Shopping List Pages, we often employ a similar approach by showing the gender in an H1 tag and the department or brand in an H2 tag. Without question, the biggest bang for your SEO buck is the brand or designer pages in your website. Of course, we'll use an H1 tag for departments and brands when a website sells all women's or all men's clothing.
Again, the key idea here is to have the Product Names on your website be slightly different from the Product Names that show up in marketplaces such as Google Shopping.