7 ways to enhance your product listing optimization

What Is Product Listing Optimization?

Before diving into ways to improve product listings, it’s essential to understand what product listing optimization entails.

Product listing optimization is the process of improving and refining product pages across online marketplaces, brand websites, and digital retail platforms to maximize visibility, engagement, and conversions. This involves enhancing product descriptions, images, pricing accuracy, SEO elements, and technical data to ensure that each listing meets consumer expectations and ranks well on search engine result pages (SERPs) and within marketplace algorithms.

With competition increasing across e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and Google Shopping, product listing optimization is no longer optional—it’s a necessity for any brand or retailer looking to succeed in online sales.

If you want your products to stand out, target buyers effectively from the crowd and boost your online conversions, here are seven ways to improve the quality of your product listing pages and climb the search results.

1. Add enhanced visual content 

Words are great, but a picture tells a thousand words. High-quality, well-produced product images and videos can communicate far more about your products, adding an extra layer of excitement on every digital shelf.

One potential challenge of managing these valuable assets is ensuring you have the right systems in place to successfully deliver images and video content to your digital shelf. Typically, Digital Asset Management (DAM) software acts as a central hub for all your digital assets. However, by integrating the right DAM and Product Information Management (PIM) systems together, you can deliver digital assets to your online channels that are complemented by the market-ready product information that ensures these assets are always telling the right story. 

Using enhanced brand content (EBC) and A+ content for Amazon

For marketplace listings, platforms like Amazon offer Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) / A+ Content, which allows sellers to include premium images, comparison charts, and enhanced descriptions to increase conversion rates. Sellers who utilize EBC see an average 10% increase in sales.

Managing and delivering these visuals across your digital channels is easier with the right technology. By integrating Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Product Information Management (PIM) tools, you can centralize all your digital assets, ensuring your product images tell a consistent and compelling story across every channel.

2. Monitor product information accuracy 

If your product information is accurate or has incomplete product descriptions, you run the risk of unhappy customers at best, and a missed sale at worst. Accurate product information is the lifeblood of any successful product listing page, and it helps ensure that your items consistently outperform competitors in search results..  

The need for accurate and complete product information is not only felt by the customer, either. With new and increasingly complex product-related regulations, such as the European Union’s Digital Product Passport initiative, accurate product information is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a business-critical need. Only with the right PIM platform in place can you optimize your product listings and be sure they are displaying the correct information.  

However, getting this accurate information out across your digital shelf is only part of the challenge. Maintaining this accuracy is also key. This is possible with Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) technology, a software solution that monitors all your digital shelf touchpoints and sends you real-time, actionable insight should the information on any of your product listing pages become corrupted or incomplete. That way, you can always keep your PLPs optimized for conversions. 

3. Maintain channel consistency 

In today’s omnichannel shopping environment, buyers are seeing your products on more channels than ever before. These non-linear buying journeys mean you need to be telling the same product story across all owned and third-party channels, whether marketplaces, resellers, social channels, and even in-store. Failing to have a consistent story across all these touchpoints will leave potential customers confused and more likely to go with the competitors’ offers. 

Ensuring this channel consistency is key if you want to improve product listings, and is another important benefit of having an advanced PIM solution at the heart of your tech stack. An advanced PIM with built-in syndication capabilities empowers you to robustly manage the consistency of all your online channels in minutes, not hours. Need to change one piece of information? Simply update your product listings in the PIM’s centralized dashboard and with the press of a button your product listing pages are automatically across all your channels. 

4. Develop a strong SEO strategy 

In a crowded market, if nobody can find your products then nobody will buy them. That’s why getting your SEO, or search engine optimization, strategy right is so important. A winning SEO strategy is often overlooked by brands selling online, despite being an essential part of any successful digital shelf strategy. For example, turning the key features of your product into benefit-focused, SEO-optimized product descriptions is the best way to ensure your products are seen.  

However, for many marketers SEO remains somewhat of a time-consuming mystery. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With an advanced PIM as your foundation, you can enjoy the AI-powered content creation capabilities that tailor the SEO potential of your product listing pages to the expectations of channel, market, and customer – and all within a matter of minutes. This gives you a huge advantage over the competition, and ensures your products are always findable by potential customers. 

5. Integrate immersive elements 

Want to take your digital asset strategy to the next level? Then why not explore how immersive elements can help your PLPs pop on every channel? Immersive experiences help sellers stay competitive by offering innovative advertising opportunities that resonate with their target audience. The era of immersive shopping is already here, and leading brands are already giving their customers the interactive product experiences they expect. These immersive elements use Augmented Reality (AR) tools to place furniture in a customer’s home, or shoes or a customers’ feet, and can truly bring your products to life. 

Of course, these immersive elements require the right technology to make them possible. However, at the core of any immersive experience sits complete and correct product information fed by an advanced PIM solution. Without accurate information on dimensions, materials, colors, and more, these immersive elements aren’t reliable and could leave your customers frustrated and making a costly product return.

6. Understand how products perform 

Beyond monitoring product information accuracy, DSA technology allows you to monitor buyer behavior, product performance, and channel competition from a single, centralized dashboard. With DSA, you get real-time, actionable insights that you can use to optimize all your e-commerce touchpoints. This ensures sellers can refine their offers and target their audience more effectively while maintaining a competitive edge in search results. It also means your marketing teams are no longer selling blind on the digital shelf, as they can respond to each and every issue that arises. Thanks to an advanced PIM system with integrated DSA capabilities, your teams have the ultimate foundation for e-commerce success. 

7. Close the digital shelf loop

As is now clear, the digital shelf can be a tough selling environment if you don’t have the right tools at your disposal. Even with the best intentions and efforts in creating winning PLPs, those efforts can soon be in vain should information disappear or images distort while out on the digital shelf. That’s why so many successful e-commerce brands rely on the right software solution to “close-the-loop” on their online sales strategy. 

Only with an advanced PIM that has syndication and digital shelf analytics capabilities integrated can you successfully create enriched product stories, distribute them to all online touchpoints, monitor their performance data, and then react to ensure these listings remain optimized. Closing this data enrichment loop is key to any successful e-commerce strategy, and that’s only possible with the right technology platform in place. 

Trends in Product Listing Optimization for 2025 and Beyond

As ecommerce evolves, so do product listing optimization strategies. Here are key trends shaping product listings in 2025 and beyond:

• AI-Powered Product Descriptions – Automating content creation for SEO-optimized listings across multiple platforms.
• Personalized Shopping Experiences – Using AI and machine learning to tailor product listings based on customer behavior and preferences.
• Voice Search Optimization – Adapting product descriptions and metadata for voice-based search queries.
• Sustainability Transparency – Increased demand for detailed sustainability data within product listings (e.g., material sourcing, environmental impact).
• Augmented Reality (AR) Integration – More brands leveraging immersive experiences to let customers visualize products before purchasing.

Staying ahead of these product listing trends will help brands and retailers maintain visibility, engagement, and conversion rates in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

inriver: The complete solution for e-commerce success  

To stand out in a truly omnichannel world, you need to rely on the right product-related software. For a growing number of brands, manufacturers, and retailers, that software is the inriver platform. With an advanced PIM solution at its core and integrated syndication and digital shelf analytics capabilities, you have all the tools you need to improve product listings, elevate your e-commerce strategy, and win on the digital shelf.