How do I optimize for OneBox without messing up my Organic SEO?
This is a funny question I get from time to time. Funny because the answer is that doing feed optimization is really a totally separate task and has very little to do with on-site optimization, and much less to do with off-page optimization.
Organic optimization is all about what you put on the page and the off-page factors that influence rankings as well. Feeds don’t necessarily need to have any data from on the page. In fact, you could do a feed for phrases that aren’t anywhere on the product page. Not that Google would like it for long (their quality bots seem to have hit Base just a bit lately, which seems like a good thing), but it is possible.
So the easy way to create an optimized feed without touching your site is to create it in excel. That way, you can put whatever text and not worry about what your database or pages actually say. It should still be similar, but the wording can be different. Doesn’t need to be so “Marketing” speak. It can be much more factual and use your key phrase a few times. That’s really all you need here, until you get really fancy. If you really feel the need to pull database data and you don’t have what you want already, create a new field or table for your Base content. There’s no reason it has to come from only what’s generating your pages.
The other reason I laugh is this : Why would optimizing a description for a key phrase be hurting your organic SEO? Wouldn’t you want to try to rank for that same phrase organically too? The two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. In my opinion, if you’re trying to rank for a phrase you’re trying to rank for a phrase regardless what spot on the search results page it is.