One of the first things you’ll learn after operating an e-commerce website for a while is that your product pages will always be the most important pages on your site. That’s because the search keywords that cause people to end up on product pages are almost always the types of keywords that people will use when they’re ready to buy. Therefore, someone who finds your website on Google and lands on one of your product pages is much more likely to spend money than someone who lands on another type of content such as a blog post.
With that in mind, improving your website’s product pages is one of the most efficient and effective ways to increase the revenue that your e-commerce business earns. If your website is already generating traffic – and you’d like to increase the amount of revenue earned from that traffic in the fastest and least costly way possible – working on your product page SEO is probably one of the most efficient ways to utilize your marketing budget. When you look at the most popular e-commerce sites like V2 Cigs UK, you’ll notice that they’ve all worked extremely hard to make their product pages as great as they can be. If you want your site to compete on that level, you’ll have to do the same.
Here’s how.
Make Your Product Descriptions as Good as They Can Be
The most important SEO trick for improving your website’s product pages is making sure that your text descriptions are as useful and informative as they can possibly be. That’s going to help you in two ways.
First, improving your product page text is going to help you from an organic traffic standpoint because Google primarily organizes information on a textual basis. When people shop online, they use text keywords to find products to buy. Your site only has a chance to appear among the results if Google’s algorithm believes your site provides information relevant to those searches. Lengthening and improving your product descriptions will give your website a better chance to appear in the results for a wider variety of search terms.
The second benefit of improving your product description text is that it makes your product pages more useful to customers. Think about your own behavior as a consumer. When you land on a website’s product page, it’s not always because you’re ready to buy that product immediately. Sometimes, you’re trying to decide between several products, and you’re looking for information to aid your decision. These are some of the questions that your product pages should answer if you want them to be as useful as they can be.
- What is this product?
- What does this product do, or what problem does it solve?
- Who should buy this product?
- How is this product used?
- How can someone who buys this product have the best possible experience with it?
- How does this product compare to other similar products?
Take Your Own Product Photos
Have you ever noticed that, when you search Google for pictures of a particular item, you don’t just see the same picture over and over? Google wants the Google Images service to be as useful as possible. For that reason, it generally shows very few duplicate pictures. When people buy products online, they want to know what those products look like. It’s an important part of the buying process – and if you want your product pages to show up on Google Images, you really need to consider taking your own product photos.
Handling your own product photography doesn’t have to be expensive; all it really requires is a good set and proper lighting. With those two things, any modern smartphone can take very professional photos. Once you’ve taken pictures of your existing products, it’s not too difficult to make photography part of your normal workflow when adding new products to your site. That’s going to enhance your ability to generate traffic from searches on Google Images, and it’s also going to improve the conversion rates of your product pages because it’ll make those pages more useful to customers.
Offer Relevant Upsell and Cross-Sell Recommendations
Why does the waiter always recommend a wine or offer you the dessert menu when you eat at a restaurant? It’s because customers who have already committed to buying from you are always some of your best opportunities for generating additional revenue. The way to do that in the e-commerce world is by ensuring that your website’s product pages offer relevant upsell and cross-sell recommendations at every possible opportunity.
One of the greatest types of products that you can sell is one that requires a constant supply of consumable items. That’s one of the reasons why manufacturers of printers and razors earn so much money – and if you sell any products with consumable accessories, you should always offer to sell those products in bundles that include extra supplies of the required accessories. Customers will often buy the bundles if doing so means that they can save a little money in the long run.
Even if a product doesn’t have the required accessories, there’s still room for you to make creative upsell and cross-sell recommendations that can drastically improve your bottom line. If you’re a clothing seller, for instance, maybe you have a particular dress that would look best if it’s worn with a strapless bra. Recommend a specific bra on the dress’s product page, and some of your customers will end up buying both items at the same time. If you can provide a picture showing what the two items look like when they’re worn together, that’s even better.
In cases where there are no upsell or cross-sell offers that make sense, consider suggesting alternative products instead. If your e-commerce site carries many different products, there’s a good chance that you can recommend certain alternative products if the customer decides against buying the product he or she is currently viewing. Suggest some alternatives and explain why the customer might want to choose one or the other.
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