In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Today we're talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them
unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural
links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites --
it doesn't matter what you're selling consumer products, B-to-B products,
in this case, I am doing an office supplies example -- you've got a big
problem in that people just don't want to naturally link to those pages.
The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to
change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the
same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product,
your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search
traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think
this can be a big, big positive.So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example.
Here's Acme Store. They've got the standard manufacturer's picture that
the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing
data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly.
Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the
description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add
to Cart" button.You haven't added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I
don't know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not
exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see
that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it
uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price.
But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web
is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I
have some vested interest. The search engines don't like to count those
kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight
from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to
every other ecommerce provider.Let's take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here
I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I'm going to
walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much
more exciting, and they're not that much additional effort. Right? To some
degree, but that's what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page,
everyone would be doing it and you couldn't have the competitive advantage.Here I've got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I've sort
of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there.
But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they
essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are
searching for it, you probably don't want to change up the title
dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might
consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure,
maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at
what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and
add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don't have to do this. I could
just keep the standard title if that's what it takes, and I can add
uniqueness in other places.Let's start with the images. If you just take the one image that the
manufacturer suggests, you're really losing out. A great example of this
story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They
make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single
angle. They've got the shoe. They've got the side of the shoe. They've
got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom.
They've done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The
great part about this isn't just that these images are now yours and yours
alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say,
"Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do
use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page.
You've got tons of opportunity.I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and
different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people
the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger
version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images.
Sometimes you'll see websites where you click a different one of these and
the URL changes. You don't want that unless it's in a hashtag, because it
will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL.Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at
companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A
unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well.
It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so
compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people,
who weren't interested in the products at all and probably never bought
something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and
read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that
were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different
products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got
a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we're
aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If
this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who
are passionate about it, you're going to get such better content there.Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit
with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the
popularity in a specific category. I think that's a good one. It lets
people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write
books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on
Amazon, they can see how well they're performing in the category. Other
people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about
this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats.There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You
could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do
people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they
buy them at the end of summer? I don't know. Let's see. Those sales
trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this
and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they
also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product.
Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data
points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your
customer database, that are anonymous. It won't be sharing privacy issues,
but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link
to it and make this page more unique and valuable.Number five, I love the comparisons. If you've ever been to a site like
CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell
phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against
each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn't
have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are
a real unique value proposition, because now you're not just the source for
where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can
do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are
also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they'll
buy from you.Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be
done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You
can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There
can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don't Like." The
comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out
like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or
not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What's your
experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or
five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you
have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we're an
office supply store. Let' see if we can get everyone to rate the usability
of this, whether it's travel worthy versus whether it's rugged and durable
versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different
aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable.All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites
from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don't know. We'll see how
long it takes to develop. Hopefully you've enjoyed this edition of
Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care.
Transcription done by https://www.speechpad.com
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
My idea of the product page design is little different. It's more engagement centric than product centric. My engagement centric model says develop easily sharable contents which encourage your audience to engage with your brand. Lets say i have a coffee mug to sell. Now what possibly i can write on my coffee mug page which makes it linkworthy and the same time helps in visitor's engagement. You can have contents like:
1. Share your best coffee experiences (encouraging people to develope contents and engage with the brand).
2. You can have contest like share your best coffee experience and win coffe mugs for your entirely family. (excellent way of making your contents go viral and attract links).
3.You can have 'How they do it videos' like a video on 'how a coffee is made' . You can have 'how it works video' like 'how a coffee machine works' (another good way of making your contents go viral and attract links).
4. You can provide customized options so that visitors can order customized coffee mugs (though it is more related to product optimization)
5. You can create applications through which visitors can creat their own virtual coffee cup designs. You can have design contests like these on your product pages.
I can come up with dozen more ideas if i am paid for it. But my point here is to look for ways to engage with your audience instead of perfecting your product title, button colors and other page elements. Visitors engagement leads to brand retention. Brand retention leads to brand loyality and brand loyality leads to more sales and leads. And last but not least, no marketing strategy is complete without a facebook fan page strategy. Facebook is an excellent medium to engage with largest number of audience. Here are some examples:
https://mashable.com/2009/06/03/dunkin-donuts-facebook-campaign/
https://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/digital/e3i9953839003c11ce8270c77cb5f750f06
https://mashable.com/2009/04/05/compare-the-meerkat/
seo-himanshu,
I wanted to thank you for your participation in this community. It's a pleasure reading your posts and here's why.
It's partly because you seem to be a solid digital marketer. More importantly it is your thoughtfulness and ability to mentally build on a solid foundation.
You really think about this crap. You build out scenarios and envision solutions on a moving timeline. It's this projection of what we know and how to apply it for real, that separates the masters from the experts.
Bravo.
Now stop overshadowing me or I'll have Jennita play a Tonya Harding across your knee at the next SMX East. ;)
In-house photography is certainly a great way to differentiate your website, but when people are searching for a specific product they already know about, having familiar imagery can be a reassurance. Therefore, if you do differentiate, don't be too unique (particularly with your main landing page image). Make sure the product is instantly recognisable.
Also, whilst product descriptions are important (both as SEO content and for those inclined to read the copy), in my experience most people simply skim this, if they read it at all (obviously, the complexity and number of options offered by a given product have an influence here). Instead, I believe it is the photography that has the biggest impact in most scenarios (again, especially if someone has searched for a product they already know about). So you should use the highest quality photography available to you - if you have the talent in-house, great, otherwise do use the manufacturer's imagery if this is of a better standard.
A few more tips on product photography...
Having products isolated on a white background makes for more compelling images in general, however this is also influenced by the design of the page they reside on.
Many ecommerce sites use quite small product images as the main landing page image, and whilst these pages may have the option to enlarge the image, most people won't use this option. A product image 400 x 400 pixels, say, is going to have a bigger influence on customer preception and motivation than one 100 x 100 pixels. Keep an eye on page speed, and do optimise images for the web, but use the largest images that fit with the design and they'll have much more impact and influence.
Just a few points of view from my own ecommerce experience. Hope they provide a little more food for thought.
Great point about consumers expecting a recognizable image. If they're in the stage where they are comparing your product, shopping around, then it is very likely they are finding the particular product based on image and not reading descriptions at all. (With the exception of things like a laptop, where many models look alike.)
Also, consumers LOVE seeing products in action. Even if you can't afford the money or time to produce videos for everything, you can show images. Show the Five Pens being held in hand and written with. Show what you've written looks like.
Convincing clients to spend the time or money to make their product database unique is one of the biggest hurdles I've come across with ecommerce. But the benefits are huge.
So true. Of course, you give this kind of advice to the owner of an e-commerce site and their response is often, "So I have to come up with something unique to say about each of the items we sell?" Well, yeah. If you want people to pay attention to each of the items you sell, you have to have something to say about them all.
Thank you. I am so sick of hearing "My product pages are all duplicate content, but I don't have time to write anything unique." Isn't this your LIVELIHOOD? Too often, it's someone who wants to slap up a thin affiliate site, run it on 3 hours/week of time, and get rich. Good luck.
But what do you do against those guys with total lack of ethics. Lets say you invest 100$ in a really insightful unique product description. do this 100 times and you've got to invest 10000$. content launched, everything is fine so far. but then comes your competitor, takes the content, puts it into a text-spinner and there he is, just got the same benefit but without investing 10000$.
i am talking about quality text-spinners and product description which are free of any humor (because the product requires a serious presentation).
all i want to say is, that the advice "go out there, write some amazing stuff and G will love you and you got yourself a linkbait" might be right, but might also turn out as a risky investment, depending on how your competitors play the game. would be great if seomoz could write something about those spamming tactics and how "honest" people can protect their content against such abuse.
Spent time with a client yesterday morning explaining this concept, he said "I don't have the time to write anything unique for my product descriptions." I said by writing well written, unique keyword relevant (not rich) product content he could increase sales by 100% inside 3 - 6 months... he soon came round to my way of thinking...
Whenever I've had a client moan a product of theirs is not on the 1st page of Google its ALWAYS been because they are using the manufacturers description. A quick rewrite takes 5 to 15 minutes (plus include a good couple of links) and within a few days their ranking jumps to the 1st page. Its never failed.
Not one mention of video for product pages on a Whiteboard Friday? :)
I think it's becoming more and more vital for e-commerce, of course the cost of external production vs the lack of quality doing it in-house is a stumbling block.
One of my favourite combinations of video and reviews is on QVCUK (example here) - they answer just about any question you could have about a product, whilst the video continues to upsell (in that photo scanner page the video suggests you might also like Coreldraw).
The reviews also state how long the customer has been with QVC, which I suppose offers more trust and credibility.
For more on this, check out this presentation creating ecommerce videos that sell - it's based on BJ Fogg's (founder of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab) behaviour model - his keynote at SES recently was supposed to be excellent.
Final tip: Consider adding Q&As to your product pages - especially if you sell on eBay - you can use that 'ask the seller a question' data to craft your product descriptions, because I would wager if eBay customers are asking those questions, the visitors to your traditional site will want the same answers too.
good one :)
however... having great pics and descriptions of products doesn't always mean that people will actually link to your sites - unfortunatelly there are many shops that simply copy your content (steal) and put it on teir own pages.. so - your uniqueness is lost...
one thing that also works for ecommerce sites is having your wiki/tutorials/knowledge center - especially if you have products that are rather specialistic
worried someone might steal your image? Put your company name in the image so if they direct link to it your company shows on their website. If not then you could watermark your images to help dissuade image theft, if its subtle it shouldn't put too many people off. My photographer clients who sell their photos online watermark theirs and its not affected sales in their opinion.
The other point to make is to use tools such as Google Website Optimiser to test these different elements on product pages. Then you can confidently state whether using your own or the manufacturers' imagery, for example, helps or hinders conversions. The same applies to elements such as sales stats and comparison charts, etc.
Social engagement has it's obvious benefits, but ultimately we should remember that the aim is to get more visitors to actually add to basket. A/B testing can tell you what works far better than intuition.
A valid set of points. One of the key advantages people undertaking SEO have is to produce original content for the product pages. Afterall so much effort tends to be directed toward the homepage but the product pages are just as important and are the actual pages that sell the product to the customer. This is the first visual introduction to your product that the customer has and impact must be maximised. Not necessarily on a visual level but the content needs to be original, smart and to the point. Sell the key points and benefits of the product and create fresher content than what you see on the manufacturers website and this will provide hopefully a bigger interest in your product.
I actually did LOL when I read Mike Feuti's comment to seo-himanshu: "You really think about this crap." :) I love our community!
Thanks, Rand, for throwing some attention at the e-commerce realm. I'd really like to see more posts in this area because this is most relevant to what I do every day. (I think that was one of the options in the last SEOmoz survey, to want to see more of X in future posts.)
I was just showing our graphic designer this WBF and he agreed with me that our biggest obstacles are time, manpower, and money. But we have to start somewhere, so we're beginning with the best-selling items and then move our way down the list.
We have a couple of instructional videos of how to install some of our products, but I think a "Zappos Video" could be made maybe instead of just pictures. For example, have someone sort-of Vanna White our products, explaining the parts and features and then get into how to install them. To people like me who don't really know much about the auto industry, when somone would say, "Attach to the rocker panel" I wouldn't know what the heck a rocker panel was!
Good point about licencing the photos if you take them yourself in-house. Looks like we've got a million pictures to watermark.
I think that's a great idea. Start at the top and do what you can. Too many people look at their 5,000 product pages and just give up, but 50 of those products are probably 20% or more of your revenue. Plus, then you can start collecting data and measuring impact. Do SOMETHING now, instead of waiting for perfection.
Agreed. Lovely to see a Whiteboard Friday on e-commerce. Not just for the new tips but also to see that we were already doing some of the things Rand suggested. I think comparison charts, in particular, can work really well if well designed. This one for example (not my site, but I wish I had done this one!) https://www.allergybuyersclub.com/compare-vac.html is well designed without being flashy, has an add to cart button and everything. And take a look at the backlinks - it got a link from the EPA for heaven's sake! You're not going to get that link with content spinning.
My belief is that more content does two things; it provides opportunity to differentiate and builds trust in the visitor. Consider a page with a picture, name of the item, price, and "add to cart" button. Kinda sketchy. Then consider an amazon.com page, which can go on forever, giving at least the impression that it's more than a guy in his garage selling stuff. More trust converts to more visitors and sales.
Did anyone else notice that Rand promoted both Adidas AND Pumas today? :)
This is a welcome WBF with some good points/ideas made by Rand. I think it's important to remember that content pages really need strong SEO from it's parent pages to really be effective, which takes some time. If you have a look at Amazon (one of the best in creating unique product pages) then it takes their pages a while to get ranking (which I know is not the "be all and end all"). However, it's their Category pages that have strong SEO which pass down SEO to the product page.
I work for an e-commerce retailer who has millions of product pages across various categories (similar to Amazon). We have unique content via customer reviews, sales ranking of item in our store, and with key product we invest time to create unique descriptions. The pages are indexed quickly but I feel this is down to SEO on upper pages being passed down, so don't lose focus on your parent pages or you will be missing an important contributor. From my experience in a competitive market if your competition has superior SEO on it's homepage and category pages then it's likely they will rank better on product pages.
Of course, UGC is very important to create a community around your store and the more people actively participating is great, so make sure your customers can easily share their reviews on their websites/social pages as if they have taken the time to write a review then a lot of them like to share what they have written with their friends (and you get more links!).
I totally agree with the idea that e-comm sites need to be more aggressive in adding valuable content to their sites, including product pages.
That said, I think there are a couple big holes that Rand leaves out, that kind of need to be addressed.
First is video
Second is where product pages fit in the overall SEO campaign. Based on my experience, product page optimization is nice, but it is not a huge priority compared with other site levels because the keywords these pages rank for tend to have lower search volumes are gravitate more toward the longtail. Hopefully you make up decrease in traffic in conversion rate, but its not a given. Besides, products come and go, and the lifecycle of many product pages might not really fit with an SEO campaign.
Last is the issue of cost. Everythign Rand says makes a ton of sense. However, whether you're inhouse or a consultant, you are going to have to convince a CFO or someone else holding the purse strings that you're going to need to do this; in order to make that happen, you need a much more compelling argument than simply "it might get us some links".
Assuming the site isn't selling unique products, most of its competing sites are presenting the same descriptions as each other, so if you've got unique content (whether it's your own or UGC), combined with just a few links (which those duplicate content pages aren't likely to have) it can make a big difference in rankings for both the product name and associated long-tail queries.
If the unique content appeals to the target audience, that ranking improvement is bound to lead to an increase in conversions.
I bet somebody here has some data that demonstrates what a difference that can make for the ROI of the site.
Like I said, I don't disagree with any of the principles here. In fact, I think e-comm sites should be more aggressive when it comes to differentiation. I also completely agree that just a handful of links to product pages can be a rankings coup.
My (main) issue is that at some point you're going to need to convince someone to open a checkbook, and it's going to take a lot more than "doing x might get you links" or "we can increase our ROI if x,y,and z happen" to convince them to do it.
I gave you a thumbs up because I think this is a good discussion but I disagree with your comments about product pages. The Long Tail is exactly the reason optimized products pages ARE important.
Stylin' tips to match your stylin' jacket, Rand ;) You know what I love about (4)? Once you start collecting that data, you find all sorts of uses for it. You can link to Top Products on the home page, you can start sorting your search results by popularity, and on and on. A lot of small to mid-sized ecommerce sites don't collect data on their own sales in a usable way, but it's not that hard to build a couple of data tables and add a ton of power to your site.
First, a warm HI to everybody, then, a big THANKS to the author. I'm new here, and this is my very first comment. I just started working on an ecommerce SEO, and I'm glad to see that what I wanted to do is not just a crazy (untested) idea but actually a suggestion. The in-house pics are very important, and not just any photos but high quality photos taken with a good DSLR camera. The site Im working on has hundreds of products but the pics simply don't do justice to the products, and as the author says, unique pics are important for the end users. Slap a watermark on them and the copying problem is solved. The video is also a good idea, but I think that adding those 360-degre interactive views is also interesting as it gets the reader to "participate". I have no idea how that's done but have seen it on various car dealership sites. The text should aslo be as the author says, personable. Somebody mentioned that competition will copy the text... oh well, let'em do it, you still keep the larger weight as you're the first to publish it, and you can always protect the content with CopyScape. Also, the overal content strategy of the site can use a catch-line, a slogan. I've read somewhere that Loreal and another makeup company use such phrases: We're second best, but we really try to make our products better, and We're expensive, but you deserve it. This will ensure that ecommerce sites dont fight an uphill battle of low pricing. Besides the mentioned links, I think that adding a social widget such as AddToAny is very important, as it makes it convenient to readers to share the link in their networks on FB, twitter, digg... it's a long list.
That's my 2cents...hope I didnt step on anyone's toes, if I did, sorry, wasnt intentional.
You've outlined an awesome ecommerce site here, describing all of the things that compel me to not only buy a product, but also continue to use the website. Sites like the Apple Store are halfway there in the fact they have multiple images that they've sourced themselves, a great unique description and user generated content, but if they combined that with the "people also liked", "people also bought" and further statistics I think the site would be as close to perfect as possible.
Another awesome Whiteboard Friday, Rand.
very awesome, i have just the site that i needed this for!
Great WBF, and great tips.
Rand, when you mentioned the text and description are key to success, it reminded me of an example I had seen for Ebay. Watch this video, and you will be surprised on how description can increase your sales and the power of networking by getting great links back:
https://www.gpyr.com.au/projects/wickedsick.htm
Did anyone mention anything about a Q & A on the product page? I believe that would be extremely beneficial for consumers and search engines.
Great video with very practical tips on how to improve & uniqueify pages. However, one must be aware that the purpose of a product detail page is to get the user to click "add to cart". Since this is the focus, be careful not to distract the user from taking this action, if you do, you will lower your conversion rate.
Marketing, SEO, and usability must often walk a fine line.
Finally watched this, and worth the wait. Extremely useful, and the reader comments contain good ideas too!
This is another amazing white board Friday post! Provides a number of things that you can do to make e-commerce site pages cool and exciting. Worth the time to watch!
Thanks for the vid! I am a big fan of Whiteboard Friday!
Can anyone recommend some good software to generate product data feeds for Google Base?Also, if anyone is interested to read more about on-page SEO for eccomerce, check out ArtDriver's blog post on 9 SEO tips for ecommerce sites.
The resume: you can always create Top1 content/product page with a fresh view on things, unique ideas. Other interesting story for eCommerce sites: how to change #1 product of category fast. Say, laptop XXX for laptop YYY - every month ))
All the best SEO.
Making your own product description is key; and if you're afraid some will copy, you should not.
Let me explain:
On our wine shop www.vinosensis.com we have 100% "home cooked" desciptions for all products. It's a lot of work.
Now, thanks to Gwebmaster I can download all links pointing to my site. Guess what I discovered? Some sites actually did a Copy/Paste of my product desciptions; but as they did it the way my 3 years old son would do, they let the links (I always add links within my descriptions) - Result: They're sending me traffic!
Check the original (https://vinosensis.com/es/vinos-blancos/226-otazu-chardonnay-2009-8437001114269.html) and the copy https://www.acatarlotodo.com/producto-otazu-chardonay-355-15520.html. Hint: See "Chardonnay" in long desciption.
And remember, if you identify a site that copied yours, you can always file a DMCA Content Removal Request with google: Here
Thanks for the information about e-commerce. It is always feels good to learned new things that will help you rule Google's front page.
Product page and its description is surely a matter of great concern. It contains keywords so don't let the keywords go waste, why not use it for better optimization. I agree with dvtruong that the redirect blog readers to product page by offering coupon codes etc. The better the description, more are the chances of converting the page viewers to buyers. And last but not the least is that don't fake about product.. Be real and straight if you want to keep your first buyer forever. Plan content writing strategy, it'll be of great help...https://goingo2o.com/goo2o-blog/start-blogging-your-goo2o-store-focus-content
I loved, loved, loved....
Do you have something similar for seo part?
I never know how to display seo for search engines (google, bing...) and
for googleboot, I should display menu , images, description, or "call to action" since I am able to play with DIVs.
Please tell everone what is our way to think about it.
whish happy holidays for all... hohoho
Another tip for linkbuilding could be to offer a discount to a certain group like students or readers of SEO blogs. This might encourage people to mention the product page on their blog or site and say something like "Readers of this blog can get a 30% discount on SuperProductX. Just enter the code "SEORocks" when checking out".
E commerce web sites and its product page must needed whole detail about product, shipping as well as return policy, payment options, methods etc are must be easy and user friendly for customer point of view.
Good one
Awesome. There's a huge opportunity here for people to make product pages really stand out. Especially since hardly anybody else is doing it extremely well.
And don't forget the rich snippets!
I have been practicing all this for all my clients, leaving comparisons. I think if we use comparision, it can give competitor more idea about the sales of particular prodcut.
I personally can relate to the above video clip.
Upon seeing many competitors with the same content (duplicate content to be precise), I knew I must act upon something to make my sites stand out apart from the others.
Danny, I couldn't say that your sharing session is worth hundreds of dollars, but in fact, priceless gold!
Great article, Im often searching for extra little tips on improving Ecommerce websites Im currently working through a website for a client with over 2000 products making them all unique as they are very similar to alot of other sites with the same products, long process.
Great timing. I've got a possible e-comm client lined up and since I haven't really worked with that type of site before I was a little worried about what I could suggest beyond the more common generic improvements.
Very interesting WBF for the week. Loved the video. So informative and helpful Rand! Thanks for putting them very clearly with apt examples.
One idea, which I have tried myself before was taking own pictures for the images for one of my clients' products and that really helped a lot in getting natural links, as you said. Zappos and Woot sites were really great. Gave tons of ideas on proper use of the pages for sales. I liked the idea of multiple images and want to give a try of that too.
The idea of sales trends and that of user-generated content sounds too great and convincing. Totally a great post here for e-commerce seo.
Nice one. Thumbs up for sharing some awesome tips here!
One of my favourite videos now from gallery. Absolutely great job guys..great ideas, and great presentation. ;)
Great post. Just got an idea how to use in non e-commerce website.
Nice idea! This concept could be applied by recommendation and reviews sites too.
Great Whiteboard Friday! I feel like e-commerce is so often left out of the SEO conversation. Especially at conferences. Recently, I've been debating moving away from my current e-commerce platform. Between this Whiteboard and the Campaigns report produced through SEOmoz the decision is clear. I need to switch platforms. Thanks so much Rand.
The ideas are indeed excellent. However, many clients expect the SEOs to just optimize their current product pages and express their budget limitations. These suggestions are excellent provided the clients are read to invest for these features. But heck! Better to invest money for these features and attract links naturally than have boring pages and build/buy links.
Greta stuff Rand!
Great one! I will recommend e-commerce site owners to reach/watch this one!
Great Whiteboard Friday, you guys kill it.
Such great tips on standing out and above the crowd. It takes creativity and effort to really shine in such competitive markets, but with a little sweat and blood, and a butt load of determination you can get anywhere.
Rock On SEOmoz
In-house and unique photography is one thing I really try to push for our website, especially in selling horses and our services related to them. Since we're not selling items we order from a warehouse, keeping our descriptions as unique and unrepetitive as possible would really help us; that goes on my ever-growing to-do list.
Now I just need to learn how to watermark... I do remember seeing a funny link posted in the comments recently about a developer who set it up so that if someone stole his images and content, they would show up on the cheaters site as "Hey! You're reading stolen content!"or something to that effect.
I'll see if I can find that link.
Edit 1: Found it... entertaining at the least and a fresh thing.
https://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/10/stop-plagiarism-in-3-easy-steps.htm
Enjoyed your post. My biggest challenge is one others touch on here. Client budget. The close second is short attention spans or inability to write or create great content. I work as an advisor to the client and even my telling them the value of content, images, etc. doesn't mean their budget can handle what we would have to charge. And the ROI element is the one you would think more owners and marketers would get. Good writing is especially challenging for most clients. The flip side is that those willing to follow your input will stand out and get better results for their added investment.
I'd like to add one major benefit to user generated content:
It is often times very hard to provide "fresh" content for the search engines as they repeatedly crawl your product pages. They are some of the most static pages on the net. UGC helps to provide more incentive for search engines to increase crawl rate of your entire ecommerce site.
Getting your entire ecommerce site indexed is hard enough, but constant fresh & unique content will always keep the search engines coming back for more...!
Whew!
When I saw the title to this Whiteboard I started to sweat a little. Fortunately, seems like we are utilizing most of these practices on our product pages currently...
The comparison chart is a GREAT idea though. Can't believe I never thought about converting our comparison page to a simple chart form for comparison.
Another great post Rand. Looking forward to Pro Training next week - especially if it is chock full of tidbits like this!
Remember ... at the PRO training you can't do that SEO in your underwear. Just sayin'.
Now did I recall your previous story about how you obtained your first SEO job? I hope so, otherwise ignore my comment above. :)
#bigriskbutfunny
Well...there goes my week. :)
Yeah, you got it right, that was me...but would have been funny either way
Though adding great content is essential to converting sales and bringing those links in, don't get into the trap of adding extra items just to add them. We've seen too much information on a product page cause a decrease in conversion rate as well because there is just too much going outside of focusing on the product itself.
For me, all of this is extremely dependant on demographics. Older generations seem to focus less on the extra stuff and can get frustrated by it, as they tend to spend less time researching than the younger generations do today.
If you have a large number of repeat customers for your products, they also may not like to have to wade through all the extra jazz to find the product they were after.
Always consider doing a/b testing to see what your visitors are really after.
Great tips!
It is always estonishing how simple it can be to add value to the homepage and increase the sales.
Though I am not working in product pages I really can use those recommondations!
This is enough to solve the problem of repetitive content for google?