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.
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.
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!
