Product pages are often a potential customer’s first impression of your eCommerce business. It is important to capture the buyer as soon as possible. To do so, you must create a unique and exciting shopping experience for online buyers.
We’ve put together a list of best practices to focus on to optimize your product listing pages. These tips will help engage existing customers, turn browsers into buyers, and boost your conversions.
1. Don’t Forget SEO for Product Pages
While most people in the e-commerce industry understand that SEO is important for content pages, some overlook the need for all things SEO on their product pages. Here are a few things to help ensure that your product pages are in great SEO shape:
- Develop an exceptional title that emphasizes the product name. Be sure to include the manufacturer name if you need to. Also, if the product is a component of a larger one (like a part, accessory, etc.), include the manufacturer number or similar product identification. People tend to search for the specific product identifications for parts, so adding these details to the title will help them locate your product.
- Write a unique description of the product. Each of your products should have a unique description rather than a copied and pasted manufacturer’s description. Depending on the specific item, the manufacturer’s description could be used by hundreds of other retailers, and Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Duplicate content could severely limit your visibility in search engines.
- Add an inviting meta description. Many online sellers overlook writing unique meta descriptions for their product pages, allowing Google to use whatever text it wants to show on the search results page (SERP). When you take the time to write original and inviting meta descriptions for product pages, you are encouraging potential buyers to click on your product page over all the other page listings on the SERPs.
2. Use High-Quality Photos
We’ve all seen it before – people scrolling quickly through search results images on their smartphones. How do you get them to stop and click on your products? Well, you need large, detailed, high-quality, and eye-catching photos of your items. See the example of exceptional photo quality with close-up details from Nike:
When you take the time to post great images of products, you not only catch buyers’ attention, but you also build trust and credibility with those potential buyers. Because your products are online, e-commerce shoppers cannot touch or hold the products, so you must show the details in your photos.
Also, to piggyback on our previous tip, you must use great alt tags to help Google index your product photos. Using alt tags will ensure your photos can be viewed on the search results pages.
3. Use Interactive Filters When Applicable
If you sell products with a variety of attributes, using interactive filters will help customers to quickly and easily find the specific products they want. For example, if you sell apparel, you should have filters that allow shoppers to pick the size, color, price, etc. for each type of clothing. See the below example from Under Armour:
These filters make navigating and searching your site easy for shoppers. It also prevents shoppers from feeling frustrated when they search through pages of items they don’t want.
4. Improve Website Speed
When your pages load slowly, users are likely to simply click off and visit one of your competitor’s product pages. In fact, research shows that most web users expect a website to load within two seconds, and if it hasn’t loaded within three seconds, they will abandon the website. Moreover, when users have trouble reaching a site, more than three-quarters of them will never return to the website in the future.
Not only do consumers expect fast-loading sites, search engines do too. Page speed is also one of the top-ranking factors for search engines such as Google. If a product page loads slowly, your search engine rankings could suffer.
To ensure that your product pages and overall website load quickly, test your site speed and identify any issues that need to be resolved.
5. Make Your Call-To-Action Clear
Out of everything on your product page – images, descriptions, price – the single most important element is your call-to-action. A call-to-action (CTA) is a text or image that compels the user to take action.
In your case, a CTA would be the button that shoppers click to add an item in their shopping cart. If your CTA isn’t clear to the shopper, they most likely won’t buy anything.
To increase conversions, try the following ideas to make your call-to-action stand out:
- Make it big – Your CTA button should be the largest element on the product page (other than the images).
- Make it a bold color – Assign your CTA button its own bright color – one that cannot be mistaken for anything else.
- Make it stand out – Use a color or font that contrasts with its surroundings to make it pop on the screen.
Look at Van’s product page to see how vibrant their CTA, Add to Cart Button, is:
When the CTA button is easy to identify, your shoppers will see it and make a purchase.
Final Thoughts
For e-commerce sellers, the product page is where you win the sale. You may have a great product and a healthy marketing strategy, but it’s your product page that pushes shoppers off the fence to make them buyers.
Follow the above best practices to engage and entice your shoppers to complete their purchases.
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Read Also
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