If you’re running an ecommerce site, you know how hard it is to drive traffic to your product pages. To boost your organic search rankings and traffic, see this article.
It’s not enough to just have a product that looks great — you also need to be able to explain what exactly it does and how your customers will benefit.
To create a compelling, user-friendly product page in your shop, provide useful, actionable information. The best place for this is below the product banner.
When a visitor comes through your website, they’ll either be browsing products or scrolling through the product gallery. What they’ll forget, however, is that you can create a compelling background for each product through product background pictures.
Now that you know how to take a great product shot, get started on how to benefit both yourself and your customers by providing a background image for each product. First, find the images you prefer and make sure there aren’t too many different products in your portfolio. Make sure your background image includes a quote from your business’ website, its tagline, and an indication of its appearance on the product page.
Product background pictures should be no more than 300 pixels wide and 300 pixels high. Your images should be shot in Full HD. Leave the background blur enabled if you want your background to better match the color or tone of the product.
Ask your wife or significant other to take a picture of you with your product. With Better Marketing, you have full creative control over the background of your product page. Your account includes over 200,000 products in your portfolio, so it certainly is possible to post multiple product photos. Simply place them in folders and move around them.
Here are the current best practices for product backgrounds and products.
Ensure that the product matches the style of the underlying product page. This will make the background of your product look appealing to users. Title your product page with the line “See how we’re really different from all other competitors!”
Your product page has to be suitable for all businesses, be they ecommerce, retail, or any other type of business. This includes the tagline, which specifies some key benefits your company will provide to customers.
Use your brand colors wherever possible. Your colors can present brand messaging and could convince potential customers to follow your reports and buy your products. Also, ensure you position your product clearly in both your product thumbnails (left and right sides of your product block) and your product detail sections (top right corner of the website, along with product cart).
Product thumbnail illustrations are great for product images and can carry additional weight with shoppers when deciding whether or not to click on a specific item.
Even though we could add a few hundreds (or thousands) of product pages, and they might work for some people, they just don’t perform well without a lot of extra work. Google’s product index focuses mostly on category pages. If I have six product pages, but I also want total category pages with descriptions, reviewers, categories by color, drop downs, etc, I’m going to be a lot more successful. As an example, you can check out the orange category pages on Tesco’s website.
Recently, I discussed how to add a products per page to your.htaccess file.
The Problem With 200 Paginated Content
What if you have a few thousand product pages that need to be crawled, indexed, indexed, and indexed some more? No problem; use.htaccess to rewrite XML sitemaps to show a 200 status code.
The problem with this approach, however, is that soon Google will be crawling your entire site, and you’d need to get new—and improved—product pages in place.
I asked Martin Pezet, product manager at Frac.tl, if they’re aware of any tools or methods to monitor indexation of paginated products…
Martin answered:
There are a few services that monitor existing paginated content across a set of pages, but ultimately we need to have a repeatable process. We do try to monitor it, but it is tiresome to monitor a couple thousand pages anyway. Therefore we decide to add indexes only on individual pages. We just grab static URLs of single pages by searching for frac code “12345” (quotes added). Then we quickly add parameters to walk through the additional pagination (i.e.:… foobar…>) from those indexes.
As you can see, Martin added a parameter in Roboto3.php to tell the crawler not to crawl deeper than the build number 1 of the paginated content.
By specifying 200 on all of your pagination content, and only having improved pages (which the crawler really doesn’t want to crawl), you can add them to your XML sitemap and get them added in to your normal Google index!
Or will they?
Menachem Richler, director of Systems for SEO at NVI, asked me this question via Twitter…
Another Search Engineer at Moz, John Mueller, is on the panel with Martin Pezet today; both of them will be discussing indexation and Googlebot. John says [during Q&A], “Google will not index text content on product pages.”
So, will they?
The Search Engines Might Answer Slowly
John says they are “working on it.”
Martin says [during Q&A], “Some people expect it”
Barry Schwartz, Search & Social at Ayima, says, “It’s going to happen.
According to SearchMetrics, 73% of consumers wouldn’t visit an ecommerce site or an app outside of a branded search or ad engine. This report illustrates a lot of the challenges that most sellers must face when they wish to run their own eCommerce storefront.
The obvious one, right? Selling online shouldn’t require you to build a ‘dumb’ or boring product page.
Wrong. Until you think about how you’re selling your products all the time while shopping online, it’s best to avoid dichotomous thinking.
There are essentially two aspects to creating attractive product pages:
Depending on the type of business you’re in, there’s a pros and cons to either approach. The first approach that a lot of sellers tend to follow is the product listing then subsequent product images.
It’s a method that works for them because it’s the most convenient to keep adding products to your cart as you browse through your catalogue.
This method works until you start to see features competing for your existing attention and capacity. Aside from that, the images can be rather bombastic or feature graphics that overtake the scroll view of the page. This will bog down your site as I previously mentioned, resulting in fewer views.
On the other hand, there’s the second approach that a lot of product listing creators adopt, namely a product search.
This is where you’ve got you covered because they’ll serve up your product listings, and this time, you’ve got some sort of algorithm at your disposal that’s able to sort through them and show you the best products for your search.
As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t recommend using Product Search as a method to create product listings.
I would much rather employ an SEO method that focuses on sending searchers to a more natural place to find me — the main product page of my store.
Shopping online is something that you’ve likely become notoriously adept at over the years. Whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, or one of the countless other platforms out there; the end result is the same, you get shopping and have an urge to make all purchases you see fit with your goals.
We know this method is effective when it comes to increasing the searchability of your product.
Let’s say you’re a Black Friday surfer at heart.
Now that you know where you need to boost your presence, and how to position yourself in each of your social media channels, the second component is to create a social media checklist from scratch.
