While having a product page with quality images and a description might have been enough a few years ago, the current e-commerce landscape demands that your product pages aren’t just “nice” but effective. A competently optimized product page can increase your presence in relevant search results, improve the customer experience, and ensure your conversion rate goes from the average of 2.2 percent (Q1 2023) to the level that places you among top 10 percent of e-commerce outlets.
Here are five steps retailers should take to optimize their product pages for the best commercial results:
1. Enrich product page content.
Every single component of the product page matters, and there are instruments out there to review the listings and suggest the necessary improvements. Product page content can increase conversion rates by up to 20 percent when it includes detailed descriptions, images and videos. And it’s not just the quality product photos and correct titles. Automated tools can scan a product page and suggest ways to enrich product descriptions using available data. They also run product classification analysis to ensure that the product is offered within the right category and that the products offered alongside it are a match.
2. Optimize keywords.
The importance of using the right keywords simply cannot be stressed enough. While different sources vary on the share of organic search engine optimization in e-commerce traffic, one thing is for sure: the clickthrough rate (CTR) of organic search results is higher than the CTR of paid search ads (pages ranking one to seven in Google’s organic search results all outperform paid ads’ CTR of 3.17 percent). Previously, mastering this art to understand what keywords potential consumers use to search for a product like yours required months of learning the intricacies of SEO, but today’s automated tools do the same job in seconds. By reverse-searching multiple ASINs, they can find the most important keywords for any listing and let the retailer see their searching volume and relevance along with other metrics for a truly in-depth optimization experience.
3. Boost engagement with potential customers.
While customers who research their every online purchase exist, a recent study points out that a whopping 95 percent of e-commerce visitors have no idea what specific product they want to buy, and they lack both the time and the drive to figure it out. Presented with a selection of 100 or 1,000 seemingly similar products and categories to refine their choice, one in four will simply abandon the purchase (while others might make a purchase based on simple guesswork and be unhappy with their selection afterwards). However, there are tools to boost visitor engagement through quick and simple questionnaires that match a customer’s needs to the vast product range of the store, so use them to both boost sales and collect valuable data about your visitors’ wants and needs. This data in turn can be used to optimize both inventory and advertising.
4. Link product pages with ads.
According to HigherVisibility, which cites a host of statistical data from Google, Statista and more, almost 24 percent of all e-commerce traffic comes from paid search ads. Therefore, linking product pages with ads and writing quality copy for those ads is essential. Using artificial intelligence-powered tools, retailers can generate multiple ad copy, choose from a range of headlines, and optimize ad campaigns. Because such tools utilize the database of billions of previously published ads, the ads that they create have higher CTR and lower costs per click than human-generated ads. And don’t forget about the time savings!
5. Don’t forget about analytics.
Playing the long game requires retailers to learn about their customers, competitors, and the market overall, and there are tools for that, too. Using simple customer journey pop-up questionnaires to help guide shoppers to the exact product they need creates troves of data about potential customers’ needs. There are tools that can help companies track competitors and their sales, gain brand review insights, and run a scoring on the product listings to improve them.
Using these five tips to find the right tools for your business will improve customer experience, boost customer engagement and conversion, and engender commercial success. Gartner predicts that in 2023, 60 percent of e-commerce companies will incorporate AI into their customer experience — join them if you haven’t done so already.
George Denis Booth is a growth specialist at Sellesta, commercial and sales director of The Ohlo Group, founder and CTO of Alaska Food Co, and a non-executive director for several companies.
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