E-Commerce SEO: Making Product Pages into Great Content

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.