Screencast for Improving Product Pages

Just a quick note to call your attention to a screencast for optimizing product pages (fancy word for video recording of someone’s monitor) recently posted over at GrokDotCom by Bryan Eisenberg, co-author of Call to Action:Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, and several other good ebooks. Bryan walks through product pages on FingerHut, BestBuy and TigerDirect, pointing out what can be improved.

His tips center around:

• Readability/scanability of product descriptions
• How many and what type of images are used to help inform buyers
• Placement of add-to-cart buttons.

It’s good to see that even the giants get things wrong at times, and learning from both their missteps and successes can be invaluable for gaining insight into improving your own product pages. I highly recommend checking out the other screencasts on conversion rate tips from Target and Petco and also on reducing cart abandonment.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

OrderMotion Webinar

Merchants that are experiencing the good problem of rapid growth in orders that is straining your back-end processing capabilities may be interested in a webinar offered by OrderMotion. Learn how to automate your back-office tasks, manage multiple stores, or ask any other questions related to managed order processing.

Thursday, August 30, 2007
2:00 p.m. EST/11:00 a.m. PST

Pre-register for the webinar

The webinar will cover:

• Learn how to make your back-office operations more efficient, manage multiple Yahoo! stores, and maximize your company’s growth with OrderMotion.
• Learn how Yahoo! merchants successfully cut time and hassle from their back-office operations so they can focus on successfully growing their business.
• Have an opportunity to ask questions in our Q&A session.

A Few Quick Thoughts from Search Engines Strategies San Jose 2007

I was able to sneak out of the office this week to attend a few sessions at the Search Engines Strategy conference held in San Jose this week. Here are a few thoughts from some of the sessions I attended:

• Matt Bailey of Site Logic gave a hilarious introduction to the importance of segmentation when looking at web analytics data. Taking Star Trek (original series) as his source of data, he demonstrated the survival rates of red shirt characters when beaming down to the planet with Captain Kirk, segmenting between times when Kirk did and did not make a love connection with a female alien.

  (Author confession: Yes I like Star Trek, but no I don’t own any pointed Vulcan ears). You can read his full post on the topic in the ClickTracks articles.

  Takeaways: Segment your data when possible to make comparisons, contrast different segments to gain insights, and always view your data in context. I also asked Matt how small businesses should prioritize areas to optimize. He stated that merchants should focus first on their most profitable products and not the most or least converting as improvement to those have the greatest potential to your net profits.

• Allan Dick, senior plumbing evangelist (not making that up) for Vintage Tub & Bath, was the moderator of the same session and he answered the same question I asked Matt. Allan said that as a small business, they try to focus on key products (in their case claw foot bathtubs) and when buyers purchase those, they also likely purchase all of the hardware that matches the tub. In this way, they can focus efforts around optimizing for these core products and once buyers come and purchase, they also tend to buy related accessories.

  Allan also suggested focusing on fewer overall metrics that mean something to him (i.e. they spur him to action if changing by a certain percentage) rather than focusing on 30 metrics that you aren’t sure what they mean.

  Takeaways: Start with your core products and put your efforts there. Once you get the traffic, you can then ensure you are merchandising and cross-selling to boost your average order size. Also, read some of the interviews found by searching for “Allan Dick”. Allan began implementing what he learned at SES shows years back and that knowledge has helped grow the business to an Internet Retailer top 500 business. SEO is certainly more complex these days, but his story is proof that the effort to learn and network can pay off for small businesses.

Even if you can’t step away from your business long enough to attend such a conference, there are a ton of bloggers covering these sessions so I would recommend taking advantage of those topics where you want to learn more. Search Engine Land has a roundup of all the coverage for day 2 and other days at SES.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Knowing What’s Right to Write for Product Page Content

All too often I see merchants with stores that have recently opened (or have been open for a while but are complaining about lack of natural search traffic), with product pages that lack sufficient original content. Now while writing for the web means you write less (and make your text scanable with bullet points and shorter line lengths) than you would for a catalog, embracing minimalism with your product content is a sure way to rank poorly with search engines and also deter visitors from becoming buyers.

So how much product content is enough? I have seen sources that list 200-300 words as an ideal and others that recommend 500 words; the trend seems to be moving towards higher word count but use conversion and not just traffic as your overall success metric. The next question then from newer merchants is typically, “How do I write that much?” or “What do I write about to get that many words?”.

Realize though that it is not simply the volume of content you write for products, but the quality as well (hint: keywords). Assuming you have done your homework on keywords and keyphrases research for which you wish the product to rank in search engines, I would recommend two articles with helpful tips on what to write about and the questions to answer for your various buyers.

Writing Smart Copy For Your E-commerce Product Pages

The folks at SEO Igloo have put together an article about 5 topics you can use to shape product content. The topics include:

• Historical
• Modern
• Trends
• Psychology
• Scientific

Some of these will work better than others depending on the type of products you sell, but at the very least they hint at the ways you can transform simple product pages into content-rich pages which search engines may rank higher.

Dishing Out What the Customer Really Wants

This is a great article from the smart marketers at Future Now. I was fortunate enough to hear Howard Kaplan from Future Now speak at the Internet Retailer conference this year. Kaplan talked about the different personas of online shoppers:

• Competitive: cutting edge, early adopters
• Methodical: research and compare, need all the details
• Humanistic: speak to emotional benefits of the product
• Spontaneous: impulse shoppers

The article lists the various questions these visitor types have when shopping. Imagine your job as a copywriter is to be the sales person on the page answering the questions asked by these different personas. The spontaneous buyer may need only a persuasive headline and a compelling price to buy. The methodical buyer will want to see all product specs, any testimonials from other customers, and why to trust you with the purchase. You may not have all of these personas but viewing your product pages in this framework can help overcome any writer’s block and when done properly can boost search traffic and drive additional sales.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business