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

Zappos CEO Bares His “Sole” and Shares His Lessons

I always think it’s better to learn from the mistakes of others, than to make the mistakes yourself (unless you’re one of those people that really need that first-hand experience to learn something). With that in mind, I thought I would pass along a link to a great write-up by Melissa Dowling available at Multichannel Merchant of some tips recently passed along by Tony Hsieh of Zappos. The top-tier shoe site CEO shared his top 10 lessons from eight years in business during a recent presentation at the eTail 2007 conference.

Lessons include:

• viewing customer service not as a cost center but a profit center
• the value of returning customers to your business
• the impact of word of mouth advertising

You may already know some of these lessons, but at the very least it’s nice to see how successful e-tailers view their business (and that they worked through the same issues you may now be facing). Read the full write-up.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Finnish Gifts Blog Interview

I conducted the following interview with Chad Trent, marketing manager for Finnish Gifts. I had met the owner of the site, Ben Horn, at the Internet Retailer show. After reviewing their store I noticed how they had incorporated a blog. I wanted to find out their reasons for starting a blog and the results they have seen as I’m sure many other merchants have wondered about using a blog with their store.

Finnish Gifts Blog helps to drive product awareness and targeted traffic to Finnish Gifts store.

Tell me a bit about Finnish Gifts and what you sell there? How long have you been with Yahoo!?

As a company, we’ve been on the Yahoo! platform since 2002. FinnishGifts.com is our 2nd store with Yahoo! (it was previously on a different platform) – we now have 3 stores with Yahoo!, and are working on #4 and #5. We sell modern Finnish products; from home accents and tableware to fabric and jewelry – really a wide variety of items. Our most popular and recognizable products are made by Finnish companies iittala and Marimekko.

In looking at your site I noticed you are using a blog. How long have you had a blog and what made you decide to start one?

We’ve had our Finnish Design Blog for about 1-1/2 years. We decided to start a blog as a way to introduce new products and get additional exposure on the search engines.

Which blogging platform did you choose to use and why?

We use the WordPress platform that is part of our hosting package with Yahoo! There are several reasons we chose to go with WordPress: it’s easy to install, easy to customize, and there are many add-ons available, among other things.

Are you using any blog plug-ins to engage with visitors such as polls or send page by email?

At this point, we’ve only been using plug-ins that assist with administration, statistics, and other back-end issues. However, there are many interesting plug-ins available and we plan on experimenting with some more in the near future.

[Paul] Check out my list of YStore blog plug-ins at the end of this post.

What do you discuss on the blog? Is it mainly for showing off new products or do you feature other content as well?

For the most part, we concentrate on introducing new products. It allows us to get our products up quickly and provides another avenue for the search engines to find the new product pages at our website. In addition to showcasing new products, we occasionally will post promotions and product/industry related news.

What sort of results are you seeing with the blog? Are you getting new visitors through the blog or are you mainly connecting with return customers? Are you seeing a higher order conversion rate from visitors that started from or visited the blog?

We have seen good results. Almost all of the visitors to our blog are new visitors that aren’t familiar with our company, so as a vehicle to introduce our company and products to potential new customers it has been a huge success. The conversion rate has been slightly higher than that of visitors who go directly to our website – and many of these visitors are searching for information and are not quite as far along in the buying cycle – so we are happy with the results.

Have you seen any tangible effects on your search engine rankings from using a blog?

Absolutely. Our search engine rankings have improved in a couple areas. First, on the blog itself we use terms and product combinations that we might not typically use on our website. This has resulted in increased exposure for many “Long Tail” terms that we weren’t previously ranking for. Second, we include descriptive links on each post back to the product pages on our website. This has improved the ranking of existing pages on our website.

Any tips or advice you would offer to a merchant thinking about starting a blog?

First, determine the purpose and goals for your blog. Our goal was simply to increase the exposure of our products, but yours might be to interact with customers more or to be an informational resource. Second, decide where you want to put your blog. We chose to use a subdomain (blog.finnishgifts.com), but others might use a different domain, a folder on your domain or a subdomain at a blogging website. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these options, so it’s important to choose what works best for you. Lastly, get to work and stick with it. The sooner you get content on your blog the sooner you’ll start seeing results. It was a slow process for us at first – we were only getting about 10 visitors a day early on – but eventually you will start seeing results as long as you continue to work at it.

Big thanks to Chad for sharing these insights. Merchants should know that in addition to WordPress, which is as noted built into the Web Hosting portion of your account, you can also choose Movable Type, another leading blogging platform.

The hardest part of the whole enterprise will be finding the time and creativity to write new content to keep your blog fresh. However, if you are an expert in your product area (and hopefully that is the reason why you decided to jump into your own particular space in the online retail world) you should have plenty to discuss. Don’t be afraid to show your opinion on products. As Chad notes, the work you do here can reap benefits in terms of search engine rankings so if you are spending too much time trying to improve those, this is one thing you can do to help yourself out, and likely drive a new set of more qualified traffic to your site.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

• Don’t even think of having a blog without activating the Akismet spam plug-in. It catches the vast majority of comment spam.
• Customizable permalinks allow you to share static links which will not change.
• WP-Cache–helps speed up your blog by caching

Quick Thoughts on Internet Retailer

My notebook is full of great notes I jotted down from sessions and discussions I had at Internet Retailer. I will be putting up some posts on various topics and insights from the conference but for now I just wanted to throw out some quick thoughts:

If you don’t have a lot of money, you can’t lose a lot of money–Jim McCann, keynote speaker and founder of 1-800-flowers.com

Jim McCann gave an incredibly interesting keynote address about how he has grown a small flower shop business into a multi-channel, multi-market, business approaching $1 billion in sales. I liked this idea because I think it represents the type of bold entrepreneurial spirit I see in some of our successful Yahoo! store merchants. Often times the merchants seeing the biggest gains are the ones placing the biggest bets. He also talked about thinking like a small company and always innovating.

Venky Shankar gave an informative presentation on metrics that matter for retailers. One statistic he listed was that 70% of people 15-34 are on social networks (such as MySpace, Facebook, etc) and that 40% of those using social networks used them to learn about a brand or product. If the 15-34 year old demographic makes up a sizable portion of your customer base, you may wish to invest some time in SNO (social network optimization). What can you do to connect to these buyers and become an asset or destination for these communities?

Maris Daugherty presented on using trends to influence purchase decisions. She talked about the three main types of shoppers: info seeking, conquerors (those on a mission to buy), and impulse shoppers. How does your site speak to these groups? Do you have original and comprehensive product data (description, specs, buyer’s guides, etc) to be the one source of authoritative information on a product or brand? If not, what are you doing to get there? With conquerors, is your site optimized to allow for the quickest access to a specific product through navigation or landing page targeting for search marketing? If not, how can you remove barriers to a quick and worry-free purchase process. With impulse shoppers, are you cross-selling products in product pages, checkout, packaging products together to drive impulse purchases? There may be (and likely are) stores that have all three types of buyers so the trick here seems to be understanding the percentages, and how each is driving revenue so you can maximize your tactics for the most profitable segment.

I’ll be sure to pass along other observations I found interesting from the show in the coming weeks.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Up next: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions post-conference party report