Many ecommerce store owners shoot themselves in the foot by only listing item essentials such as product name, ID, and price. This may allow you to rank for long-tail exact match product specific terms, but assuming the terms you’re targeting on your home pages and other top tier pages are in mildly competitive markets, you will be no where near the top of the rankings.
When searchers arrive to your site from the search engines, the majority of them will be in the information gathering phase of the buying cycle and looking for descriptions, specifications, reviews, etc., to identify what they need to solve their problem. You need to provide them with the information they’re looking for in order to be comfortable and confident that the product you provide is the solution to their problem. Connecting with your prospect and building trust is arguably the most important thing you can do at this point. The best way to build trust online is to teach your prospect something that will help them make a buying decision. Whether it’s a comparison chart showing different product specs, or a buyer’s guide informing prospects what to look for when purchasing, having information in addition to your products will go a long way towards helping keep visitors in your sales funnel. These are the things that will differentiate you from the Amazon’s and other online mega stores and allow you to compete. By not having any of that information you are ultimately losing potential sales and link opportunities.
Getting Links From Your Content Pages
Now you may be saying, well I sell (insert boring product), what kind of information can I utilize that people will help build trust and people will want to link to? Well it is true that it is difficult to get links to individual product pages, you can do the next best thing and get links to a page that talks about and links to your own product pages. Ways to do this?
Buyers Guides to …
How to get the most out of …
Product manuals
Questions to ask before purchasing a …
These four examples can be relevant and would be added value to any business online that doesn’t currently have them. When done exceptionally, these pages can become industry wide resources and provide many topically relevant links. Inside each of these pieces of content you can point links to relevant products and parts of your site. The better and higher quality that you can make these content pages, the more likely they are to get links and provide you Page Rank to pass directly to your product pages. These pages do very well in forum settings as the ask/answer/discuss format of forums is an ideal setting for these purely information pieces. In addition, if you can genuinely inform and educate prospects about the products they’re interested in you will gain their trust, which makes it easier to secure the sale at the end. Another easy way to get ideas and is by looking at the top ranking sites in your field and figuring out how they’re using content to their advantage. If they are not doing anything remarkable, a quick back link check will enable you to see what they’ve done to achieve high rankings and would be easy to replicate. Your content options are only limited by your creativity.
Dave,
You’re absolutely right about Retailers under utilizing the power of MORE content and content that appears outside of the eCommerce catalog. Reassuring your shoppers by reinforcing their buying concerns within content is a great way to not only rank higher on engines, but to also capture more orders and a potentially higher conversion rate.
I am a firm believer that having product specific content, along with niche specific content is a great blend on any Online selling site and can make a big difference between success and failure. Retail blogs are becoming more mainstream, along with buying guides and linkbait campaigns surrounding specific products or groups of items.
Being creative and offering something unique to YOUR shoppers, current customers and prospects is the key. Thinking outside of the box and offering content no one else can will certainly make a retailer stand out from the competition. The examples you proved are great creative ideas that nearly any retailer can use, anytime during their store development process, even later (it’s never to late to employ this tactic).
One such site that comes to mind would be ShopWiki. They have an excellent UGC section featuring buying guides, videos, blogs etc. It’s not a typical retail site, but uses the same principle within their site/wiki. It wouldn’t surprise me to see more retailers start using things like blogs and wikis within their site, outside of the catalog, to overcome the eCommerce content dilemma.
Great write-up and advice, keep up the quality blogging Dave!!
eCopt