10 Tips to transform product pages into sales magnets

Quite often a site owner will pour his heart and soul into a home page. And this is rightly so. If a shopper is not hooked on your home page — he or she will likely exit before taking a look at what you have to offer.

But if you are an eCommerce site owner, save a little mojo for your product pages. Your customers are likely making their buying decisions based on your product pages. You want to be sure to keep your presentation simple and compelling with minimal clicks. Make the shopping experience easy for your users.

ShopFactory 9 includes several new product styles to make your job easier. Not only do the new product styles include updated layouts — they include microdata for search engines. The microdata tells the search engine the page is about a product. And you will get more traffic directly on product pages through the search engines with this new data.

Here is a list of some other tips that will help you transform your product pages into sales magnets.

1. Carry Over the messaging from your 'Home page'

   If you are running a holiday sale or a free shipping promotion, make sure you have included visual or text elements on your product pages that reinforce your message. This is especially important if you have already done a good job of SEO and have site visitors coming directly to your interior pages. You want to make sure they have some inkling about your specials or unique selling points without having to click back to your home page.

2. Use top-quality 'Product images'

   People love to see what they are going to purchase. Take the time to prepare great images. For a minimal investment in a good digital camera and adequate lighting in a home-based photo studio, you can produce great photos.

   Multiple photos per product are an excellent idea. You will want to use the image slide show built into ShopFactory or possibly additional smaller detail images lower down on the page. As a general rule, the smaller a product is, the larger the photo should be. To sell a piece of jewelry, a large photo will give a shopper the details they will likely want to see to make a buying decision.

3. Use 'Cross Promotion'

   Typically the action you want to encourage on each product page is for the shopper to click the "Add to Cart" button. But, cross promotion increases the chance that a buyer will choose addons and related products, which increases your overall sales.

   Cross promotion is also important for creating 'internal links' to other products on your site. Search engines pay attention to the internal links and can rank your site higher if you use cross promotion links. This increases the visibility of other pages on your site, since you are linking related products. Many online stores that fail to do this fall behind on rankings.

4. Up sell with options

   Quite often you have products which can have options. Up selling using options can increase your sales since you are promoting additional addons to your products. Items like extended warranty, on-site service, and consumables your products might use can all be added in using “product options”. This practice can increase your sale on each order by reminding customers of other things they might need for your product.

5. Create clear, concise 'Product Descriptions' and 'Page Titles'

   Maximize the keyword "richness" of your product pages to enhance your SEO efforts. Focus each page on a specific keyword phrase or two. The phrase should be reflected in the page title and it should also be included in the product description. Typically a two-to-three sentence description along with bulleted points explaining the product's benefits or key characteristics will give your users what they need and provide the search engines with enough "meat" to determine the relevance of your pages.

   Do not use obscure names for your product titles. For example, if you have a miracle face cream called 'Galaxa' that nobody has heard of yet, you will likely want to have something beyond 'Galaxa' in your product page title. "Galaxa anti-aging face cream" would be much more effective and tells search engines and customers what the product really is about.

   Writing engaging product copy can also pay great dividends; but it takes some skill and dedication.

6. Write your own copy

   Many manufacturers provide raw data files for content for their products. The danger in this is that the same copy you receive — is the same copy their other retailers use. Set yourself apart from your competition by writing your own descriptions and titles. It will help you in the long run with search engines and customers alike if you add your own unique value to the products you are selling.

7. Do not duplicate

   Many of your product can be very similar. This happens a great deal in online stores where two or more products are very similar. One option is to create two separate products. But make sure you write a completely different description copy and alter your title enough to tell search engines they are different. The alternative is to create one product, and use the “product options” to sell the different format or type of the same product.

   This also relates to Tip 6, if you write your own content, you are creating unique content that isn’t duplicated by other websites.

8. Use enough information for people and search engines

   Far too often we see online stores with products that have only a line or two of text, including the product title. This doesn’t help you, it hurts you in the eyes of your customers. They come to your site to make a buying decision and if you do not have all the proper information on your product — they will just leave your site. Search engines will simply ignore your product pages for important ones built by others with more information on them.

9. Always review and test

   So, take a few minutes to review your product pages with fresh eyes. Are you really leading your users to click the 'Add to Cart' button? Have you made the case for a customer who comes directly to this page to purchase your product? If not, now is the time to adjust and test.

10. Link to Product Pages

    Whenever possible, link directly to product pages from other sources. These are called 'deep links' on some search engines. Linking directly to product pages will entice visitors who are searching for your product to buy right away. Direct product links from other sources will also improve your over-all ranking on search engines for that product and the keyword(s) you use.