Get Your eCommerce Content Fit For The Summer
So you own online shop and want to improve your user experience, conversion rate and performance in search engines. You might think all three issues will need to be addressed seperately. Well think again. You can improve on all by making sure your content is interesting and unique. Basically your content needs to match your user requirements.
5 Tips to make the most of your eCommerce store:
1. Get Your Architecture Right
You can use faceted or categorised navigation. As everything both have their pros and cons. Whichever one you choose make sure your pages only exist once. The last thing you want to end up with are lots of pages that have the same content. So make sure you canonicalise any duplicate pages if you need to.
2. Content is King on Category Pages
Think unique! Make these pages worth a read. Write unique and interesting content for each category page. Link to all of your subcategories here and describe what they offer. You can also add some links to other categories here. Customers looking at this category might also be interested in one of the others.
3. What to put on Subcategory Pages
For me one of the most important factors here is to be able to view all products. So give users the choice. You can display the first 25 or so automatically (using JavaScript), but offer a "View All" to display the rest. The Second factor, and this one is key, is to write product summaries that are a) unique and b) enticing. You don't want to use the bulk standard descriptions that your competitors and suppliers use (do not use the generic product descriptions that can be found on other websites). Be unique and make sure that your descriptions are interesting and enticing to the user. Lastly don't use the same product descriptions that you use on your product pages.
4. Your Product Page
So your users have reached the product they are interested in. Now give them the content they want. Make your descriptions interesting and informative. Whilst giving all technical specs needed, make sure you add some flavour. Apart from the descriptions you can add features like user feedback. Ask them to rate, advise on and share their experiences of this product. People love to know what other people thought before they buy.
On a more technical note, use microformats to get into those search engine verticals.
5. Let's Share
Allow users to share your products on their social profiles. People tweeting and liking your product on Facebook is great advertisement...and its free.
Now get cracking.