How to Develop an Ecommerce Product Content Strategy

When we encounter content for products on an ecommerce site, we often see minimal details and features listed out with bullet points. We have all experienced this, and more often than not, that is not what users are looking for. Ensuring your items are rich in content will not only help increase conversions, but it will also help drive traffic to your product pages as well.

What are the strategies for having robust, well thought out content for your products that are going to make an impact?

There are many approaches to achieving this. Let us jump into the nitty-gritty.

Product Data Feed

All product data feeds are different but almost all should have a product title, short/long description, and features as well as product attribute selections (facets). If your product feed is missing any of the above, please stop right now and make sure you have these included as these are essential to having quality content for products. Even if you have all of the above, do not let yourself be limited and consider also including the following:

• Special features
• Climate
• Reviews
• Applications for the product
  

If you can identify something unique about a product, find a way to include it on the product detail page (PDP). Often, users don't expand features, so it's important to tell the user why XYZ about a product is beneficial.

Note about product data feeds: Some aspects of your products may be utilizing API calls to pull in outside data for specific items like reviews. Work with your development team to devise a way to incorporate third-party content.  

Utilizing Sales Data

Your sales data is the golden ticket to understanding purchasing behaviors. You can correlate email and social campaigns, organic vs. direct traffic, attribute things like weather and global pandemics to specific items and start to understand what products are important when and why. Identifying your top sellers, high margin items, and poor performing items is an essential element for your product content strategy and will help fuel your keyword research.

Product Content Strategy

Now that products and/or product categories have been identified, it’s time to perform keyword research. Tools like Semrush and Google’s Keyword Planner are great options when diving into user searches. This step can be quite a pleasure as it allows you to really understand how users are searching for products on the web. The Baymard Institute published a great article about understanding the different types of ecommerce searches. Learning the different types is highly recommended as it will further your content strategy and creation. You can read that article here.

Implement and Monitor

Depending on whether or not you need additional fields created in your product import, you may need assistance from a programmer. Bless their hearts for all that they do for us SEO-ers and digital marketers – if it weren’t for them, we would be stuck between a rock and hard place. Okay, enough of that, back to implementation. By now, you should have a very long list of keywords organized neatly within a spreadsheet next to the URL you are about to update. If you have a very large list of keywords and the ability to include your changes within a product import, I highly recommend this approach. If not, I suggest tacking your changes in batches to avoid fatigue and mental errors. Once you have imported your product sheet or made your way through your grouped products, it is time to test your changes. Take a handful of random product URLs, enter them into the browser bar, and review your changes. Once you have verified your changes make sure you trigger re-indexing through Google Search Console. Triggering a re-index is an optional step, but if performed, you will see quicker results.

Summary

Let us review the key takeaways from this strategic approach to ecommerce product content.

1. Review your data feeds.
2. Review your sales data to identify opportunities and optimizations.
3. Come up with a product content strategy based on keyword research and your findings from sales data.
4. Implement all your hard work via an import tool or manually adjust each product detail page.
   

The next time you go to import new products and follow the above steps, you will provide your users with a richer experience on product detail pages, which are often lacking in quality content. Stay ahead of your competitors by performing competitor reviews and always make sure to revisit your changes to ensure your keywords are performing well.