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.