How To Build The Perfect Product Page in 2022 (that actually converts!)

There are so many things you need to think about when trying to sell your product online.

Who is your ideal buyer? What are they willing to pay? Why are they going to choose your product over the competition?

Getting your product online is easy. The hard part is actually selling it.

In todays landscape, the ability to set yourself apart from your competition is most important. If we’re being honest, most products in any given market (especially the DTC and E-Commerce worlds) are the same.

Ultimately it comes down to how well you can separate your brand and it’s products from the hundreds, if not thousands of identical products that are just a click away from yours.

It all starts with your website. In a perfect world, your customer will find your product on your website, purchase it without hesitation and become a lifelong customer that buys everything you sell and single-handedly puts food on your table and puts your kids through college.

Now if we’re being realistic, we know that isn’t the case. Most brand spend thousands of dollars and even more hours meticulously researching and combing through every part of their customer’s buying journey to minimize any possibility of them not purchasing their product.

The good news is that you don’t have to.

While your website is definitely the most important piece of your products marketing, all parts of your website are not created equal. The most important part of your website is your product page and this blog is designed to show you how to create the perfect product one to sell your product.

A great product page has a lot of moving pieces. And because competition has never been greater, each piece of your product page is crucial to ensuring that your product gets seen — and purchased.

Having a great product page is the easiest way to separate yourself from the competition and convert browsers into buyers.

How to create the perfect product page

The perfect product page can be broken down into two categories: SEO and Conversion Optimization.

When it comes to SEO, it’s all about doing everything you can to make sure you show up as high as possible in Google’s search results. By optimizing your website and product pages for Search Engines, you ultimately end up with more traffic to your site. Showing up higher on search results also adds credibility to your products and services.

Once you have more people flowing to your site, you need to convert them to paying customers.

Conversion Optimization involves all things design and copy-related on your site. From logo placement to colours and widgets and everything in between. Often times the smallest changes can produce the biggest results.

Here are the main things to look at when creating your product pages:

Be Unique – Be You.

Custom-written product descriptions will ensure your customers understand your product and what makes it so special. While we would love to think our products are unique and sooo much better than everything else on the market, the reality is that there are probably dozens – if not hundreds of similar products out there and it’s becoming harder and harder to tell them apart. A unique, custom-written product description goes a long way in separating your product from the competition.

Providing a detailed description of your product and having it conveniently located on your website will help your customers spend more time researching the product on your website and will eliminate their need to try and find more information on it somewhere else.

“That sounds like a lot of work. Do I haveeeee to?”

Writing product descriptions is hard and there are a lot of short cuts out there that can save you time — but it’s a trap.

There might product descriptions provided by the manufacturer or ones you like from a similar product that you’re hoping to just move a few words around and put on your site.

It’s important to remember that it’s up to you to differentiate your product from everyone else. There’s a good chance that your competitors have taken that shortcut and are using those exact same product descriptions provided from the same manufacturer. It terms of your site’s SEO, using the same text as someone else is a disaster and will hurt your organic SEO dramatically.

Writing your own creative product descriptions is essential. Try and write at least 150 words to describe your product and keep the language simple and relatable to your audience.

A Picture’s Worth $1000 (words)

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but the right images of your product on your product page could be worth millions in sales.

In a digital-first world, people are becoming more receptive to buying most of their products online “sight unseen” directly from the company without seeing them in person first. This new way to purchase makes having good quality photos of your products more important than ever.

In turn, bad photos are a sure-fire way to make someone leave your site without purchasing.

Besides having high-quality and unique product images, make sure you provide enough pictures for your potential customers to see your product from every angle. There’s nothing worse than heading to a product page and seeing one single static image. Is that really the best way to sell your product to someone seeing it for the very first time?

If you don’t have professional quality photos already, don’t worry. There are third party “content creation studios” that will do all the heavy lifting for you. You read more about how they work and what to expect with our honest review of soona here.

You also need to take advantage of your website’s capabilities. If you’re able to include videos/GIFs along with your product images, it creates a much more in-depth and immersive experience for your customers viewing your product.

Loading……..

Although high quality images and video can help sell your product, if they cause your website load speeds to suffer too much, it can lead to higher bounce rates and people will leaving your website quickly because it’s taking too long.

The average time spent on a site is less than 15 seconds and the bounce rate (people that view 1 page and leave without taking any action) on e-commerce sites is over 45%

There are a variety of ways to make sure your images and content load quickly without losing quality.
TinyPNG and compressor.io are compression tools that help minimize your photo file sizes and optimize your images for websites while still maintaining image quality to ensure your website looks good and loads fast.

Tag, You’re it [Alt-Tags]

When you first start on your SEO journey, you immediately start thinking about all the text you use throughout your website and how it integrates and fits along with your brand and products.

SEO isn’t just about all the words that are visible on your page. Every image on your website also gets crawled by Google for relevancy and accuracy.

At this point, we’ve established how important quality photos are for your site. However, if they aren’t indexed and categorized properly, search engines won’t be able to see them and give them all the views and exposure they deserve.

Enter alt-tags.

With all the advancements we’ve made in technology and the internet, search engines still categorize images by the written description that you provide for them — called “alt-tags”. If you’re new to alt-tags, think of them as a closed caption, text-alternative description of what exactly your image is. In turn, think of a picture on your site without an alt-tag as a post on social media with no followers or hashtags.

When it comes to adding alt-tags to your images, make sure you’re as descriptive as possible about what your image is. It’s also important to remember that despite your best efforts, Google is smarter than you — and attempts to “beat the system” with keyword stuffing or irrelevant tags will often be caught and place you on Google’s “naughty list” (hint – you don’t want to be there)

Reviews

How many times have you researched a product online?

Chances are your customers have questions – and lots of them.

9 out of 10 consumers read reviews before making a purchase

Often times they go to product review pages/sites to get answers. Why not be the go-to source? Questions can range from first-hand experiences to sizing, quality and everything in between.

The fact is that any question about your product that goes unanswered on the product page can result in a lost customer.

If a website doesn’t have reviews on its product pages, a simple Google search will lead shoppers to find them somewhere else. It’s so easy for them to leave your site to find the information they’re looking for somewhere else, so why not just include it on your site and eliminate one less opportunity for them to leave?

Never give your customer a reason to leave your website, even if you’re confident they’ll come back and purchase. The internet is too large and competitive and there’s no reason you should make the purchase more difficult than it needs to be.

Putting reviews on your site helps in so many ways, including SEO.

With current, updated reviews, Google interprets this as new content on your page and recognizes it as accurate, up-to-date information. Also — assuming that your reviews also include relevant keywords about your product — there’s a good chance you can rank higher in those Google search results involving those keywords, thus providing you with more visibility and more traffic (for free).

How important are reviews, you ask?

Product reviews definitely help your product’s overall reputation and can improve your SEO ranking for specific keywords, but it’s also important to showcase reviews on your brand as a whole. Many customers research products meticulously before deciding and thus have likely decided on their purchase long before they’ve arrived on your product page.

The shopper’s actual challenge is finding a reputable brand to purchase from. Price is always a key factor, but so is trust. Many customers are more than happy to pay more in order to feel good about their purchase and the brand they’re purchasing it from.

Positive reviews about your brand and products go a long way in building trust and creating credibility.

If you’re using shopify, adding a review widget to your product pages is simple and can be done in minutes. We recommend using loox – which allows users to add a photo of their satisfied experience along with their review, or Stamped, which offers a variety of templates and allows for a variety of user-generated content.

They’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.

Most customers head to product review sections to find answers to their questions. You can make it even easier by including a Q&A section directly on your product page.

While you might not have the customer base and scale of Amazon’s Q&A section, you should allow website visitors to ask a question on your page about your products. The primary benefit to hosting your own Q&A section on your site is that you can be there to answer them as a reputable, trusted source. Being interactive and engaged on your website by asking frequently asked questions and responding to reviews can be a great tool for helping you build your reputation and credibility too.

Cross-selling and up-selling

When someone visits your product page, do you show them similar or complimentary products to the ones they’re looking at? “People who bought this also bought this” is a simple way to increase your average cart amount while also showing potential customers similar products you know they’ll likely be interested in.

There are many tools you can add to your site that can help with this including Wiser, which allows you to offer personalized recommendations based on inventory, pop-ups, browsing history, and more. Wiser also has a “frequently bought” feature that uses A.I. and shopping data from previous customers to automatically recommend products that should go well together.

Similarly, up-selling is the ability to show customers similar items to the ones they are looking at that are generally more expensive or higher end.

For example, if they are browsing phone cases you can show them more expensive, premium cases along with higher-priced accessories that compliment their intended purchase. A lot of the bigger e-commerce sites utilize this feature (think Amazon), however, smaller sites are more than capable of implementing this as well.

Both cross-selling and up-selling are great ways to increase your sales and average cart amounts while reducing your bounce rates. Adding a “similar products” section to your product pages can also help your SEO ranking by including internal links within your product pages and different sections of your website.

Breadcrumbs

The last thing you need to consider when building the perfect product page are breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs are usually located at the top of your product page and show you the “trail” on your site that lead users to the specific product that they’re viewing.

In e-commerce, breadcrumbs act as a “recent history” or website navigation tool that shows users where they are on the website. This is a good strategy for websites that sell many products in many categories because it allows users to easily keep track of where they’ve been and minimizes the ability to get confused or lost on your site.

Breadcrumbs can also be a great tool for users to get an overview of your shop, especially if they’ve entered your website through a product page they’ve discovered externally (Google, Marketplaces, etc)

From an SEO perspective, breadcrumbs help Google figure out a website’s layout more easily and make sure that all the website’s individual pages get crawled.

Additionally, breadcrumbs provide a richer user experience. There’s a higher chance that users will explore your website more if there are breadcrumbs showing them where they’ve come from and how they navigated there.

When someone finds your product through Google and they click on the result and ultimately land on your specific product page, they are like a lost puppy. They know why they’re there, but are probably visiting for the first time and need some help navigating to the next step.

Once on your product page, they might be interested in browsing other products, viewing testimonials or reading more about the company. Breadcrumbs allow them to easily navigate your site, even if it’s their first time and they enter inconveniently in the middle of the navigation process.

As they continue to explore your website and browse relevant pages, your bounce rates will go down. This will ultimately give your website a higher Quality Score with Google improve your overall ranking on search results.

What it really comes down to

The perfect product page needs to be informative. By educating your customers with as much relevant information about your product as possible, you remove any doubt they might have when shopping somewhere else.

When you inform your customers about your products and your brand as much as possible, you will built the trust needed to earn new, repeat and (hopefully) lifelong customers.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more information you provide up front, the less time you have to spend providing it later. Keep in mind that e-commerce lacks the touch and feel of a brick-and-mortar store, so building trust is essential for the success of your products and your brand as a whole.