How to write copy for the product pages
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Imagine your company specialises in selling snowboards for children. There are probably quite a few companies out there who do the same - selling snowboards for children. Maybe your company plans to sell snowboards online where people can make credit card payments online. Therefore, you need to convince your website visitors that your snowboards are the ones they should buy, and not your competitor's! How do you do that?
Imagine you have 2 children you want to introduce to snow boarding. You go to Google and you enter "snowboards for children". You look at the first few results (made up examples here):
- UK Specialist for Snowboards for Children - Company XYZ
Online store with extensive information on safety and snowboarding for children - XYZ - based in London, Snowboard by BRAND
BRAND-X A2, BRAND-Y 4B, company existed since 1984.
Which link do you click on? Most likely on the first one because it is tailored around you and your concerns.
The following page will discuss a few points why your great website appears in Google and how you can improve your product / service pages.
People visit your website because they want to find out more about the product they want to buy or the service they are looking for. They don't have enough information to make a buying decision, they want to inform themselves and find a company which offers the product they are after. There are two different kinds of clients out there:
- Visitors who are looking for information, but are not ready to buy.
- Visitors who have enough information and are ready to buy.
Visitors who are looking for information
Many people search the web to find information about products and services. Some people want to figure out different product options available, others want to compare prices, or they want to know about advantages / disadvantages of a certain product.
You need to cater for website visitors who are just browsing. If you don't give them enough information to stay, they won't even consider your company when they are ready to make a buying decision.
Back to our snowboard example. The website should have a clear structure with information about snowboarding which is free and which can be read by potential clients without them having to submit their details. The free advice can already recommend certain snowboards for certain needs - beginners, advanced, certain sizes etc. The free advice can also provide links to particular items in the online shop. The website should then contain an online shop which lists available snowboards and accessories in a logical order. The shop should be easy to navigate and it should encourage visitors to include additional items other than just a snowboard (such as suits, gloves etc.).
An individual product page should include a photograph of the product - or maybe even more than one photograph. The product page should include a clear headline which includes not just the brand and model number but also the generic term of the product - ie. Snowboard. So a typical headline could be: "BRAND-A 123XL Snowboard" rather than just "BRAND-A 123XL". Some of your visitors will be completely new to your products. To give you another example - if someone wants to buy a bike, and has not cycled for a long time or never before - they won't be able to distinguish between a "Hybrid" or a "Mountain Bike".
The product description should be quite comprehensive. It should include a description - which in turn can include a number of keywords and key phrases, it should include sizes, colours, materials etc. compatibility if required - all depending on what you sell. The more information you provide the better. You keep your website visitor on your site. They will acknowledge that you have provided lots of information and they will read the information - because that's why they visited your website in the first place.
Big bonus - you will keep the search engines happy - because they are able to pick up the keywords in the product description.
If you only provide a small bit of text, visitors can look at it and will immediately leave, because there is no reason to stay, nothing to read, nothing to look at. Search Engines have no content to add to their databases and your site will most likely not be listed in the results.
Have a look at the Amazon website. Select any book and have a look at the product page of a particular book. You will see that they include masses of information about every book they sell. The number of pages, if it's a hardcover, the author of the book, the category of the book and so on. They also include a summary of the book and reviews submitted by readers. All these things lead a website visitor to a buying decision. They feel they have gathered enough information to buy the desired item.
Visitors who have enough information and are ready to buy
You can distinguish between the price hunters and the visitors who only buy from established websites / companies. If you sell products online, you will most likely have a price displayed for each product. The visitor has gathered enough information - either on your website or elsewhere - and is ready to buy, to spend money.
If you have a good price for your product, you might catch the price hunters, but you won't impress people who want to buy from a website that looks established and well-looked after. So in any case, providing more information is better than doing a quick job and your website will do better in search engines.