Product Page Checklist: 11 Points To Boost Traffic & Transactions

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Product pages are one of the most important pages you can have on an eCommerce website. Get your product page right, and both your traffic and transactions will flow in nicely. Get it wrong, and your marketing efforts may fail short of your expectations.

The average conversion rate of an eCommerce store is 2.42%. Poorly designed product pages are one factor that can influence this percentage. A poorly designed and optimized product page can be potentially costing your website a huge amount of potential revenue.

In this guide, we’ll detail what you need to do to ensure your product pages are performing as well as they can. It doesn’t matter if you’re a brick-and-mortar company or operating on a D2C model; these tips will all be relevant.

First, we’ll look at how to optimize your product pages to drive traffic from organic search. Then we’ll break down things you can do to ensure this traffic has the best chance of converting.

Table of Contents

  1. Add Product Schema
  2. Don’t forget about the basics of SEO
  3. Make the most of internal links
  4. Do your best to avoid duplicate content
  5. Make sure your product pages load quickly
  6. Social Proof
  7. Product Descriptions
  8. Product Photography
  9. Delivery & Return Information
  10. Cross-Sell Opportunities
  11. Be instantly contactable

Traffic

While you may be running paid search campaigns and social ads to quickly drive traffic to your product pages, optimizing your product pages for organic search is still a must.

If you have a vast eCommerce website, this can sometimes become very difficult and time-consuming. Unoptimized or even duplicate page titles are commonly found. There are, however, a few vital things you can do to ensure that your product pages have a good chance of ranking.

1) Add Product Schema

Product Schema has been around for a while now and has two main benefits to eCommerce websites.

Firstly, it gives Search engines a very easy way of understanding the content and purpose of the page. If you’re selling tires online, having structured data will help Search Engines understand this is a product for sale rather than a blog post reviewing the tire.

Secondly, if you’re able to use all the elements available you’ll be able to enhance the appearance of your organic search listings for your product pages. This will make it much more prominent and enticing to click for users. These rich results can include a star rating, pricing, and availability, and much more.

Sam's Club Product Schema

The example above shows what a product page search result could look like with the product schema successfully added. The only thing to be careful of here is price. If a competitor is also ranking for the same keywords and has a lower price, a user may be more inclined to click the cheaper result.

If you’re lucky, your eCommerce platform will be able to automatically add this to your product pages using the information available in your product catalog. If you want to check if your product pages have schema added quickly, simply go to Google’s Rich Results tool and enter the URL in question.

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2) Don’t forget about the basics of SEO

There will always be the basic things you have to get right with product pages. This includes an optimized page title, H1 tag, URL, and meta description.

Page title

Include the manufacturer’s name, if applicable, and anything very specific to that product. In the example above the page, the title included tire size, which is very specific. This could also be an SKU number if your product is part of a larger machine or apparatus. Users may specifically search for those factors to get to the exact product they want quickly.

*Use an enticing meta description. *

If you don’t set a meta description, Google will create its’ own using the content on the product page, which may not be the best. So you want to set your unique meta description that will entice users to click your result.

If you’re able to set your product meta descriptions in some kind of templated way, this is fine, to begin with – especially for large eCommerce stores – but ideally, you’ll want unique descriptions for each product. Try to include power words and unique selling points in your description if you can. Free delivery or returns? Make sure you include that.

A nice short optimized URL (or as best as you can get it)

Product page URLs can get very, very messy. Again this will largely depend on your eCommerce platform and how they handle product URLs. More often than not, you may be stuck with an SKU number in the URL, which is fine as long as other aspects are optimized.

But you’ll want to keep them as clear as possible. Below are good and bad examples of product URLs.

SEO Optimized Product URL

Now Amazon is probably the largest eCommerce website in the world, so optimizing URLs may be nigh on impossible for them to do.

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Product pages are not the easiest to build links to, so to combat this, you need to ensure you have a good number of internal links that flow through to your product pages. There are some easy ways you can do this.

Have your most important category and product pages in the main site navigation

Having your key product and category pages in the main navigation is a way to increase the internal authority of these pages. It’s also a clear signal to Google of the site hierarchy and what pages are important.

If we look at the below example from Not On The High Street, we can see a clear structure with main categories in the top navigation. A user is then easily able to navigate through the rest of the subcategories via a drop-down menu.

Not On The High Street Site Navigation

Implement breadcrumbs onto your category and product pages

Having breadcrumbs implemented isn’t just useful for user navigation, but it also gives Google a clear indication of the relationships between a category, subcategory, and product page. It also helps make the website very easy for Google to crawl quickly.

Going back to our BFGoodrich tire example, you can see breadcrumbs have been implemented on the product pages as well.

Product Page Breadcrumbs

Once breadcrumbs have been implemented, they can be marked up with breadcrumb schema which will appear on the search results. This will give Google further information on the site structure and hierarchy. This schema can then also appear in search result pages like in the example below.

Breadcrumb Schema Search Result

Link from your blog posts to product pages and vice versa

Even if you’re on an eCommerce website, you need a blog. If you have a library of relevant guides or blog posts, these are a great way to link to individual product pages and category pages with optimized and varied anchor text.

If you don’t have any, you can always start a blog and create some. Not only does this create additional opportunities for relevant internal links, but it also allows you to rank for additional related keywords your product page won’t be able to rank for.

A quick win will be to see what pages have the most backlinks pointing to them currently and seeing if you can add any relevant internal links to the product pages you are trying to push.

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4) Do your best to avoid duplicate content

The bigger your eCommerce website, the bigger this issue could be. As your product catalog grows, it can be easy to cut corners to save time. This often comes in the form of using “templates” across your website. Templates ultimately can result in duplicate content.

For example, using the same 300-word template for the on-page content of each product page will seem like a great idea that saves you a bunch of time and stress. You may think changing the title, and odd keyword is enough to make the content unique. But you’d be wrong.

The more you do this, the bigger the issue will be. If you’re set on using templates, try to make 3-5 different ones instead of just using the same. Then, it may take more and effort, but make sure every title tag, description, and piece of on-page content is 100 percent unique.

Sticking with our example from Sams club, you can see each tire size variation has been addressed in the page title and meta description.

Sam's Club Tire Size Variations

Sam’s club also goes one step further and ensures that each description is different for each tire size.

Sam's Club Different Tire Descriptions

For this to make the biggest impact quickly, go through your most important product pages that are ranking and driving traffic now and ensure the content is unique and optimized.

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5) Make sure your product pages load quickly

Page speed will always be important for SEO and conversions, in fact, research has shown that 40 percent of shoppers will leave a page if it doesn’t load within three seconds.

Make sure you compress images and upload the right sizes, so they aren’t resized in the browser. Standard speed optimizations across your website will also help out here. Going back to the example of Sam’s club product page, we can see there is room for improvement when you run this through Google’s PageSpeed Insights report.

Google PageSpeed Insights Report

It will also be checking out the Core Web Vitals for your product pages, as these will potentially become very important in the coming years.

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Transactions

If your product pages are getting traffic but not converting, something’s wrong. Whilst this could be pricing issues, or perhaps an issue with the website, more often than not it’s because users don’t feel comfortable making the purchase.

The below points will go a long way in convincing users to add to their basket and begin the checkout process.

6) Social Proof

Social proof can come in many forms and is one of the most effective ways to drive eCommerce sales. In fact, research has found that reviews make customers 71% more comfortable purchasing a product.

Social proof examples you can use could be:

  1. Product reviews
  2. Urgency signals
  3. Showing stock levels
  4. Showing awards your product has won
  5. User-generated content

In the below example from Schuh we can see they clearly display reviews, and also use the urgency signal of “selling fast” which appears when you first load the page.

schuh Social Proof

They also use other aspects of a great product page, such as highlighting free delivery and having multiple high-quality photographs. We’ll discuss these in more detail further on.

Social proof can have a massive impact on driving more transactions. Yieldify regularly runs these types of campaigns for their clients because they consistently get results. For example, they showed a message of reassurance to users that had been on a product page for 15 seconds without adding a product to their cart.

This visual displayed the widely-recognized Trustpilot logo, coupled with a 5* review score to build trust and encourage in-session conversions.

Healthy Chef Social Proof

This campaign was particularly successful and led to an increase of more than 50% in both revenue and impressions. So even a fairly simple and broad social proof aspect used across your website has the potential to make a big impact.

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7) Product Descriptions

Your product description is your chance to explain what the product is and why it’s worth purchasing. Product descriptions should supply customers with all the important information about the features and benefits of the product so they’re compelled to buy.

A common mistake here is to use the same product description that suppliers give you. You shouldn’t do this. For one, other sellers may be lazy and just copy and paste this as well. And two, it won’t do a good job of selling the product – most of the time, it will just explain what it is.

If we take a look at the below example from BPI sports, you can see the section in the red box nicely explains what the product contains, how the ingredients work, and the benefits. They also have another section (highlighted in green) that dives deeper into the benefits of the products.

bpi Sports Product Descriptions

This highlighted green section allows users to quickly digest the main benefits of the product. The keywords that have been bolded also point to features the user will want to see or use.

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8) Product Photography

Product photography can sometimes be neglected. But that’s potentially another costly mistake you’re making.

Well-known eCommerce craft website Etsy found that the quality of images was the most important factor in an online sale for 90% of its users.

What Influences Etsy Shoppers To Make A Purchase

If we take a look at the Nike product page, you’ll see a multitude of product images from all different angles. The box highlighted in purple is a video that auto-plays when you land on the page.

Nike Product Photograpghy

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9) Delivery & Return Information

Unforeseen delivery costs and unfavorable return policies are two main factors that cause cart abandonment. 60% off abandoned carts are due to extra costs (shipping fees), according to research from the Baymard Institute.

You need to ensure this information is clearly presented throughout the customer journey to avoid this from happening. One of the best places to do this is product pages.

At this point, users have seen the price of the product and will want to know how much it’s going to cost to deliver. Going back to our Schuh example, you can see they highlight delivery costs in a number of different places to overcome this issue. They even highlight a 1-year return policy.

schuh Delivery & Return Information

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10) Cross-Sell Opportunities

If a user is viewing your product page, this presents a great opportunity to cross-sell other related products. This is a great tactic eCommerce websites can employ to increase their average order values.

In the below example, we can see beauty brand Glossier cleverly cross-selling sets that the current product being viewed is part of. They also advertise this with a money-saving incentive.

Glossier Cross-Sell

Yieldify again have run campaigns like this that have proved very successful for clients. For example, for SKYN Iceland, they set up a campaign targeting visitors purchasing Hydro Cool Firming Eye Gels. Once this product was added to the basket, they suggested a complementary product. This resulted in a +23.1% uplift in conversion rate and boosted order value by 14.94%.

Carefully think about your products and what would work well as sets or bundles or frequently bought together items that you can use as cross-sells. You can easily incorporate these into your product pages. If you’re not doing so, you risk missing out on potential incremental revenue.

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11) Be instantly contactable

If a user has any last-minute questions or doubts, you need to be in a position to quickly answer these. This is where live chat software comes in very handy.

For instance, a user could be viewing a pair of shoes that have caught their attention, but they may have some final nagging questions that they want an answer to. Do they wait for a potential length email reply? Do they try social media? Call?

Most customers at this stage won’t wait around for an email response or want to jump in a phone queue to ask a quick question about a product they are considering. When they can’t get an answer quickly, they’ll leave your site and look elsewhere.

schuh Live Chat

Schuh has a live chat feature clearly present across every page on their website by placing it in its top navigation bar.

According to Moxie Software, 62% of customers expect live chat to be available on mobile devices, and if available, 82% would use it. So if you don’t have it, you’re again missing out on a potentially huge revenue-saving opportunity.

Live chat can also help you drive home those conversions. Research shows that live chatters spend 60% more per purchase and are 2.8 times more likely to end up purchasing a product. Added to this, if the session with a live chat agent is good, 38% of customers reported making a purchase.

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Related Reading

Bringing it all together

So as you can see, product pages have a lot to offer eCommerce stores and should not be neglected.

Hopefully, these 11 pointers will give you some food for thought when it comes to your product pages. As a quick summary, here’s your checklist.

  1. Add product schema if you can
  2. Ensure you have well-optimized page titles, H1 tags, and meta descriptions
  3. Don’t forget about internally linking to product pages
  4. Try to avoid duplicate content
  5. Make sure the page loads quickly
  6. Add social proof to your product page
  7. Create enticing product descriptions
  8. Make sure you have a wide range of high-quality photos
  9. Clearly display your delivery and returns policy
  10. Cross-sell relevant products
  11. Make sure you’re easy to contact!

Quickly check that you are doing all these things to see if you’re missing out on some quick wins.

Wondering how you make all of the above work together seamlessly? It can be tricky.

Use this free product page template from Yieldify for inspiration if you’re reviewing your product page designs. It contains all the aspects your product pages will need to convert more visitors into customers.


Written by our guest writer James Garnier, a Content Marketing Manager at Yieldify.

Yieldify gives eCommerce marketers total freedom to personalize their companies’ websites, 100% code-free.

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