Product content is the product your customers see more readily on your website. If you want to grow your e-business, produce great searchable product data that communicates your brand promise to your target market. If no one is able to consume the content, it defeats the purpose of its production in the first place. Quality content without consumption is a futile effort.
Your target audience should be able to find your product content to enjoy the benefits you offer. It should go beyond your target audience, attracting shoppers to your site, even when they didn’t plan to do so. Your product content is the foundation of a successful omnichannel experience. This is because it becomes easier for content to be shared across multiple channels.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the language companies use to be more visible online. You’ll need to embrace its principles so your website can perform in terms of keyword and content structure, development of links, web design, and on-page elements.
Everything we do on the web involves a process of searching for information. This is why it’s highly important that you make your content easily searchable. This will help give your brand more visibility and generate greater leads for your company.
Tips to Make your Product Content Searchable
Before we go further into the benefits of making your product content searchable, we’ll explore helpful pointers you can use to make product content easier to find.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important tool that can help make a site more visible by moving it to the top of a search engine’s list of result. Of course, this optimization can be internally done which is where the quality of your content comes into play. Your content should be great enough to be able to attract people to your site and make them share with their friends.
Don’t stop at just Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but generate micro-content, which are small understandable chunks of information based on details that are specific to your product offering. This is important because Google is the go-to search engine for most consumers, and Google prefers micro content.
Add descriptive HTML tags and attributes to your product content. To be able to accurately do this, there is need to infuse key phrases that your target audience will likely use in their search relating to your offering. This won’t be possible without adequate knowledge of your target audience. You must know the personas of your customers.
- How do they talk?
- What do they do?
- What are their preferences?
Creating buyer personas which represent your ideal customers will go a long way in helping you craft content attractive to your intended customers.
Utilize the potentials social marketing offers for your brand visibility and audience expansion. According to a study by Google back in 2010, social media was the second biggest discovery platform with search engines ranking first. It provides a medium to reach out to new customer segments and makes a brand more recognizable.
Put descriptive metadata in each page’s content, then place it inside an HTML header tag. The contents of the header tag allows bots to determine to a large extent if your page is relevant to the inquiries of customers.
Trending keywords can go a long way to increase the search ranking of your product. Keyword search optimization can help companies drive traffic from search engines to your site. Your content becomes more effective because you are writing bearing in mind the specific customer segment you are targeting, thereby providing solutions to the problems they face.
Include social share buttons in your content. It will go a long way to enable your customers easily share your content especially the ones that resonate with them to the friends and followers through their social media accounts. This can garner a lot of views in the fastest possible time.
Achieve Product Content Visibility
It can be frustrating when customers can’t make use of your product content, because of its lack of visibility. In that frustration, be careful and follow these don’ts so that you don’t compromise on your brand promise and image.
Don’t deceive your customers with inaccurate keywords that don’t reflect the content just to get more traffic to your site. Another common mistake is keyword stuffing, when you inject your target keyword into every sentence of your content. Doing this will do more harm than good.
You should provide your target market with information that will add value to their lives and is relevant to providing solutions to the problems that they face. This will make them hungry for more of your content. Of course, this won’t possible if you don’t properly understand your customers and the reason for their search. This is why your content should focus on your customers, as nothing else matters.
Include relevant, quality external links. Take particular care to link only to well-ranked, reputable sites. Your site should be one that is easy to navigate, especially one that is mobile-friendly so that you can get accessed by mobile devices from any channel or platform.
What language are you using in the drafting of your content? This is an important question you need to answer. Write your content with a defined set of people in mind.
Save Time Finding Images
One benefit searchable product content offers is that it saves time finding images. This is because your images are appropriately titled with rich descriptions and captions that capture everything you want to say and how it relates to your offering. Your product image is an important product content because it gives customers a pictorial image of your product or service and shows them its features, in a way that they can easily picture it in their minds.
There is need to optimize your images to create better customer experiences that will get you results. Properly named and labeled images are much easier to find. Unlabelled ones end up neglected because they remain incomprehensible to users. Pictures that are overly large won’t be easily found and can delay load speed. It’s important to post images in the right proportion and specification, to optimize them. Achieve this by scaling them.
A picture is worth a thousand words. It can help readers understand and make it more enticing. Infuse elements like headings, bold letters, and captions into product content to make it more memorable.
Image search is much more significant than you might imagine. According to data from Jumpshot and Moz, people search in Google Images 10 times more often than on Bing or Yahoo. This represents more than 40 times the number of searches done via Facebook. Having seen its importance, images should be high quality and you should pay careful attention to an image’s ability to engage the audience.
Saves Time Sharing
This is another benefit of making product content searchable. When you make pages with users in the mind instead of search engines, it definitely reduces the time spent sharing because customers on their own will easily find them. To do so, break content down into sections and copies that viewers can scan easily.
Websites love shareable content, especially in this knowledge-driven era. The inclusion of social share buttons and call to action in product content creation makes it easier to send across to different people. It’s important to ensure that modes of interaction and social buttons should be properly functioning. Place relevant phrases in the body of the content, to make it easy to share them across platforms on the spot.
It even becomes better when you back content up with engaging and compelling visuals, increasing shares by a significant percentage and increases brand awareness. You need to give customers something worthy to share. Content shouldn’t strictly be bland and lengthy product descriptions but should be able to engage customers enough to attract further interest.
The world we are in is one where interaction is made possible by its very nature. Most times, shares take place on social media platforms which increases the possibility of conversion. When product content is searchable, sharing becomes easier and generation of organic traffic is higher.
It’s necessary to point out that if the content does not solve an identified problem, make emotional connections or inform customers about a particular topic, no one will share it, even if it’s easily searchable. This is why your content must be so appealing and memorable that it can become viral.
Improve Your Company’s Reputation
The principal goal of your content is to inform, engage and bring value to your customers. Product content creates an impression of a brand in the minds of your customers which forms their attitude. More importantly, the ability to easily find and understand your brand content helps customers have a better overall user experience, thus improving the reputation of your company.
People trust the first listings on major and popular search engines (Google for instance) and when your product content is easily searchable, it accords a certain level of trust in your brand and what you stand for. You become the brand competitors will want to beat because of the credibility your company stands to gain.
You can also leverage the reputation of influencers that are important in the industry you are operating in for your content to be visible. This will grant you access to prospects you may never have considered and increase your exposure.
Making your content searchable makes the delivery of superior customer experience possible. In today’s world, knowledge is power and content visibility creates room for the sharing of knowledge.
Distribute your content regularly across different platforms to plant your brand message firmly in the minds of your customers. Don’t restrict your content to your own site but publish to as many sources as possible that are relevant to your target market.
The more visible you become, the more people see your brand as an authority and the more familiar they become with your brand. With familiarity comes increased interaction with your users, which deepens the relationship with them. Communication becomes a two-way journey whereby you can respond to complaints and requests, thus encouraging reviews, especially positive ones.
Saves Time Finding Product Specifications
Product specification provides information to customers that can illuminate the product from others through its characteristics. Information like manufacturing date, design specifications, product images, usage guides, price, colors, technical characteristics, price and much vital information that can aid a customer in his purchase decision.
When you make your content one that is easily searchable, it will save considerable time for customers because they will have access to timely information when they need it. This is because site usability is increased for users since the links added to your page as well as the architecture of your page will make your product description pages easier to navigate.
When your content is highly searchable, product specifications are arranged in a structured way to make it easy for specific information to be gotten, even through scanning. Major attributes and descriptions of the product are accurately depicted, which saves time.
Product specification has lost its value if it’s not thorough and informative, with every detail that can adequately describe your product. Customers need accurate descriptions and exact specification to have a complete picture of what is being sold to them. Headlines and bullet points can go a long way to increase the visibility of your product specification.
The use of targeted keywords in product specifications can go a long way to sift you out of the sea of competing brands. If you want to save time finding product descriptions as an e-commerce business, be sure to include specific keywords that your customers will be looking for in their search for information.
Don’t fall into the trap of overstuffing keywords. Use them in moderation and in different variations. Strive to be original and speak the language that communicates a message in a way that people can connect to the brand.
Generates More Leads
There is no person that has ever made a purchase decision without engaging in gathering information about the product or service in question. It could be structured or unstructured especially for online purchases. When product content is one that has visibility, it can generate leads for your business.
When your content is highly visible, it gets ranked on the top of search engine results and this will lead to more clicks to your site. According to Rankexecutives.com, 60% of clicks go to the first click. This means brands that aren’t at the top are left to battle with the remaining 40%. Similarly, Lyfemarketing.com discovered that 37% of search engine clicks are usually on the first organic listing they come across. Securing your site will allow you access to numerous visitors who are sure to click on your site.
Traffic to your site is increased through relevant keywords and title tags that are attached to your product content. Through this increased leads, customer data can be generated. This data is very valuable for strategic business decisions that birth winning strategies. Through keyword data and customer information gathered on-site visits, more insight can be gotten into the needs and preferences of customers. Furthermore, more winning keywords with low competition can be used to drive more traffic.
The best way to maximize your business efforts is to make your content one that can be easily found. The cake in the oven is not the one that gets bought but the one displayed in the show glass. In the same vein, it’s important to ensure your content is easy to find, so customers can consume it. This will create value for customers and generate a lead for your business.
Conclusion
Content marketing does not end in simply gaining the trust of customers. Do more work to make your content effective enough to produce consistent inquiries and sales often.
In the words of Brian Clark, “one of the most repeated rules of compelling copy is to stress benefits, not features”. While features are mere description and specification of the physical product, benefits communicate the message properly about what you can do to make life easier for your customers and solve their need. It’s safe to say that features and specification alone won’t work because you need to tap into the emotions of your customers.
The need for quality content can’t that can increase the visibility of your brand can’t be overemphasized. This is because it creates a bond, stronger than the mere act of buying and selling. This line of thought was paraphrased from a quote by Jeff Bullas, “quality content enables you to create a bond with your audience beyond the simplistic purpose of buying and selling”. He couldn’t have said it better. Search engines can do their work when you deliver quality content that is appealing to your customers.
When the information you provide is accurate and important to customers, you give them information that will help them become customers. This will help to increase the trust they have in you and thus, generate quality leads for you. Hence, efforts need to be intensified to ensure that an audience goes beyond scanning and skimming your site to hitting the buy button.
The benefits of making product content searchable outweigh the cost. Cost is reduced per acquisition because clicks from search engines aren’t paid for when your site ranks high. There are many more benefits you are sure to enjoy when you make your product content searchable. After all, higher visibility equals higher sales, increased customer engagement and improved brand image.
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