SEO Steps for 2013 - What Can You Do With an Hour?

In many ways, 2012 was the year search engine optimization (SEO) really grew up. Google left us with little choice. But we evolved as an industry, striving to build high-quality content and focus on adding as much value as possible for our users, readers, and customers.

There was a lot of pain along the way throughout this growth process, and many are still cleaning up from the aftermath. For example, the gaps in Google’s algorithm have been closed to the point that any quick SEO tactic is likely to be just that -- a short-term fix at best, a potential cause of long-term damage at worst.

If you want to win in 2013, you must commit to a solid long-term strategy. However, that’s not to say you can’t build small wins into your long-term strategy to assist in developing brand strength.

The only real way to beat the well-known online brands is to become one yourself. But just because the moretraditional SEO tactics from previous years are now areas to avoid in 2013, doesn’t mean there aren’t any quick wins out there.

Research and Analysis Wins

1. Make a cup of tea and read through Google’s patents to figure out where they’re going next!
2. Not a fan of tea? Take your client for a beer instead. Find out what else they’re working on outside of your campaign. There’s a good chance you’ll find information that can be of great assistance.
3. Spend time with your dev team. Get to know them and figure out their difficulties and bottlenecks.
4. Build a checklist scorecard of how well you know outreach targets, and map out stages of how you you can get to know them better.
5. Find the top bloggers in your local city or region. Figure out where they hang out so that you can meet them (events, don’t stalk them on the way home).
6. Even better, arrange your own meetup and invite key bloggers and journalists.
7. Run an industry survey to collect data, which can then be used for content production.

Google+ and Authorship Wins

8. Set up Google Authorship for your site, or if you have already, verify that it’s working.
9. Arrange a seminar to demonstrate how your team can link up their Google+ author profiles.
10. Encourage your team to build up their Google+ profiles and share other content.
11. Have a blog? Find orphaned posts from ‘guest bloggers’ and move them under the relevant author profiles where you can map them up - same for ex-staff members.

Events and Sponsorship Wins

12. Find local sports teams and events you can sponsor.
13. Submit a speaker pitch for an industry event.
14. Create a content plan around liveblogging an industry event.

Content Strategy and Planning Wins

15. Be creative - brainstorm new product ideas to make them link-worthy.
16. Acquire a company!
17. Get sued! (Ok, maybe don’t.)
18. Open new content angles by relating your niche to a different topic.
19. Dig into your data - look over old company reports, white papers, etc. for key statistics.
20. Schedule a team brainstorm to develop new content ideas.
21. Share a Google Calendar mapping out your website content plan with auto-send reminders to the people involved with different areas of content creation.
22. Aim to split opinions with your content and promote this to both audiences for a reaction. It doesn’t have to be controversial, just as long as you have no right or wrong answer.

Relationship Building Wins

23. Follow up! Make the effort to stay in touch with key contacts via social, email, phone, and face-to-face.
24. Become friends with key influencers and meet them in person - invite them to lunch or arrange a meetup.
25. Reuse great outreach connections and build on-going relationships.
26. Provide customer testimonials for your software, product, and service providers.
27. Ask influencers to add you to their partner pages.
28. Get your users involved. Build relationships and brand interaction by rewarding loyal fans.
29. Ask your friends and family to link to you if they have personal websites.

Content Production Wins

30. Take photos and make them available under a Creative Commons license.
31. Write topical content about a trend from that day.
32. Interview experts within your niche (ego bait).
33. Craft an exclusive content pitch for a leading authority website.
34. Focus on one piece of great content, instead of four average ones.
35. Develop a content ideation plan for an infographic using data from within your company.
36. Answer common questions asked within your industry. This can be a great method for brainstorming content ideas.
37. Set up Google Alerts for these questions so when these are asked on blogs or forums you can reply with your opinion (and link to your content).
38. Create and syndicate video content to target new audiences.
39. Offer a discount promotion to get people talking, and so they are picked up on promo-code websites.
40. Create a great 404 error page. Your users will love it, and it might get you some links for creativity!

Comment Marketing Wins

41. Make the effort to reply to comments on all of your content (posts on your blog, guest posts, news coverage, etc.) to help build relationships.
42. Find an active forum within your niche to start contributing and building profiles.
43. Find two targeted blogs; comment where you can add value, and subscribe or follow them and their key writers on Twitter.

Local Wins

44. Take photos of your office, or store and upload a minimum of six high-quality photos to help your local listing stand out.
45. Ensure all of your company addresses are registered and up to date on Google+ Local.
46. Design business cards that encourage customers to review your brand on Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp!, etc. Offer them a next-time discount incentive.
47. Create landing pages with local intent. Submit them to Google Local if you have multiple addresses.
48. Take a visit to your local library and dig deep into historical information about your local town or city. You might find a gem that hasn’t been written about online, which is great for picking up local citations and links. Michael Dorausch has some great tips in a local review of Tampa.
49. Create a list of power reviewers within your sector and look to get on their radar.
50. Make sure you’re listed on the key local providers, such as Yell, ThomsonLocal, ReachLocal, etc.

Blogger Outreach Wins

51. Find two of the most authoritative bloggers in your niche and figure out the best way to connect. In all likelihood, they’ve added that to their “About” page.
52. Pick up the phone and speak to top influencers.
53. Hire writers within your niche and leverage their contacts for outreach.
54. Spend your hour carefully crafting a great content pitch and make it personal and original.
55. Give bloggers and journalists a product they can use or test in exchange for a review (use with caution, and make this well-targeted and selective).
56. Write for authority sites within your niche. Build strong relationships and strengthen your reputation by leveraging the audiences of well-respected industry blogs.
57. Get your client to create a company email address for you with their domain so it’s clearer when you’re sending emails out on their behalf.

Penguin and Panda Penalty Review Wins

58. Perform a content performance ratio analysis to figure out how much content you need to clean up.
59. Build a list of top sites you want to remove links from.
60. Clean up your own internal anchor text from over-optimisation.
61. Reduce cross-linking from other sites you own. Link from partner pages, rather than sitewide.
62. Clean up any links from your social profiles and author bios.

On-Site Optimisation Wins

63. Prioritise a list of key actions, and assign responsibilities and deadlines.
64. Install SEO WordPress plugins to optimise your blog.
65. Optimise page title tags. It’s the oldest quick SEO win in the book, but it still works!
66. Test pay-per-click (PPC) ad copy as title/meta description to lift organic click-through rate.
67. Review navigation structure such as breadcrumbs and internal linking.

Productivity Wins

68. Use tools. I could fill another 96 points here, but I suggest discovering which two or three make you more efficient. Then spend the time to really get to know how to use them fully.
69. Start to document your delivery process. This will save you a lot of time in the future when training your team.
70. Run a knowledge share session with your internal team and/or client. Try to make sure they know what you do, then you don’t have to do it all yourself!
71. Learn how to get things done. Watching this video takes 45 minutes -- you’ve still got 15 minutes left. So you’re instantly more productive!

Link Removal Wins

72. Analyse your backlinks to find off-topic, poor anchor text links.
73. Analyse the market to find the percentage of exact-match anchor text for key competitors.
74. Clean up any obvious paid or over-optimised links.

Link Reclamation Wins

75. Google Operator Query “Brand Name” “Key Person Within Organisation Name.” Then ask to be credited with a link within article if not already given.
76. Google Image search for your infographics or photos. Ask for link credits where these are not provided.
77. Find broken links pointing out of site with this tool. This is another easy fix to clean up and makes your site look good.

Competitive Analysis Wins

78. Research competitors’ top pages in OpenSiteExplorer to get content ideas.
79. Review brand traffic history in analytics to measure the impact of offline brand signals.
80. Think of creative ways you can get more people searching for your brand by joining up with offline advertising.

Public Relations Wins

81. Bring your PR and social teams together to understand what they are doing and how they can help each other by working more closely together.
82. Sign up for PR service HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to become a link source for news articles.
83. Build a list of key journalists and media contacts you want to influence.
84. Enter relevant industry and local awards competitions.
85. Brainstorm ideas to connect offline with online tactics. How can you get more people searching for you (sending brand signals to Google)?

Technical Wins

86. Create and submit an XML Sitemap to keep this up to date in Google Webmaster Tools.
87. Check how your website displays on mobile and tablet devices, and plan to create platform-specific sites if you don’t already have them.
88. Fix duplicate content homepage: www vs non-www.
89. Check for external duplicate content.
90. Make sure the geo-targeting for your international site is set up correctly in Google Webmaster Tools.
91. Optimise your site for mobile. Do it in less than an hour with a plugin.

Analytics and Measurement Wins

92. Start developing a strategy around your top 20 PPC spend/converting keywords.
93. Find your top converting landing pages. Optimise them and update the content to attract new links.
94. Ensure all your analytic goals are in place to measure both micro and macro conversions so you can report on revenue, leads, and ROI to your boss and/or client.
95. Talk to your clients and learn about their main business.
96. Finally...spend your hour writing a report making a business case for the value of SEO to get extra resources allocated. Because really -- an hour's just not enough!

by kevingibbons 
Source : SEOmoz Blog

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Internet Advertising Timeline - A Breif History of Online Advertising

Today, marketers barely remember what it was like to do print ads, traditional press releases, and TV/radio spots. Internet advertising took stale and generic ads and turned them into dynamic, extremely targeted messages.

Before banner ads and AdWords caught on like wildfire, the Internet as an information database transitioned into a full-blown marketplace. The most notable example of an industry leader that caused a paradigm shift for businesses was eBay.com. All of a sudden, brick-and-mortar establishments seemed too involved when consumers could simply do their shopping and selling from home. People could run their businesses from the comforts of a clunky desktop computer with the help of a dial-up modem, free AOL trial, scanner, and half-decent camera (film, probably). Buying and selling merchandise across the web got the world’s attention and people began to realize the potential of the World Wide Web. Then, in walks the behemoth with a mission to catalog every piece of data in the world and make a pretty penny through search advertising: Google.

Once people became comfortable with shopping on the Internet, there was a rush of companies that wanted a piece of the market and they all began building websites and advertising online. The dot com boom got people thinking they struck gold. Marketers scrambled to adapt during the first dot com boom only to quickly be shocked with the proceeding bust. The dust settled, lessons were learned, and Google started taking over the world with their advertising model. Since they were cataloging all of the world’s information, why not charge advertisers to present relevant ads alongside that data they were providing for free?

Internet Advertising Timeline

1994 – Pay per click (PPC) was created to allow advertisers to pay only for the ads that users actually interacted with. This was the beginning of modern marketing techniques: paying only for performance rather than pushing ads out to millions of people without any guarantee.

1994/1996 – CDNow.com launched the first affiliate marketing model and later Amazon.com perfected the model and still depends on affiliates for driving revenue today.

1998 – Google had indexed 60 million pages with their search algorithm and began ranking them based on back links and keywords.

Standardization of Banner Ad sizes

1998 – Hotwire.com sold banner ad space to Zima and AT&T. The 30% click-through rate showed marketers that it was a viable new advertising channel with strong ROI.

1999 – The Internet advertising industry reached $2 billion.

2000 – Google begins selling ads related to the Internet user’s search term, enabling extremely targeted advertising for the first time.

2001 – The dot com bust wiped out almost all Internet-based companies, notably Pets.com. Amazon.com made it through barely alive and Google depended on their search algorithm and unique advertising model to continue breathing.  Advertise.com is also born.

Remember pop-ups?

2001-2003 – Pop-up ads took over as the most effective online advertising and quickly began annoying users. Thankfully, Opera created the pop-up blocker and effectively wiped out these ads as quickly as they popped up.

2005 – Video advertising gave marketers a way to deliver extremely dynamic ads on the web. Video ads weren’t just for TV anymore.

2005 – DoubleClick was created before the dot com boom and bust, but 2005 saw them develop into the leading behavioral targeting ad inventory company. They collected data on all Internet users through browser cookies and used that information to deliver targeted ads based on actions the user previously took across the web. Now when you book that hotel in Cabo San Lucas, advertisements for flights to Mexico will fill your computer screen.

2007 – $10 billion was spent on advertising on websites, 14% of all ad spending. Web 2.0 officially took over as a solid advertising channel.

2009 – Social media became the new hot topic and advertisers quickly learned that they can put their messages in front of users while the person is chatting, sharing photos, and updating their Facebook wall with how their day is going.

Today – Now the goal of Internet advertisers is to deliver their message as discreetly as possible and make the message interesting enough that the user would actually enjoy interacting with it.

Source : Advertise.com Blog

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The 3 Key Areas About Your Paid Search Program

The smartest way to begin 2013 might well be to make a careful review of paid search performance and practices in 2012. If your company spends closer to 8 figures than 6 on paid search annually it is well worth the time of the CMO to take a deep dive here.

Evaluating an enterprise paid search program can seem a daunting task. Complexity and scale can lead senior marketing leadership to make one of four mistakes: allow paid search managers to evaluate themselves; allow a vendor seeking to win your business to evaluate your team’s performance; hire a consultant who knows little about paid search to do the evaluation; or, worst of all, evaluate performance against aspirational goals set by others. For obvious reasons, none of these yield a fair assessment of how paid search performed against opportunity.

Instead, CMOs and marketing directors should take the bull by the horns. The answers to 28 questions in 3 key areas can allow the marketing leadership to gain a better understanding of paid search, better understand the challenges and opportunities the channel presents, and get a clear picture of how well her/his team performed against that competitive landscape.

Stage 1: Goal Review

Before reviewing any data, it is important to get a clear understanding of what paid search is expected to do for your organization. This isn’t a question of what the budget or forecast was, it is much more fundamental than that. It is often remarkable how little thought goes into these questions. Deeply probing what we’re trying to accomplish and how we measure our performance against those objectives is a critical first step.

1. What do we seek to achieve through paid search advertising? Is the goal to make money in the immediate term, short term, or long term? Is it a branding exercise? Some hybrid?
2. Have we included in our goal setting some notion of long term value of a customer? Should we?
3. Do we correctly separate performance of our brand keywords from competitive non-brand keywords? (This is a pass/fail question. Blended performance goals make no sense.)
4. Have those goals changed over time? Since last year? During the course of the year? Why did the goals change?
5. What metrics do we use to know whether we are achieving our goal? Is it a single success metric? If so, is that metric as closely tied to value as it can be?
   • In ecommerce: why use orders as a metric instead of sales, and why use sales instead of margin?
   • If leads are the success metric, do we assess the value of those leads? Do the values vary by keyword, geography or device? Do we use those differences in our bidding?
6. How do we measure offline success driven by paid search? If we cannot measure directly, why can we not estimate it?
7. Are there other success metrics we should use? Should not a “get directions” click or click to call on a smartphone count as some type of success?
8. How do we address the issue of multiple paid search clicks preceding a successful visit? Do we parse credit appropriately?
9. As a marketing team, how do we think about multiple marketing interactions preceding a successful visit (online or off)? Do we parse credit between channels? Should we?
10. Do all of our business units follow the same practices? Is paid search managed by different teams within the organization? Does that make sense?
11. If applicable, how do we manage international search? Do we have language skills internally to do this well? Do we advertise on Yandex (Russia) or Baidu (China)? How do we measure success of those efforts?

Stage 2: Performance Review

How did we do against the goals we pursued? Whether the goals and metrics were the right ones, whether they changed during the course of the year rightly or wrongly, the question here should be how did the paid search program do against the goals they sought? Performance shouldn’t be faulted for achieving the wrong goal.

Again, we should look at this not as a function of performance against a forecast or budget, but against opportunity. Results can be above or below forecast for reasons relating to forecasting methods and foibles, not performance. The numbers and responses in this section, and the responses in Stage 3 will get us what we want.

1. Show me aggregated paid search performance data by month splitting out brand and non-brand.* If there are apparent deviations between the performance and the goals month-to-month, what is the explanation for those deviations? If non-brand efficiency metrics vary significantly, why would we as an organization be willing to invest more in marketing some times than we are other times?*If the goal was to achieve an aggregated performance efficiency we can’t fault the performance of non-brand advertising in isolation, but we should at least see it clearly and understand what it means. The non-brand performance is the only piece over which the paid search team has meaningful control, so that data is what must be used to evaluate performance.
2. Show me the Year-Over-Year non-brand performance by month. What factors drove the changes year to year?
3. Show me the trend in the fraction of total website success metrics driven by paid search. Split this out by brand and non-brand as well. Why is it trending up or down? What does that mean for the business? Does that say anything about performance?
4. Show me non-brand performance data by month split out by search engine. If there are differences in marketing efficiency, what is the explanation?
5. Show me Google-only performance over 2012QX {Marketing leader picks the X} broken out by category (campaign might be a decent proxy). Do the efficiency differences make sense?
6. For a different quarter show me Google performance data by Keyword. Sort this data by advertising cost descending. Understanding that there is statistical noise involved, does the KW level performance look reasonably coherent? Do major differences in performance have a sensible explanation?
7. Bucket this list of keywords by ranges of click volume so that there are roughly an equal number of clicks in each of 5 buckets ranging from the highest traffic terms to the lowest traffic terms. Do any performance differences between these buckets have a reasonable explanation?

There are reasonable explanations for many types of anomalies. The point of this exercise is to gain a deeper understanding of the program’s performance against goals, and to see how the paid search team answers hard questions about performance. If the answers make sense, great. If the answers smell fishy, they probably are.

Stage 3: Practice Review

Even if the performance numbers, trends and answers to the questions in stage 2 look good and sound reasonable, it is impossible to tell whether the program is truly optimized without scrutinizing the team’s practices as well. Efficient numbers could still reflect a poorly built program covered up with decent bid management.

1. How many distinct keywords are active in our Google account? Our Bing Account? Why are those different numbers? How many distinct keywords have we tried? Why have we not tried more? Why do we turn off keywords? Couldn’t a case be made that there are no bad keywords, only bad bids? Looking through the keyword-level data in #6 above you might notice some holes; ask about them specifically and expect a reasoned response.
2. What do we do to reduce poor quality traffic? The answer should include references to match type layers, negatives, and syndication partner treatments. Go into the account with the paid search manager and drill into a campaign and adgroups. Are there obvious negative phrases that are missing? Is the ad copy associated with each adgroup compelling but also accurately reflective of your brand? Do you see different matchtypes running for the same keyword? If so, is more being bid for the exact match traffic than broad match? If so, that’s probably a good sign, if not, it’s probably a bad sign, but another good avenue to question.
3. While you’re in the account, navigate to a different campaign and look through the ad copy and landing page assignments. Do the keyword, copy and landing pages fit together? The landing page should reflect the specificity of the user’s query — no deeper, no shallower.
4. Show me some examples of copy tests we’ve run in the last year. What lessons did we draw from them? What copy tests had the biggest impact on performance? Do we change copy without testing? Has that proved to be valuable? What fraction of your time goes into ad copy versus other tasks? Does that balance make sense?
5. Do we split out campaigns by device? {Best case three separate campaigns for desktop, tablet and smartphone. Acceptable case and often just as good, two campaigns: desktop + tablet in one and smartphone in the other. Worst case is two campaigns desktop in one, tablet + smartphone in the other.} Do we have different ad copy for different devices? Do we have different objectives for different devices? Should we?
6. Do we split out campaigns by geography? Should we?
7. What other types of segmentation do we do to better target bids and copy?
8. How do we set bids? {If the response involves ‘trying to find the right position’ it’s time to find a new manager.} How often do we adjust bids? Are we adjusting based on time of day and day of week? Do we have mechanisms in place to anticipate seasonal flux? Do we make use of bid simulator data to understand the cost/benefit tradeoffs of different bids?
9. Do we make use of all the available advertising vehicles and options associated with search these days? Are we using:
   • Product Listing Ads (mostly an ecommerce option)?
   • Dynamic Search Ads?
   • Sitelinks?
   • Seller Ratings (if applicable)?
   • Search Retargeting? {This one is new but really important.}
10. How do you prioritize activities? Do you spend most of your time on the highest leverage activities? If not, what keeps you from doing that? The answer might be that task lists from on high or demands from other constituencies in the company prevent the team from using its human resources wisely. If so, that’s important to understand, and address.

Conclusion:

This review process does not require the reviewer to have deep knowledge of paid search, the reviewer simply needs to have common sense, and a good nose for BS. Paid search makes sense when done well. Data that doesn’t make sense combined with answers that don’t make sense should raise big red flags about the health of the program.

If the practices sound right, the data makes sense given the goals and constraints placed on the team, and the team has smart, rational make-sense answers for anomalies then the team is doing its job well against the opportunity available. The right goals combined with the right practices, execution and technology will produce the best data possible.

May 2013 bring you the best results from paid search ever!

By George Michie

Source : 

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Facebook Exchange (FBX) - Its Opportunities

Welcome to 2013 folks, the year that programmatic marketing and big data will dominate the thoughts of smart marketers, now with the additive known as FBX, or the Facebook Exchange. Anything this big and new is bound to cause disruption, and therefore opportunity, and so let’s look at how you can take advantage of it.

What Is The Facebook Exchange (FBX)?

In some ways, FBX is another media exchange like the GDN, AdMeld, RightMedia etc., an open marketplace where display media ads are bought and sold using RTB (Real Time Bidding).

As opposed to many different domains being aggregated together in one place, the FBX offers inventory from Facebook only.

Unlike Facebook Marketplace ads that are bought on a CPC basis and utilize Facebook user profile data, FBX is bought on a dynamic CPM basis, and the buyer must bring their own data to the decision rather than use Facebook data.

Search marketers will be very familiar with the auction process as it is a second price environment, just like AdWords.

Where Is The Money Coming From Today?

Given that FBX doesn’t offer data for targeting purposes, the first money into the pot has been from the retargeting companies. They can easily use the pixels they have in place for their clients retargeting campaigns and extend that buy onto FBX. And this is happening a lot, but many other companies are following and this will dilute the retargeting dominance in the future.

Is This For Search Marketers Or Display Planners?

Well, in many ways both – think of FBX as an equal opportunity media source.

When Facebook Marketplace ads began, it was the media planners that seized the early opportunity; but, as the buying model shifted from CPM to CPC, search marketers stepped up and stole the show.

Search marketers built the better tools and had the more relevant experience and quickly put their display colleagues to shame. I was running a global display media team when this happened, and I have to reluctantly admit I saw the budget disappear from under my nose before I realized it!

The difference with FBX, though, is that you need to access the inventory through a DSP, or a company that uses DSP technology. We have discussed previously in this column about how a real-time CPM buy seems to scare off the search marketers, and so perhaps FBX is the media buyers revenge?

Search Retargeting On FBX

When we created the idea of search retargeting at Chango, it was the first time that display media and search marketing truly overlapped. Up until then, we, as an industry, were guilty of propagating the idea that somehow search + display was this magical 1+1=3 model, without really ever having more than anecdotal data.

Search retargeting, though, took that wonderful intent signal and combined it with the scale and affordability of display, and finally delivered on the promise. Now, as one of the ad exchange partners, our search data can be paired with Facebook. For us media and data geeks, that’s more than a little cool!

For the search marketer, that means that perhaps they can win on this battleground, and make the case that it is search data providing the smarts, and FBX, the reach. I certainly think that can be the case; but, given that most search retargeting is still bought as media and not search, I do wonder.

Does FBX Matter? Could I Not Just Ignore It For Now?!

Nope, sorry! Unlike the introduction of just another media exchange, FBX potentially adds 25% to the real-time media available, and results are showing that consumers are converting quicker, with fewer impressions, and at a considerably lower CPM than elsewhere. It kind of has everything going for it right now.

There are a number of ways to take advantage of it. I would advise marketers to start in two ways. First, look at your site retargeting programs and extend them on to FBX – with the media price alone, you will increase the efficiency. And secondly, add prospecting to the mix by excluding your existing site visitors from the buy, and finding new individuals using search data.

About The Author: Dax Hamman 
Source : http://searchengineland.com/

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Optimization Strategies For Product Pages - Increase Conversion

Many business owners rely on content to push the customer through the sales process. There is no doubt that the content of the site is strategically important to convincing the customer to buy. But beyond the content, there is the site itself. While the content may be getting the message across, does the site help or prohibit customers from moving forward through the buying process?

Image credit

Shoppers come to a website not only with an intention to buy something (clearly the most desired end action from the site owner perspective), but to also learn, research and compare what you offer against what your competitors offer.

When landing on a product page – either via internal site navigation or external site search – shoppers need to have their informational needs met before they’ll even consider pulling the trigger on a purchase.

This is where your product pages come in. Not only can your product pages provide this information, they can also serve to help buyers find relevant pricing information, delivery costs, warranty and/or return policies, and a whole lot more.

Effective product pages are able to satisfy the various needs of each of your visitors. Raw product information isn’t enough! Your product pages must be designed with usability and conversions in mind. Effective product pages convert visitors on an intellectual and emotional level (content) as well as on a sub-conscious level (usability).

Here are 11 product page conversion optimization tips that can help you turn your product pages into your best sales staff.

Keep Your Product Page Layout Consistent

Try to maintain as much visual continuity from one product page to the next. Your content management system should use a single (or very similar) template(s).

Images, product descriptions, specifications and pricing should all be in the same place for the shopper who jumps from product page to product page. This consistency eliminates the need to re-orient themselves with each product page and provides the ability to compare information much more easily.

Provide A Printer-Friendly Page

Not every shopper is ready to buy. Some will want to print out the product information, either for review later or for someone else’s review. Ensuring your product pages are printer friendly allow for your product information to be printed, saved and passed on in a format that is easy to read, compare and perhaps even make notes on.

Below is an example of non printer-friendly page. I’ve circled in red all the things that are not needed on the printed page.

This, and all printer-friendly pages, should be stripped of unnecessary navigation elements, including linked breadcrumbs and links to other content. In case you weren’t sure, nobody can click navigation links on a printed page. I’ve tried.

You also want to ensure all the relevant information prints legibly. Consider font style, font size and information placement on the printed page. Once you strip out all the unnecessary stuff, there is room to ensure the remaining content is plenty legible.

Have Your Contact Information Available

Ideally, we want our product pages to close the sale, but that can’t always be the case. Sometimes, a shopper has a question that hasn’t been answered on the website, and providing a way for them to get that question answered is critical to their completing the purchase.

Understandably, displaying contact information will increase the number of emails and calls for questions that have been answered on the site, but the risk is losing the customer altogether. They are contacting you because they either were unable to find the information or needed additional clarification. Without the ability to get in touch with someone who can help them, the odds of getting the sale diminishes.

Write Robust Product Descriptions

Each product should contain a unique product summary, overview or description. This information is the crux of what the product is, does and will accomplish for the buyer. It’s the “meat” of the product page and is what will (or won’t) convince the shopper that this is the product they want or need. Use this space to address the emotional needs as well as the “what’s in it for me” question.

Include Detailed Product Information

In addition to your product information, you also want to include detailed information on the product’s features, specifications and benefits. If some of these features require more information, provide links to pages that have more details on each feature. Include as much information here as possible, so as not to force the visitor to leave the page unless absolutely warranted.

Use High-Resolution Images

Images are extremely important for helping shoppers get a greater understanding and appreciation of what they are (or may be) purchasing. And with monitor quality improving rapidly, you should use only high-res images for each of your products.

There isn’t a lot of lost with the low quality image on the right above; however, it’s enough to make the eye have to work harder. When low-quality images are used, the visitor is left with a low-quality impression of your products. Better images improve the perceived value of what you offer.

Add Enhanced Image Views

Sometimes, one image isn’t enough for the shopper to get the full appreciation for the product. Adding additional images and image enhancements allow the shopper to see your product in a more interactive format. Consider adding images of the product from various angles, in use, in storage, zoomed in, in a video or or even just a larger view option.

These enhanced image views gives the shopper a greater appreciation for the product that they cannot yet hold in their hand, and this can often be a defining factor in being able to make a decision to buy.

Incorporate Product Comparisons

Whenever possible, incorporate the ability to compare your products side by side, showing varying features and benefits of each. This comparison helps reassure shoppers that it’s the right product for them, which in turn reduces the likelihood of a product return. Side-by-side product comparisons emulate an in-store benefit that shoppers don’t often get online.

Prominently Display Pricing Information

All product pricing information must be displayed in an obvious place on the product pages. For most shoppers, the quality and value of a product has no meaning until they can affix a price to it.

Don’t hide your pricing information or tell people to “call for more information” unless it’s absolutely impossible to put a finished price on your products. Even still, a “starting at” pricing can often help provide a baseline of expectations, eliminating calls and questions from shoppers who will never be your customers.

Provide International Pricing Options

If you sell products outside your home country, it’s a good idea to including pricing in different currencies. This can be as easy as allowing the shopper to select their own currency and having the calculations made on the fly. If you’re unable to provide different currency prices on the site, link to a currency conversion site, allowing your shoppers to make the conversions easily on their own.

Calls To Action

Finally – and most importantly – every product page absolutely must have at least one (or more) calls to action. The single most important action a user can take is to “buy now,” but other actions can be used as needed. These can be (but are not limited to): “purchase now,” “add to cart,” “save for later,” “add to wish list,” “compare” and “print.”

Each of these calls to action has a specific purpose and can keep the visitor engaged in the site without forcing them to purchase or leave. Don’t overload your shoppers with options, but only include those that you feel will be most valuable to them.

The two primary roles of your product pages are to inform and to sell. Generally, you won’t get the sale unless the page provides adequate information. The more complete the information, the more likely that the page will become a “top seller.”

Shoppers that are well informed are more likely to not only complete their purchase, but also to make the best purchase possible and then return later to do it all over again.

Quick sales can turn into sale headaches that convert a profit to a loss. But giving visitors the information they need steers them to the right product and helps them make an informed purchase – creating profits now and hopefully for years to come.

By Stoney deGeyter
Source : http://searchengineland.com/

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