Once your small business website is up and running, and you’ve started to build a great customer base, it’s important to regularly review and refresh your online presence to keep it up to date.
Product pages are one of the easiest parts of a website to forget about, and yet they are some of the most important. These pages are where your customer will be finally convinced to buy what they need, so each page should work as hard as possible to encourage your audience to purchase.
To help you, here are our five things to check on your product pages to help keep them fresh.
If you don’t tell customers what you’re selling right now, they won’t buy it from you. You could have the most amazing products in store, but if you don’t tell them about it online they’re unlikely to know about them.
On the other hand, if you’re listing goods or services that you no longer stock or offer, you’ll be wasting your customer’s time and irritating them in the process. Go through your product pages with a fine-toothed comb and get rid of any products you don’t stock, and make a note of any new product pages you need to add.
Vague, misleading or poor descriptions will all stop a customer from buying your product; you wouldn’t just buy a ‘car’ from a showroom, you’d want to buy a ‘four wheel drive, power assist car’.
Make sure your product descriptions are as clear, concise and as accurate as possible. This includes having measurements where appropriate and unique design features. You should also clearly mention how the colour of a product can look different on different monitors, as this is a common problem when buying online.
Good product photography can also dramatically enhance the likelihood of a customer buying from you. Professional photography is a good investment: get photographs of different angles and close-ups, as well as images of the product ‘in situ’ if appropriate.
As well as encouraging your customer to buy from you, it’s important to make visiting your website a pleasant experience (and one they’ll want to repeat). When you’re reviewing your product pages, check they’re user-friendly, readable, clear, well-designed and functional. This is particularly important for mobile visitors, so check your website on a smartphone as well as a desktop – more on this below.
A good customer experience should include a strong indication of what you want the customer to do after they’ve visited your product page. If you want them to buy the product, there should be a clear button saying “Buy now” or “Add to basket”. If you want them to call you for a quote, make your phone number is clear. If you want them to visit your store, tell them!
Although it’s not specific to product pages, having a mobile-friendly website is very important. In 2015, internet use from mobile devices (like smartphones) was higher than internet use from desktop computers for the very first time (Comscore, 2015). Google also has a new function which means that mobile-friendly websites are more likely to be shown when a customer searches for information from a mobile than those websites which aren’t mobile-friendly.
This information shows how important it is to think ‘mobile first’ when it comes to your website. Slow loading time, large images and text that’s too small are all very frustrating for a customer using a small screen.
For more help on this, read this article:
Once you’ve updated your product descriptions and images, and improved your website for mobile visitors, the final question to ask yourself is: Could this page be even better?
There are always new ways to improve your website and your customer’s experience, from adding a ‘click to call’ button to encouraging customer reviews. You can use Google Analytics to measure visits to your website, where they come from and what people do while they are there. Use this information to help improve each web page so they’re all working as effectively as possible. You can read more about using Google Analytics for your business in our guide.
Asking yourself these five questions will take time – but it could make huge improvements to your product pages, helping you gain more customers and more sales.
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