A landing page is the first page that someone arrives on your site. Now if you’ve got a website that sells products or services online, quite often these landing pages are your product pages themselves. On an ecommerce website, you have lots of different types of pages. You have information pages. You have your home page. You have category pages, which list the various different products and you will have the product pages themselves.
So what is it that makes a good landing page for products? Well, there are certain basics.
The first, the starting point is the photography. You should have a really good photo of the products so that people can really see it in fine detail and ideally zoom in so they can really have a good close look. So you need to have professional photography and high resolution photos with the functionality that people can click and zoom in, particularly on certain types of products, clothing for example, and electronics. So people can really see the product in great detail. Ideally, you would have several photos. You want to basically give people as much of the experience of physically holding and touching and seeing the property first-hand as you can on the web.
So photography is very important. You need to have clear pricing so that the price is clear and it’s easy to understand. You want to have a clear, bold call to action. You don’t want people hunting around, trying to find the “Add to Cart” button or the checkout button. It needs to be big and clear and obvious.
If there are options that come with your product, those need to be clear and they need to be easy to use. So you don’t want to give people too many options. But you also want to give enough flexibility. So things like colour choices, size options, delivery options, etc., those should be very clear and very easy to use.
You also want to make sure on your product landing pages that there are certain basic pieces of information that are clear and easy to see at a glance without having to read through the description to get them. So that might include things like size or dimensions, technical information, whether it’s in stock or not, expected delivery time, that type of thing. Of course there should also be some kind of summary description.
Now all of those things, the description, the call to action, the photo or photography, the basic information, all that information should be above the fold. In other words, you should not have to scroll down to get any of that information. It should all be visible.
Now, the problem with a lot of product landing pages is that is where it stops, which is fine for some people. But there’s a lot of people, when shopping online, that really want to do their research and do their homework and not just about price. They want to really understand the product.
So where you will increase your conversion rates is by having further more detailed information as people scroll down the page. So you might want to have a much more in-depth and thorough description. A short summary description that appears above the fold and then a much more in-depth description.
You might want to include a Q and A and have the ability for people to ask questions, almost like a forum style, that you can then answer or you might want to have a frequently-asked-questions section that answers the questions that most people ask about that particular product.
It is really good to have some kind of reviews section or a testimonial section. People often look for reviews now when making product purchases. So they can live on your website or they could be pulled in via a third party site, someone like Trustpilot, Feefo, someone like that, so that people can see it. This product has been rated 4.5 stars out of 5 and here are some comments from people that have bought it before. There could be alternative choices to the products, which is a really good one. If people are perhaps unconvinced whether this particular version is the right product for them, you could give them three or four choices of similar products from your site that they might also want to consider.
Now that should be towards the very end of the page because ideally you want people to make a decision and purchase the product that they’re on. But giving that choice and helping people browse around the other related products is a very good way of doing it. But then with related products comes add-ons. So when buying a box of chocolates, you might want to give people the option of having an add-on to add a greeting card or to have the box of chocolates gift-wrapped. Like the order options, they should be very clear and very easy to use and inviting, attractive, because those things can significantly increase the average order value of your site.
One further thing to consider in terms of the extra information that you want to give people is video. So video is massively underused in ecommerce websites and it’s an area of great potential. It could be something that differentiates your site from your competitors. The video, if you’re selling clothing, you could have a catwalk video, showing models actually wearing the item in question and showing how it would look with a more complete wardrobe. If you have a technical product, you could have a video of someone showing how to use it and how it works. You could have a video of someone opening the box with the product, taking it out and actually reviewing the product.
So those types of videos would make a big, big difference to the success of your product landing page.
Overall, the key thing is you want to be able to anticipate the reasons why people might not purchase the products and answer those objections. You want to give people confidence, give people trust, make sure people feel there’s no risk. Make it seem easy. All of those things reduce the resistance. At the same time, you want to make your product appear as attractive and valuable as possible. You want to sell the benefits in the description and in the copy and in the video. Also you want to help people make the right purchasing decision for them, understanding that people are not necessarily experts in your products and services and sometimes people need more information, sizing guides, how-to guides, etc., that they can read.
So one very good thing to think about is having a product-by-product comparison chart, so that people can evaluate a product like by like, and see which one is the better one to meet their particular needs. Those things help people make a purchasing decision.
Now there are a couple of technical bits that I will include as well because a good product landing page should also have SEO built into it. One thing to consider is the URL structure. What is the URL? It is the domain name of that particular page, it should include the product name and the product name itself should be in a way that someone would search for it.
So rather than calling it “product 314,” you want to call it “red widget” if it’s a red widget because that’s how people would search for it and the URL of the page should be yourwebsite.com/redwidget. Then you also want to make sure there’s a unique page title that has been written for that page. That’s a unique Meta description written for that page so that if Google is looking at the page, you can see that if someone is searching for a red widget, this page is highly relevant and the title and description explain what the product is and what it’s about in brief. So that if someone saw it in Google, they would understand it and want to click on and read more about it.
Another final factor to consider from an SEO perspective – and this is a common one with ecommerce websites – is when you have products that appear in more than one category, you end up with what are effectively duplicated pages and that can be a problem. Those duplicated pages can end up competing with each other resulting in none of them doing as well as they could. You can do something called “canonicalization” which is when you tell Google which one of those three versions of the page is the primary one and it lets Google know that those other two versions are basically the same page.
I hope this is useful for all of you that have an ecommerce website or are considering an ecommerce website. Of course all of these tips, they are just as relevant if you have a product landing page that is not ecommerce. You still want to go into that same level of information, answer people’s questions, be thorough with it, because then you win those people that want that further information. If you only provide the basics, then you will be cutting the conversion rate significantly! For future questions, please send them to podcast@jdrgroup.co.uk.