When you sell a product online, you need to consider its story. Now this won’t be a fairy tale “once upon a time...” narrative but your product content is the story you’ll tell a customer about what your product is and why they should buy it.

Good product content is about maximising visibility and conversion rates. It’s super important - the same content will be used to represent your item across several product list pages and to return results on a search engine.

Ultimately, you only have one opportunity to get it right.

It’s important that you offer varying forms of product content to ensure yours ‘speaks’ to your customers, otherwise you risk losing them to your countless competitors.

So, where do we start? Let’s think of the journey a customer will take from first interacting with a product on a site to the point of purchase. Let’s say we sell table lamps on a very popular third party eCommerce store.

A customer on the site is browsing the ‘lighting’ category and our product is somewhere amongst the hundreds of results available. But how do we make sure they choose our product?

Well, this is where product content comes in. On the category page, a shopper is usually met with three things: title, price and image.

First up is the product title. Wherever it appears, it makes clear what the product actually is, and also differentiates it from its competitors. It should include a few key features, like the product’s make and model, to increase visibility both on- and off-site.

As it’s one of the primary ways that on-site search locates the right pages for customer search queries, it’s important to align the title with the language customers use on that site.

Product titles also have a great effect on SEO. They’re partly how results are generated on search engines, so if they aren’t optimised you risk losing traffic.

And of course, there’s price. A customer won’t click on something they can’t afford, so clearly display the current price, as well as any promotions or discounts available. Equally, if the product can be bought as part of a bundle, make sure that this is made clear.

Last but by no means least: product image. One of the few pieces of visual product content, it’s crucial to utilise this well. Consider how customers use images. They may want to zoom in and zoom out to better gauge the size of a product, or see examples of it ‘in-scale’. Thinking from a shopper’s perspective is a good way to ensure your image - or images - are suitable.

Images are the first thing our eyes are drawn to while shopping, so they’re a key opportunity for customers to see whether an item is relevant to their needs.

On the category page, we’re met with primary images - a customer’s first visual impression of a product. They need to be clear, high-resolution and ultimately convince customers this is what they’re looking for.

Don’t be afraid to test different versions to see which leads to a higher click-through rate. Use this data to decide which images should be used for the category page and what alternatively works on the product detail page.

The product detail page is where we get the opportunity to give the customer a bit more information about our product. Here, additional forms of product imagery come in - perhaps a video, different angles of the product and the choice to see it in various settings. Customers need to be able to picture owning the product, otherwise they’re unlikely to purchase it.

Next, let’s consider the product description.

This shouldn’t be a chunk of text but should highlight features of the product at a glance.

Structuring product descriptions this way has been found to increase user engagement, and bullet points are a great way to achieve this.

Product attributes are features such as product dimensions, materials and colours. These are very important, as they’re used to generate filters on product list pages. When attributes are inaccurate or key parts are missing, products might not appear when filters are used to find items on a site.

You won’t always know if there are gaps in your attribute data, so ensure that you keep an eye on customer feedback and queries about your products. If customers frequently ask questions about a certain product, it’s possible that your attribute data needs work.

Product variant options are often displayed alongside the primary image on both the category and product detail pages. If our product comes in different colours and sizes, it’s important to make this clear. This keeps customers aware of which items are in stock and, depending on what variant is chosen, the product content should update accordingly.

Test different ways of displaying product description, attributes and variants and examine how these influence customer engagement and conversions. To make changes like this for our lamp, we’d need to reach out to the eCommerce store where it’s listed. But regardless of whether you’re using a retail partner’s site, or it’s your own, it’s important to stay aware of how your product content could be improved.

Product Content for eCommerce