Obviously, online shoppers can’t try-on, ride, use, measure, or test the products offered on your e-commerce storefront. For some, the convenience and savings of buying online vs. visiting a brick and mortar will diminish if they aren’t exactly sure what to buy.
Sure, you probably have spec sheets, descriptions, and customer reviews for each product, but how effective are those elements at driving traffic to your website? More importantly, is there enough information available on your sales pages to give visitors the confidence to add the items to their cart?
Here are some of the ways online buyer’s guides can grow organic search traffic, avoiding a traffic jam and turning your e-commerce business into a one stop shop!
1. Keep Your Content Fresh
Many companies struggle to invent ideas for blog or social media posts. With search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! consistently adjusting algorithms to rank sites based on regularly updated and compelling content, creating and distributing a product buyer’s guide is a simple way to regularly upload original content. Capitalize on the knowledge of your vendors, sales staff, or product specialists. Transfer their expertise of the products into a blog post, infographic, or white paper download, and you’ll always have consistent buyer’s guide source material.
2. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords.
Buyer’s guides are a less obtrusive method for providing the ranked keywords online shoppers commonly use to find your site. Attempting to cram as many keywords as possible into short product descriptions or specifications on each landing page will only confuse the reader. It will also likely result in keyword oversaturation, a search engine no-no. Spread them out throughout a buyer’s guide, and you’ll have relevant content that is easily digestible as well as search engine friendly.
3. Be a Trusted Advisor.
Neuroscience tells us that many consumers find it easier to buy from an expert. Cost can become a secondary factor if the buyer feels protected with superior product knowledge and application advice. Providing this in advance of an online purchase builds trust between consumer and retailer. However, make sure your buyer’s guides are providing honest, accurate, and appropriate information. You don’t want to get caught selling instead of advising.
4. Less Bounce, More Landing.
We can assume that people who click through to a buyer’s guide for a particular product type have a higher likelihood of actually engaging with what they find for a longer period of time. With bounce rate and session time being a contributing factor to your organic search ranking, providing easy to digest and compelling information on your buyer’s guide is the key to keeping a visitor on your site, increasing the chance of a sale. It’s also helpful to prioritize what they encounter first based on historical sales data, positive reviews, and keyword data.
5. Just Do It.
Once an interested buyer is engaged with your buyer’s guide, create a simple process for ordering by providing product page links or calls to action buttons in your content. Many times for online shoppers, the convenience of finding exactly what they are looking for and making it easy to immediately complete the purchase will prevent them from continuing their search. If it is too difficult to get back to the selling pages or the checkout steps are confusing, they might just bail on your site altogether, resulting in a lost sale.
