For most brick and mortar businesses, product location is a vital part of business. A retail store wants to put its best, trendiest, most popular, and most expensive merchandise at the front of the store because the owners know that these are the products that are not only going to lure more customers into the store, but they are also the products that customers most want. Making your products easy to find and showcasing products that you want your customers to buy is essential in ensuring customer satisfaction and guaranteeing a purchase.
Believe it or not, the concept of product location is equally vital for your online business. If you are not categorizing and placing your products appropriately on your website, your customers may feel the same frustration that you felt when you couldn’t find your brands in the grocery store.
If anything, product location plays an even more vital role in the success of your online business than it does in the success of a brick and mortar store. Customers who physically walk into a store are more likely to stick around until they finally find the product they’re looking for. Website users have much less patience; if they can’t find the products they’re looking for quickly, most users will simply leave your site and go somewhere they can find their products with greater ease.
In order to make the most of your SEO campaign, it’s important to maximize the efficiency of your website by making your product locations easy for your users to understand and navigate. Here are just a few tips on how to make the most of your site’s product locations:
Be Specific
Have you ever visited a website and been unable to find a product because it was listed under a category that didn’t make any sense? You probably went through several other categories, looking for the product, only to be disappointed and confused. Disappointment and confusion are two of the last emotions that you want your customers to associate with their experience on your site. Fortunately, these emotions can be alleviated if you make sure that your product categories are specific.
You do not want to list hundreds of products under a category that is general, vague, and unspecific. Chances are that a large, general category will only apply to a few of the products listed on the page. This makes it harder for your customers to find the products that they want, which means that they’re more likely to give up and go elsewhere.
Instead of listing 100 products on a single page, under a single category, try creating subcategories. If you sell party supplies, break up your party favor category into subcategories like “Girls Party Favors,” “Boys Party Favors,” “Dinosaur Party Favors,” etc. You may end up listing a single product in several of your subcategories, but it will help your customers find what they are looking for with greater ease. Ultimately, this will translate into better conversion on your site and greater customer satisfaction, which is likely to lead to more returning customers in the future.
Be Accurate
Imagine going to a party supply website and finding 20 product listings for wrapping paper under the “Piñata” category. That would be confusing, right? If you are trying to find wrapping paper, the “Piñata” category is the last place you would think to look. If your products aren’t being named and categorized correctly, your customers may be unable to find them, which means that they’re not buying.
The solution: when naming your products, be sure to name them correctly. Make sure that the product title accurately depicts the product itself, as this will help customers to find products that fit their needs.
Second, make sure that you sort your products into categories that actually fit your products and accurately convey to the customer which types of products they will find within that category. Don’t sort all of your wrapping paper products into a category called “Cellophane,” as “Cellophane” doesn’t accurately describe the products within the category.
Keep SEO in Mind
As you sort and name your products, consider using relevant keywords in your category and product titles. This will help Google crawlers to determine your site’s relevance. A party supply store that is focusing on the keyword “party favors” may want to consider including this keyword into each of their categories and/or subcategories that include party favor products. It would also be a good move to include this keyword in the product title (and description) of each party favor product sold on the site.
Highlight Your Best Products
Just as a brick and mortar store puts its most popular and valuable items out front, online businesses should consider highlighting their best products in a spot that’s easy to find (like the home page). If you find that your party supply site gets a lot of business from costume rentals, then a good move would be to highlight your costume rentals on your main page. After all, you know that costume rentals are what your customers want. Placing a link to the costume rental section of your site on your homepage will allow many of your customers to jump right to the products they need, eliminating the extra time it takes to find and navigate to the costume rental section on their own. Getting rid of this extra step and allowing your customers to find what they’re looking for with greater ease will enhance the usability of your site, which leads to greater customer satisfaction and higher conversion rates on your site.
As you implement these changes, you will find that your site becomes more user-friendly, consistent, and clean. For an online shopper, these characteristics make your site more trustworthy and reliable. And ultimately, the users attracted to your site through SEO will be more likely to convert into both one-time and long-time customers. Don’t let your customers get frustrated. Optimize your site’s product location techniques and see the difference it makes in your online revenue!
