How to Optimize Your Product Pages for More Conversions in 8 Simple Steps

The secret to any successful ecommerce business is knowing exactly who your target audience is and what they want. 

Identifying your target audience allows you to ensure every part of your online store, including your product pages, is targeted to their needs. 

Undertake audience and market research to allow you to fully understand how your target audience behaves online and collect key segmenting data such as gender, age, and location. 

This research and data will then allow you to target your product pages accordingly. For example, if you discover that your target audience wants detailed product information before they make a purchase, you know to include this on your product page. 

Similarly, if audience research reveals that your audience likes to read product reviews before they add an item to their online basket, not including reviews on your product page would be a costly design mistake. 

Product descriptions can make or break your ecommerce store. 

Why? Because people want to make informed purchasing decisions when shopping online. 

Product descriptions give you the chance to provide engaging and detailed information about the individual product such as key features, specifications, and tutorials on how to use the item. 

You can also use your product descriptions to provide need-to-know information such as ingredient lists and safety warnings. 

Detailed and SEO-friendly product descriptions will help your product pages to appear in relevant search results, while persuasive language and engaging storytelling can engage customers with your items and convince them to make a purchase. 

The next step in our product page optimization guide is to optimize your product images and videos. 

One of the biggest challenges facing ecommerce store owners is that customers can’t actually see, hold, or feel your products in real life before they make a purchase. 

In order to ensure this doesn’t prevent users from converting into customers, therefore, you should ensure you’re including the highest quality product images and videos. 

Consider showcasing your products from multiple different angles and include close-up shots of specific details in order for customers to see as much of the item as possible. 

While product photographs are ecommerce bread and butter, more and more online stores are including product videos too. 

Videos of your products in use can be a great way to convince users who are unsure about making a purchase to add the item to their cart and checkout. 

The product videos you incorporate can be anything from demonstrating how to use your products to showing the full functionality of the item, just always make sure your product videos are of a high-quality and are short and engaging. 

Find Out More

Selling clothes on your ecommerce store? Take a look at our guide to taking product photos of clothing for expert tips and tricks! 

Ensuring your customers can actually find your product pages is pretty important, in fact, if they can’t, how are they going to be able to make a purchase?

Organizing your products into logical categories and subcategories ensures users can find exactly what they’re looking for. 

When creating category pages, consider adding filtering and advanced search options to allow customers who know exactly what they want to have the best experience. 

If you have a large inventory then product categories are even more important.

For example, if you sell pet supplies you can sort your products into obvious categories and subcategories such as dog food, dog beds, cat toys, cat collars, etc. This means that a customer looking for a new dog bed doesn’t need to waste time searching through pages of cat toys before they find the product they want to purchase. 

Remember to also ensure you optimize your navigation menus for mobile devices too. Opt for a burger menu that users can open and be specific with your product listings and categories to make navigation quick and simple. 

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Take a look at our 10 best practices for website navigation to help you ensure customers can journey through your ecommerce website with ease. 

As part of your product page optimization strategy, streamlining your purchasing process can provide amazing results. 

People are used to shopping online, they know how it works and they often don’t want to waste time going through a lengthy process to complete their purchase. 

Ensuring your purchasing process is streamlined and intuitive will help to keep customers happy and enhance their overall experience of shopping on your online store. 

In fact, if your purchasing process is too long-winded, chances are customers will become frustrated and abandon their carts, opting to make their purchase elsewhere instead. 

Make it easy for customers to see how they add an item to their cart and complete their order while they’re on the product page. You can even provide a quick checkout option for even speedier purchases. 

Consider offering both guest checkout and account creation options to ensure customers can opt for the choice that best suits them. While guest checkout can result in quicker one-time purchases, signing up for an account can come with other longer-term benefits such as special offers. Make sure you communicate this with your customers. 

Try to make sure any form fields are simple – just ask customers for their basic information such as name, contact details, and delivery address. You don’t need to know their favorite color or the name of their pet, so don’t make your checkout forms lengthy for no reason. 

The less friction and hurdles you can add to the process, the more chance there is that the customer will make it to the end and checkout. 

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Once you’ve finished this article, have a read of our checkout page optimization tips too to make sure your checkout process is optimized for conversions.

We all know how useful calls to action (CTAs) are, and that’s especially the case for product pages. 

Decide what the key action is that you want a user to take when they have landed on your product page and how you want to phrase it e.g. “add to cart” or “buy now”. 

Action-oriented phrases such as these encourage users to take action and you’re effectively holding their hand through the buying process, steering them towards completing their purchase. 

When writing your calls to action, make sure they’re not only clear and easy to understand but that they stand out on the page. Use vibrant colors or boxes to ensure your CTA button is separate from the rest of the content on your product page. 

We recommend testing a few different CTA’s for your product pages to see which produces the best results. 

If you want to excel at your product page optimization then incorporating user reviews by adding testimonials and ratings can be a great step. 

Authentic user reviews and ratings can go a long way to convincing users to make a purchase and including them on your product page helps to boost your conversions. 

Encourage users to leave a review on your products through follow-up emails after they have received their purchase. You can even provide them with an incentive such as money off their next order if they leave you a review – just be sure to ask for honest reviews so that you’re not bribing customers for positive feedback. 

Be sure to monitor your reviews and respond to them in a timely and professional manner, even negative ones. If customers can see that you take the time to respond to customer feedback, their perception of your brand will be much more positive than if you simply ignore customers. 

You’re always going to say your products are the best, but hearing from real-life customers can be exactly what potential customers need to push them into making a purchase. 

Find Out More

• Unsure about how to ask customers for reviews? We’ve got you covered with our five key strategies for asking customers for reviews. 
• We also have advice on how to respond to negative reviews because we know this can be difficult!

Product pages are not just a way to showcase your individual product to a customer, they can also be a great way of increasing the value of a user’s session and boosting your sales further. 

Many ecommerce stores will display related or complementary items on product pages in order to encourage customers to keep shopping and add more items to their carts. 

Cross-selling other items on your product pages will help to increase the average order value for an individual customer. For example, if a customer is on a product page for a dining table, you can also showcase the matching dining chairs to encourage the customer to buy both. 

You can also learn how to upsell, which is when you persuade customers to buy a more expensive or upgraded version of the product they’re interested in, and is another common way of increasing order value.

Showcasing related and complementary products on your product pages is a tried and tested product page optimization technique and it works, just make sure the products you recommend are relevant. 

So there we have it, eight simple steps to help you achieve the ultimate product page optimization strategy. 

To recap, the steps are:

1. Understand your target audience
2. Craft compelling product descriptions
3. Optimize product images and videos
4. Implement clear product navigation
5. Streamline the purchasing process
6. Leverage persuasive CTAs
7. Incorporate user reviews
8. Showcase related products 

Now that you’re ready to optimize your product pages, why not take a look at our guide to designing the perfect ecommerce product page for all the best templates and tricks?