Buying and selling in the digital world happens at the click of the mouse- upload image, buyer sees the listing, and he clicks to purchase; voila! The deal is sealed. If only it all were that simple. Right?
As a seller trying to catch the fickle customer’s attention on crowded online store fronts, there is a lot that one has to take care of. The most important task is to ensure your product is what the customer finds every time he is looking to make that purchase. To ensure this happens, what you need is effective product listing.
The key to making a sale online is a good product listing. In general a basic product listing involves the following:
Apart from these, a good listing can be made more engaging and attention seeking with images, formatting and upgrades.
The most important of all these is however the Product title. Both from the point of view of giving out the right information to the buyer, as well as for optimizing your SEO, a good product title is of huge importance.
Here comes the idea of PLA or Product Listing Ads, the latest frontier of SEO and search marketing that is changing the way a user ends up discovering your products in the online marketplace.
By including common terms, keywords that generally reflect the consumer intent in fields your product belongs to, you as a seller can effectively boost additional visibility to your campaigns on search results.
Remember, your product title is an advertisement of your product- it is your chance to give the consumer an enticing idea of why they should spend on your product. Working a good title therefore involves providing a clear picture of your item along with ensuring your product is among the first options they come across in their searches.
An ideal product title should be optimized for display on a SERP with limited characters. A cut paste job from your existing product page does not solve your problem- one needs to put in some thought into it.
When I say a good product title, I mean a title that should –
Getting there is however easier said than done. Here are a few things you need to keep in mind when designing the perfect title:
1. The title should start with the core product attributes and key intents you are trying to sell to the consumer with.
The product type should find a place here, especially within the first 2-3 words of the title.
For example, an example from ‘fashion’ might look like this:
Color Brand and product |Type | Category
Nike Eliminate II Leather Running and Walking shoes | Running and Walking | Shoes
2. It is important to prioritize based on high-value search queries.
In this example, “walking” and “running” shoes, “leather” are highly used words in consumer queries that have been incorporated into the title. Make sure these are included within the first 25 characters of the title, along with optimizing them for display and readability. A Donna Karan shoe can be better put as DKNY not only cause the abbreviation is a more commonly used consumer query but also because it is easy to display and read.
3. Always begin your title with the main keyword.
For example, if it is Samsung note 2 phone convers that you are selling, the ideal title should begin thus:
RED Samsung Note2 covers I Premium quality- custom design
The second part of the title gives a brief description of your product. That it is of high quality assures the prospective consumer, that it is customizable differentiates your product from the others on the marketplace.
4. Provide specific information useful to the consumer in the title.
It helps to add in some information that would help the consumer decide in your products favor on the marketplace. For example, buying bags online is always a risky proposition for a consumer, considering the size might not be right or the material not as good as she had expected. In such cases, adding the fact that you offer “easy returns” can tilt the decision on purchase into your favor.
It bodes well to understand that every marketplace in the online commerce space is vying to grab eyeballs of the consumer. Hence it is but a given that every marketplace has its own set of rules and norms for putting up product listings. In such a scenario, before one goes about deciding on the right title for their product listing, it is imperative to glance through these framework guidelines marketplaces have set up for retailers.
These guidelines are not just whims and fancies to bring into line retailers who otherwise do not care much for the market place’s design and style sensibilities. These rules help you the retailer in utilizing the marketplace’s product feed on search engines to enhance your item’s visibility to the consumer.
Most of the popular market places in the Indian ecommerce space have common few rules that follow the international norms. Some of these include;
Every marketplace has its own combination of these basic rules to arrive at the best product title to suite them. eBay for example can be cracked with the following formula:
Product + Features + Benefits
And remember, all of this in just 80 characters:
1) Product –start your listing title with the product name, which is usually your main keyword.
2) Features –color, size, storage capacity, model – anything that is important to your item and something that people search for. For example, if you sell memory cards, it’s capacity and type should find its way into the title as most people will use these two parameters when searching, e.g.:
Transcend Compact Flash card – 16GB
3) Benefits – after the product name & main features, if you still have character space left unused, cover the benefits/extra features or even shipping terms. A few examples would be:
FREE Next Day Delivery!
100% GENUINE!
FREE Gift Included!
2 Year Warranty!
If you exhaust your 80 characters allowed by eBay, you could always consider adding subtitles, at a price.
Yes, getting the right title does seem a lot of effort and time now doesn’t it? Then again, remember, this is a one-time investment and an extremely important one at that. A good or bad product title can be the difference between your product selling off the virtual shelves or stagnating there buried deep under pages and pages of search results, invisible to the consumer’s roving eye.
Based on title tags alone, the first steps of commerce begin to take place right within the search engine result page. The right title can make the consumer get a better sense of offers, pricing, product description, returns status, discounts and more readily, within his search query result alone. Utilizing this simple yet important tool in your arsenal would boost your chances of being sold manifold. So get started with your titles right away.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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