This is the time of year that signals refreshing change, growth and renewal. For many, it also signals the right time to clean and declutter. Spring (and summer) cleaning is important not only in a personal capacity, but when it comes to your eCommerce store as well. Now that we’re nearing the end of June, it’s time to kick-start your summer maintenance online.
Why Update Your Online Store?
Updating your eCommerce shop most often comes down to reviewing and editing your product content first. While online sellers should strive to create evergreen content as much as possible, even the greatest product copy needs to be maintained. Creating a content maintenance schedule – every six months as an example – ensures you stay on top of how your brand and products are being positioned in the market. Some reasons to maintain or update your store’s content include:
- Stay relevant to your shoppers and what they care about
- Keep up with industry trends, including trending keywords
- Optimize your listings for promotional periods
- New seasons
- Back-to-school
- Holidays
- Amazon Prime Day
- Other
- Stay up to date with what competitors are doing, or find new competitors to watch
- Monitor analytics to find high-performing trends you can adopt across your catalogue
- Ensure you’re familiar with all of your existing content
What to Update
Now that you know all the reasons an online seller might adopt a maintenance schedule to keep their site’s content updated throughout the year, the next section will highlight what exactly you can update and how to tackle each piece of product content.
1. Product Images
As eCommerce standards change, you may also need to adapt your product photography style. The same can be said as new technologies and methods of creating images emerge. With the increased popularity of 360-degree photography, it might be time to look at how you can include this immersive visual technique in your own image gallery.
If your product images are looking outdated, if they feature call-outs that are no longer relevant, or even if they just need some sprucing up, it’s time to get new photography done. Contact us today to learn more.
2. Product Title
Your product title is likely the component that requires the least updating, since the content it contains should include evergreen elements like the brand name, item type, model name and primary keywords. However, treating your product title as a short sales pitch, especially on a marketplace like Amazon, can leave room for certain key features that may change as search trends do.
Include your product title in your maintenance schedule to ensure all of the information is still correct season after season – perhaps there’s been a branding change or there’s a seasonal use or feature you can call out for a portion of the year.
3. Feature Bullets
Your feature bullets, whether positioned on your own eCommerce website or on a marketplace like Amazon, should contain the most important information about your product.
All key features and their corresponding benefits should be outlined in this section. As such, much of the information will likely stay the same as the seasons change.
It is important, however, that the keywords used within your bullets are still relevant and producing good traffic. Audit your bullets’ SEO optimization as a part of your maintenance schedule to ensure you’re ranking well for the best keywords possible.
4. Product Description
Product descriptions often contain narrative content, romance copy and explanations of uses and applications. Your product description is a great piece of content to include in your maintenance schedule, as it offers more character space to fill with seasonal copy, new keywords and updated content based on industry and competitor trends.
Learn more about how geekspeak handles the optimization of product descriptions.
5. Other Areas to Update
In addition to updating your product content (copywriting and photography), use your maintenance schedule and the new season to look at opportunities to introduce new sales and promotions. This is also a great time to audit the organization of your website, ensuring promotional items are featured in their own easy-to-find section, and all products are easy to find. If your site’s taxonomy has become outdated, see how geekspeak can help.
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns should constantly be monitored and updated, but Spring/Summer or another scheduled maintenance period offers the opportunity to perform a deeper audit into your online advertising to determine what’s working and what’s not. Update your ads to leverage the latest search trends, promote new sales and use season-specific language to relate to shoppers.
Whether you have a new product that just launched a month ago, or a range of legacy products that haven’t changed in years, it’s important to take this time to audit each one equally – from their titles to their ads – in order to make the most of your online assortment.
