Enhance Product Detail Page With Top Content Creation Tools

A harsh competition in eCommerce should make you sweat. You know it’s a battlefield for the fast and furious. And, for creative (aka. forward-thinking) ones.

Covid-19 pushes brands and retailers to cope with increased demand in some business areas, like food, household goods, gaming, communication and teleconferencing, internet, health & safety supplies, etc. The sales are now mainly performed online. People are stuck at home — whether following their own safety guidelines or fearing to get a fine. Here the sellers’ rival begins. As the market moves to online sales channels, it makes sense to wrap product information in a more attractive outfit. And pretty fast. Agree with me? Let’s break it down.

Why should you pay attention to product information? Buyers cannot feel or touch the product (can’t experience it in real life) and it is especially important for sellers to be able to create a persuasive product content.

Okay. Let’s step on a mission: create/enhance product information (including product descriptions and product images), making it SEO friendly and self-assuring just within a week. And a cherry on top: how you ensure it is automatically delivered and updated across sales platforms.

MISSION BEGINS

A good product page detected

What is actually a good product page? A good product page is kinda insurance for a buyer, where you put all product specifications, close-to-reality images, return policy, instructions or guidelines, or any other information that would give the most explicit information on a product. If it leaves them with confidence, then — bam. Deal, purchase, no returns.

A great product page is SEO friendly. It is Google-tasty, it gets along well with Amazon search engine. And they put you on top.

A great product page delivers well-crafted rich product information. Check out how to write sales-driven product descriptions and how to make perfect product images for ecommerce websites.

You can’t do it all on your own, and why would you?

Here we compiled a list of tools to enhance your product content. Starting from the basic image editors, spell-checking apps and way up to the integral product content platforms, and other curious product marketing tools.

Images Tools

• Annex Cloud

Pricing: request here.

Simply. Your customers are taking pictures of your products. You can’t just let this valuable content go to waste. The app says you can collect, moderate, and curate this content for use across your website and marketing campaigns, etc. And, a nice feature, from my standpoint: Smart Image Ranking Algorithm to rank images based on views, shares, conversions, and more. The service gives customers few ways they can share pictures: by hash tagging their images in social networks, uploading to your ecommerce website, or sharing through your app. Well, these kind services add an authenticity to product content. A big yes.

The company also offers Ratings and Reviews and Q&A Integrations.

• Flowbox (ex. Photoslurp)

Pricing: request here.

A similar platform to enhance your product images. Helps to Integrate user-generated content, like photos and videos into your eCommerce store. From a buyer’s perspective, it seems to be valuable social proof. Sales can’t be a one-way street, right? The platform also offers Image recognition algorithms to make the link for you by helping identify products from your catalog in customers’ images.

• Canvas

Pricing: $9.95 per month when paid annually or $12.95 paid monthly

Easy image editing tool with dozens of creative templates to make a creative product image for an eCommerce site. It is absolutely intuitive and has an impressive variety of templates ideas, as well as access to canvas stock images.

• Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe Spark

Pricing: get all apps as a part of Adobe Creative Cloud for US$39.99/mo (and 20+ creative desktop and mobile apps including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat)

Single App: Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop for US$20.99/mo

Photography Plan: includes Adobe Spark, Lightroom, and Photoshop for US$9.99/mo

Get Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and 20GB of cloud storage (1TB available).

Powerful Imaging and graphic design software and a tool for illustrations (web and mobile graphics to logos, icons, book illustrations, product packaging, and billboards). Photoshop and Illustrator are aimed at professional use. If you’re planning to make a big retouching work or graphic design for websites, product packaging, and similar — go for it. But I suggest you also check out more user-friendly options, which can give unexpectedly good results in improving your product images. Adobe Spark, in its turn, is a quick product content creation tool. Create impactful social graphics, web pages, and short videos within minutes. There are loads of ready-to-use templates, patterns, images, layouts, filters, etc.

• Infogram

Pricing: $0 – $149 /month

Sellers need to provide different-style product images: 360 degrees, with different perspectives and angles, close-ups, give the ability to zoom in. But if it all fails to provide full information on a product, it’s not enough. For this reason, you’re free to use any supporting materials, such as tables, instructions, graphs, etc. Infogram focuses on helping you create infographics, charts, and data visualization. And this was a huge helper in my work on enhancing product content.

• Skitch

Pricing: $0 – $279/month

This is a great space to start your product content strategy ideas with. Kind of a notepad, it has many cool graphics, shapes, arrows, stickers and many other creative tools to deliver your ideas more clearly to your colleagues.

• Image Color Picker

Pricing: free

Easily match a design of all images by getting to know its HEX, RGB, and HSV values. A great tool for branding your product images.

• VEED

Pricing: $0 – $58 /month

Free-stock pictures:

Here’re my personal favs of royalty-free images sites:

1. Unsplash
2. Burst Shopify
3. Pexels
4. Pixabay
5. Freepik

Also do not ignore the paid stock websites, usually, they got a wider range of more sophisticated content:

1. Shutterstock 
2. iStock
3. Adobe Stock

Writing Tools

• Grammarly

Pricing: free, or premium plan from $11.66/month

Grammar check. You just can’t be perfect in everything. Let’s agree, online sales is your strong point. Leave the spell-checking to the app. A simple, yet important service to make your product description look correct. P.S. Even if you’re extremely good at grammar, typos are always hiding behind the bush and Grammarly is there to give better alternatives.

The tool is free, but if you are willing to get 250 more Grammar Checks, Advanced Plagiarism detector, and Vocabulary enhancement suggestions — go with premium.

• Google Drive Research Tool

Pricing: free

Did you know Google Drive allows you to do Google searches without ever leaving a window? Honestly, I just found it out, and I’m not sure whether I feel ashamed or excited about the finding. Works as simple as that: click “Tools” at the menu bar and choose “Search” from the dropdown menu.

• Google Fonts

Pricing: free

Little-known fact about Google: there’s a whole catalog of 600 free fonts you can easily use. While it can’t work with some marketplace guidelines, nobody prohibited you from making it shine on your ecommerce website. Choose a font you like, then click “Use” to get the HTML code. Copy and paste onto your site.

• Hemingway App

Pricing: free or get a desktop app for $19.99 as one-time payment

Want to make your written content easier to read? Follow Ernest Hemingway’s writing philosophy “get the most from the least”. Especially handy in the era of information flood with a short span of buyers’ attention.  The app aims to help you tighten up your words and sentences to make them more impactful. Hemingway uses colors to make the suggestions:

Yellow: denotes long or structurally complex sentences, and suggests to cut them into a few.

Red: the sentences, which might confuse the reader. Better rewrite.

Purple: those words usually have simpler alternatives

Blue: words, that can be omitted. Such as some adverbs or weak and hesitant language.

Green: passive voice detected:) in some cases it is really appropriate, so do not blindly rely on the app. Though in most cases, it’s actually better to use active voice.

Content Management Platform

• Storychief

Pricing: 0$ – $65

Storychief lets you keep and publish faster your content and track how it performs from a single content management environment. You can also collaborate with your team within a platform, optimize content for search engines and more perks.

• Thesaurus

Pricing: free

A personal favorite essential tool for any type of writing. Lets you find synonyms (or antonyms) to stay more creative or specific with a message you are struggling to convey. Website also has an explicit dictionary.

• Evernote

Pricing: Basic (free), Plus ($34.99 per year), and Premium ($69.99 per year)

A helpful digital notebook for every step of the product description writing and editing process.

Pros:

• Easy and intuitive note-taking.
• Great features.
• Flexibility.
• Syncing across all devices (in free version it is limited to 2).
• Incredible search. Ability to search handwritten text in images.
• Text-based tags, geolocation tags, notebooks, and stacks of notebooks for better search.
• Forwarding emails and editing them as a note.
• With Evernote Plus, you can save notebooks offline to read and edit your notes with no internet.

Cons:

• Free version is limited in features.
• Evernote uses cloud storage, and you can add a specific amount of additional data each month.
• Unused storage from one month won’t be transferred to the next.
• Only 60MB of new storage per month for a free account.
• Costly Premium plan.

• WordCounter

Pricing: free

Okay. Now you might say, even Google docs can count the # of words. What’s a thing about this tool? And the thing is, its functionality goes far beyond word count. Also characters, sentences, paragraphs. Wait, some more: reading level, reading time, keyword density. Online editor can help you to improve word choice and writing style, and, optionally, help you to detect grammar mistakes and plagiarism.

• Upwork

Pricing: free (percentage for the deals: 3-5%)

If you’re unsure whether you are qualified enough to craft best-selling product descriptions, which is a case for many companies, find freelancers to write product content for you. Upwork is a global freelance platform. You can check out and compare the product description writers ranging in expertise and price levels. Upwork suggests handling all communication within the Upwork Messages (via text, chat, or video) to create a safe space for both the hiring party and the freelancers. As for the payment, Upwork makes it simple and secure. It supports all the major payment systems as MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, or PayPal. Both parties receive an invoice of the work done and are guided by Upwork support team if needed.

SEO tools

• Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console

Pricing: free

Now, the SEO-helpers. Are you sure your ecommerce site is Google-friendly? Product description SEO and product page SEO are as important, as the content itself. It is aimed to inform about how Google bot is interacting with your website, giving detailed info on broken links and popular keywords. Google Webmaster Tools can alert if there are some malfunctions with your ecommerce product pages. Luckily, it’s free.

To make your life easier, here’s a Beginner’s Guide to Google Search Console by Neil Patel.

• Ubersuggest

Pricing: business – $49/month

Ready for some more freebies? While compiling a product description, you can’t just orient for a buyer’s satisfaction. They won’t even have a chance to check it out, if the search engine, whether it’s of Google or Amazon, will put it at the bottom of the search queries. Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool to help you find the most appropriate keywords that would rank in search engines, making your product content discoverable. My personal tip. I usually check the highest-ranking site for the given keyword. This helps to get some ideas from the best-rating sites.

Ubersuggest features:

• Rank tracking
• Site audit
• Keyword research
• Competitive analysis
• Backlinks

• Serpstat

Pricing: 0$-$499 (they have now -35% spring discount)

Serpstat is a SEO Platform as well, founded by Ukrainian developers. A tool has lots of cool features, as Positions Tracking, Backlink Analysis, Keyword Search, Site Audit, and Competitors Research. Here how it looks like:

• Semrush

Pricing: 0$-$399 (they are currently applying – 16% discount)

One more leader in a niche. Analytics Reports: Organic Research, Advertising Research, Display Advertising Tool, Backlinks, Keyword Research, Product Listing Ads, Traffic Analytics, Market Explorer. Tools: Keyword Difficulty, Domain vs. Domain, Charts, My Reports, Keyword Magic Tool, CPC Map, SEO Writing Assistant.

• Ahrefs

Pricing: $99-$999

A leader in SEO-tools, Ahrefs offers a wide functionality. Here’s what you’ll see once enter to a dashboard:

Domain Rating (DR) shows your website’s total backlink profile strength.

URL Rating measures a single URL’s backlink profile strength and its possibility to rank high in the Google SERPs

Backlinks provides info on the total number of backlinks that are pointing to a specific website, and in this case, the client or our website.

Referring Domains – amount of domains that point to a specific website or URL.

Organic Keywords – amount  of keywords the website ranks for in the top 100 search results.

Targeted Keywords – the performance of your targeted keywords over a certain time range.

Generally, here are the tools you are getting with Ahrefs:

• Competitive Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Backlink Research
• Content Research
• Rank Tracking
• Web Monitoring

• Schema.org

Pricing: free, a collaborative space

What is schema.org and why it is important for SEO? Schema markup is a form of microdata added to a webpage, which creates improved descriptions to be more understandable for search engines. According to a study by acmqueue, less than one-third of Google’s search results include a rich snippet with Schema.org markup. Let’s see an example.

<h2itemprop=”description”>The local bakery shop with the vegan options!

Address:

<span itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>

<pitemprop=”streetAddress”>17 Sunrise Street

<pitemprop=”addressLocality”>Los Angeles, Ca

Tel:

808 6971177

itemprop=”menu” href=”http:// http://www.gepard-bakery.io/menu “>Click here to view our healthy and eco-friendly pies!

The bakery is open:

<pitemprop=”openingHours”>Mon-Sat 9am – 7:30pm

<pitemprop=”openingHours”>Sun: 10am – 4pm

The code might look confusing, but schema.org gives examples on how to use the different item types. And you can get a clear vision of what the code does.

Website audit tools

Product reviews/questions tools:

• Answerbase

Pricing: free 30 days, $19 -$249/month

A software with an extensive database of answers to product questions. If you want to get the product q-ns answered automatically by the selling item – this platform would save a decent amount of time.

Product discovery tools (tools for better product search)

• Syte

Pricing: Fill out the form to get a quote

Now, this is a whole product content platform to help brands and retailers with setting up a visual search, improving product discovery throughout a buyer’s journey, giving better search results, and simplified product tagging structure to improve the UX. Basically, it would give a potential buyer more relevant product recommendations. You can also get product images of someone using it. A high-rated blogger in your shoes walking down the 5th AveLifestyle pictures, in its turn, Add 100+ layers of trust and note of humanness.

• Searchspring

Pricing: request here.

This service is quite similar in a way it also helps customers to find a product they need faster. It has a smarter spell correct and guides shoppers with helpful suggestions. The app also helps expose relevant products.

CSPs (Content Service Providers)

And a cherry on a pie. Catch a list of highest rated Content Service Providers on a market, where you can get access to the ready-to-go product descriptions.

Content Distribution Tools

The final step is about product content distribution. If you happen to sell at various sales channels and marketplaces, which I recommend you to do, catch this fact: each of those has its own product information requirements and specific data structures. Gepard Content Syndication Platform helps to regularly distribute and update product content on a number of marketplaces. Besides, uniting powers with our strategic partner Icecat, a leader among service content providers, you don’t have to worry about finding one. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pass your own product content. The rest is on Gepard.

Before you go, catch a Checklist for a Good Product Content. How many points you’ve got?

• Titles include a brand name, model, series, etc.
• Primary and alternative images
• Product Videos
• Lifestyle product images
• Images are in one style with a brand
• Zoom and rotate
• Full descriptions
• Physical attributes
• Tech specs
• Communicates competitive advantage
• Call to action
• Clear product benefits
• Any product upgrades information
• Specifications
• Product categories
• Pricing details
• Availability
• Country of manufacture, manufacturer
• Related products
• Alt tags for product images
• Warm tone of voice
• Descriptions are easy to read
• Words evoking emotions
• Supported by tables, graphs
• Ratings and reviews
• After all, don’t forget to stick to your own style.

Online sales will grow even faster after Covid-19 and more prompt corporations & companies would invest in automation. Every part of the business thread should be transformed. And such essential as product content as well. Consider enhancing your product information in all its aspects, starting from product images, product descriptions, product SEO, and product content distribution to a number of sales channels. By using various product marketing tools and content creation tools you’ll be able to cut up to 80% of operational costs and significantly reduce time-to-market.