How to find answers in product info, Q&As, and reviews.

You’ve likely seen this capability on Amazon, when you’re utilizing their “Customer Questions & Answers” capabilities and when you start asking your question…it will suggest answers from the content that already exists within the page.   The result looks something like this:

You want to have this capability within your own site.   To accomplish this, there are solutions that you can integrate into your product page like Answerbase’s Product Questions & Answers solution which will autosuggest answers from the existing Q&A content…but also allow you to identify that you’d like it to suggest answers from other information on the page including your product descriptions, product specifications, product reviews, etc.

Why you want to find answers in product info, Q&As, and reviews.

The reason you want to have your product questions and answers tool find answers in product info, Q&As, and reviews is to answer questions most efficiently for the sake of the customer as well as your business.   Customers are looking for an answer and they’d like a quick answer to their question, so if you make it easy for them to find the answers they’re looking for they’re most likely to convert.   In fact, Answerbase see that up to 75% of the questions that get answered convert to a sale.   This ensures that they don’t bounce from your page to try to see if Google can find another site that has the answer readily available.

This capability will also save your company time and money by reducing duplicate questions.   Answerbase sees some sites decrease their inquiries by up to 83% as existing information is suggested as answers and takes care of the customer when available.

This combination of increased conversions and decreased inquiries have a notable impact on your bottom line, as you’re increasing revenues while decreasing costs to get them.

Other benefits of product Q&A engagement

Of course, your customers will ask questions that you haven’t covered and those will inevitably be posted.   The benefits of this engagement and these new inquiries is that it’s growing valuable content that can be used to ensure that question is answered for future customers.   If you publish the content in a way that is optimized for Google (like Amazon, Best Buy, Answerbase Customer sites, and others), you can also see those Q&A threads pulling up in search results similar to this:

That ensures that you can answer questions efficiently not only for the people who are on your site, but that content can lead brand new customers to your site as they’re asking product related questions through Google and other search engines.

Ecommerce merchants will also use that Q&A engagement to identify gaps within their current product information, descriptions, and specifications….and look to optimize that information so it includes the information that is inquired about the most.   This ensures that over time, your customers have easy and efficient access to all of the information they need in order to convert to a sale and purchase the product.

We hope this post has been informative.   If you’d like information on how you can support this on your site where your product questions and answers capabilities can automatically suggest answers from your product information, reviews, and Q&As….you can schedule an Answerbase demo here and we’ll have a product specialist walk you through.

The post Find answers in product info, q&as, reviews appeared first on Answerbase.

This post will take a close look at what Amazon is doing with it’s Product Questions and Answers capability, covering how they have implemented this feature on their product pages and highlight some hidden gems that drive impressive results.

How Amazon Product Questions & Answers Engages Customers

When you visit a product page on Amazon, you’ll notice that they have a preview of the product Q&A engagement right under the product title.  See how that is displayed, pointed out in the following screenshot…

That let’s the visitor know that the product question & answer capabilities and content available.  You’ll see a bit further down the page that there is a more “in your face” call to action right above the product details and specifications, where they ask the user to enter any product questions that they may have through a simple field.  See how that is displayed here….

This gives the customer the ability to ask their own specific question with the goal of removing any information barrier that may exist on their journey of purchasing the product.  The tool will autosuggest existing answers to them if the content is already available, saving them the time of needing to read through (and successfully find) the information within product descriptions, product specifications, etc.

Finally, below all the product information that the seller has made available, you can see that they have the full Customer Question & Answer functionality and content for that product available as displayed here…

This gives the customer another engagement point to ask their product question if they didn’t find it within the product information above, and also shows the current question and answer content that is available for that product.

All of these options on the product page give customers easy access to the product Q&A capabilities and content, ensuring that they can get their product questions answered and get on with the sale.

This all seems simple enough, and many of you undoubtedly have used the functionality yourself….but there are some details in the way that Amazon has implemented product questions and answers that ecommerce merchants need to recognize and learn from in order to not miss out on some great opportunities for their own sites to use product Q&A to drive new organic traffic and drive conversions to their site.

There are a couple treasures hidden in plain site with how Amazon has implemented Q&A that most people don’t recognize and they’re driving both organic traffic and conversions to Amazon’s products.   Let’s dig into the details of how Amazon has implemented this capability to get the most out of that Q&A content and engagement.

Landing Pages for Each Product Q&A Thread

The first treasure I’ll point out has a notable impact on product question and answer content getting indexed in Google (and other search engines) and growing consistent traffic from customers who are asking similar product questions on those search engines.   Let’s look closely at how Amazon publishes the Q&A content on the product page.  Take a look at the question title on the page…see here:

That question title is a link.  When you click on the link, you’ll see that it goes to a page that is a specific page designated to that specific Q&A thread…see here:

Now, let’s focus on what this does for Amazon….having a specific page for every single product Q&A thread.   What it does is allows Google to recognize the question title as anchor links to the question details page and therefor be recognized as a page that covers that question.   Google crawls to those pages, indexes those pages, and then shows them in search results when customers are asking similar product questions on Google.

See an Amazon product Q&A landing page as the second organic search result here:

You see in the above image that the second result is Amazon’s product Q&A landing pages which are  getting indexed and that is driving brand new customers to that content.  The first organic featured snippet result is an Answerbase customer, as we power product Q&A landing pages for ecommerce merchants with their own sites (the merchants can have those landing pages on a subdirectory or subdomain of their site) and we ensure those pages are optimized for search with the appropriate page title and markup on the page.   Better optimized pages will lead to better matching to what the inquiry is, and better click-through.

The visitors to these product Q&A landing pages click to see the content, see the answers to their questions, and then many purchase the product from the site that is providing the information they’re looking for.  You can see it works for Amazon’s product Q&A content, it works for our customers who use Answerbase to power these pages, and it’s important for ecommerce merchants to also support product questions & answers in this manner as well…so you can ensure that your content is available within organic results, lifting both traffic and sales on your site.

Most people engage with Amazon’s product pages and don’t ever realize that those landing pages exist….but they do, and it’s helping Amazon drive traffic and sales.

As a provider of product questions and answers, Answerbase has seen that these landing pages can significantly increase the organic traffic to a merchant’s store.  We have a case study where one of our customers increased their organic traffic by over 4x previous levels and Q&A content is now responsible for over half of the overall traffic to their site (they have consistently created GREAT content, and that is what Google is looking for).  A typical organic traffic trend to that product Q&A content looks like this:

It’s important to note that the above chart is ONLY organic traffic and ONLY traffic to those Q&A content pages.  As you continue to answer customer questions about your products, you not only help convert those customers but it builds those landing pages which start to show up in search engine results….and lead to year over year organic traffic growth to that Q&A content.

Another notable thing about the traffic coming into those pages, is we’ve seen that the average lifetime value of customers that come in through the product question and answer content is up to 2x higher than our customer’s normal Google traffic.   That speaks volumes on the intent of the users who are asking those questions on Google (and other search engines).

As a merchant you are wise to implement product questions & answers on your site in a similar manner, so that you can leverage all of the product knowledge of you and your team…and ensure that knowledge is driving new traffic and conversions.

Getting Answers from All Available Product Information

The second detail we’d like to highlight in how Amazon manages their product questions and answers functionality is uncovered when we look at the ask question field, see here:

When you start typing in your question, it will autosuggest answers….but it will look for those answers within all of the product information that is available.  That means it will look through the product description, product specifications, Q&A’s, reviews, etc…..and ensure that if the information is currently available, it’s going to be presented to the customer to read.  See an example of some results here:

This helps ensure the customer gets the answers they’re looking for and don’t have to wait for a response.  It also reduces the number of questions that need to be managed by the seller….while still being able to convert those sales.

Answerbase sees that up to 75% of the product questions answered convert to a new sale, so the ability to effectively answer the customers questions in the quickest possible way will increase your conversions and sales.

How to Put Lessons from Amazon to Work

If you don’t have a product Q&A capability on your product pages, it’s important that you get one and start to build that valuable content in order to grow your conversions and traffic.   Not all product question & answer providers are equal.   Answerbase’s product question & answer capabilities will ensure that you are able to take advantage of your content through dynamically creating new Q&A landing pages and driving conversions, so we’d happy to service you with these capabilities if your current provider is falling short with how they are managing that engagement and content.

We hope this post has been informative and encourage you to Schedule a Demo if you’re interested in hearing more about what product questions and answers can do for your ecommerce site.

The post How Amazon’s Approach to Product Questions & Answers Drives Sales appeared first on Answerbase.

What is Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce decouples the front end and the back end of an ecommerce application, allowing brands and developers the flexibility on the front end by utilizing robust API of a headless service while still being able to take advantage of powerful administration and management tools on the back end. The end goal is to ensure that companies have the flexibility they need to provide the best customer experience and accomplish the desired business goals.

What are Headless Ecommerce Tools?

There are several ecommerce platforms that advertise themselves under “Headless Commerce” and provide the necessary tools, API, and supporting documentation that gives developers what they need in order to create a robust ecommerce front end.   Several of the most popular are these…

• Shopify’s Plus
• Bigcommerce
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Kibo Commerce
• Magento Commerce
• SAP Commerce Cloud

These platforms give a great foundation for giving companies a powerful ecommerce engine in the back-end while allowing them flexibility on the presentation layer as they integrate those ecommerce capabilities into their online store, social experiences, mobile applications, customer contact experiences, etc.   Although these platforms provide very robust capabilities, they don’t cover every capability that ecommerce merchants would like to cover in their customer experience, so it’s necessary to identify other headless ecommerce tools and services that provide robust API capabilities to fill in the gaps.

Recommended Headless Ecommerce Tools & Services

Below is a list of some essential ecommerce tools and services that have a robust set of developer tools and API in order to compliment your headless commerce experiences.

Shipstation

Shipstation is shipping software for ecommerce fulfillment.  Shipstation’s API and development tools allows ecommerce developers to manage orders, shipments, stores, warehouses, carriers and a number of other elements related to your Shipstation account.  create shipping orders, check on shipping rates, as well as a number of other capablities that are powered through their powerful shipping engine.

Answerbase

Answerbase’s customers include the likes of Pillsbury and Betty Crocker, providing headless ecommerce product question and answer community capabilities to power functionality.  This enables you to power Q&A engagement on your product pages similar to what you see supported on Amazon’s product pages, where customers can ask questions about the product they’re viewing and and then receive answers from your company or other verified purchasers.   It includes a robust set of content and community features to ensure that your visitors can get all of the product information they’re looking for from the most relevant source to drive conversions.

Pimcore

Pimcore is a decoupled, API-driven product information management solution that can handle complicated product and pricing structures and support multiple front-end apps.   It’s ability to manage multiple catalogs, currencies, catalogs, product views and price lists gives developers and marketers what they need from a PIM solution.

We’ll continue compiling the list of these services as we become aware of services and partners that have created a robust foundation for companies and their developers to work with, as we look to enable merchants who adopt headless commerce the best headless ecommerce tools on the market.

The post Headless Tools and Services for your Ecommerce Site appeared first on Answerbase.

This post will help you understand what the top benefits that your product questions and answers should be showing you, so you know what to look and ask for when you’re looking for a product Q&A solution to add to your ecommerce store.

Organic Traffic Results

There are product related questions being asked into Google every day, and many of those questions are ones that you’ve already answered for your existing customer base.  It’s important that you make sure that your answers are published in a way that Google gobbles up and displays favorably in their results.  You want to manage and publish your product Q&A content in a way that results in the content being displayed in Google like this:

Answerbase’s product questions & answers platform spawns landing pages for the Q&A threads which draws those long tail queries to the product Q&A content in order to achieve results like you see in the above example.   It’s important to have Google be able to recognize that there is a content piece specifically addressing the question that is being asked into their search, and marking that content up in a way that Google can easily read and recognize the answers to the questions and display it in featured snippets as seen above.

Some notes on what you should be seeing with your Q&A content:

• Increased Customer Lifetime Value:  We see that the average lifetime value of customers coming into those pages and converting to new sales is up to 2x higher than normal Google traffic.
• Year Over Year Organic Traffic Growth: As you continue to answer customer questions, that content should lead to year over year organic traffic growth that is measurable for your site.  We encourage you to read our Epestsupply Product Questions & Answers Case Study, where Answerbase’s product Q&A doubled their overall traffic and increasedtheir organic traffic by 4x.

Again, not all product Q&A is created equally, you’ll see that many solutions out there only support product questions and answers with a simple JavaScript widget on the product page.  These solutions often lack important features for both users and search engines to see all of the product related information they’d like to.  For example, many times when using some of the standard product Q&A widgets you’ll see that Google doesn’t index Q&A content if there is paging of that content….that’s a problem as your content grows.  As you scale, more sophisticated solutions are necessary to ensure all the hard work you put into answering questions is rewarded with new traffic and conversions…you need to make sure your product question and answer platform is doing that work for you.

Management of Repeated Questions

You’ll notice on many product Q&A solutions, if you type a question into the question form that matches the same exact question that has been asked before…it doesn’t auto-suggest that existing content and lead the user right to the sale. That isn’t good for conversions, and also has your team spending additional time on questions that have already been answered.

What you want is for the solution to recognize when a question has been asked before and let the user know that an answer is available now, similar to what you see here:

You don’t want to make it difficult for them to post their new question if they’d like, but you certainly want to make it clear that they can view an answer immediately if and when it’s available.

It’s essential that you have a solution that does this, and does it well.  Answerbase sees that for mature knowledge bases we can have questions answered up to 83% of the time through existing content, which saves you time and helps you convert them on the spot rather than them jumping to Google to find the product information there….perhaps on one of your competitor’s sites.   Do it well on your site, so they just get the information they need and then convert to a sale.

Increasing Conversions & Tracking Results

You need to make sure that your product question and answer engagement is contributing towards increased conversions on your store and that you’re able to easily track the conversions that it’s assisting with.

As noted in the quote above, Answerbase sees that up to 75% of questions answered by Answerbase convert to a sale (View a Product Q&A Case Study), so you’ll want to make sure the Q&A product that you’re using is focused on conversions and effectively managing the content in order to produce conversion results for you.   You also need to make sure that the solution is tracking and reporting on those results.   It shouldn’t be complicated to do, the solution should offer some kind of tracking script that you can copy from their administration tools and place into your order confirmation page like this:

This will ensure that the solution can monitor all engagement that users are having with the question and answer content and then report back to you on the exact ROI that you’re getting from  that engagement.   Ensure that the solution you select is not only providing the ability to track, but giving you an ROI of multiples of what you’re spending.

In Closing…

There are many other things that product Q&A engagement can do for ecommerce stores in order to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your customer engagement, but the items are listed above are some of the “must have” items you should be looking for.   If you’d like to speak to a specialist about any of the above items or all the additional benefits that product page questions and answers bring to ecommerce merchants, we encourage you to Schedule a Free Consultation with a product Q&A expert who can talk you through.

Hope everybody is well and happy selling!

The post 3 Benefits Product Questions & Answers Must Produce for your Ecommerce Store appeared first on Answerbase.

When looking for that product information, the answer to their pre-sales question can be found throughout the page….typically in one of the following formats:

• Product images
• Product descriptions
• Product specifications
• Product reviews
• Product question and answer content
• Product manuals
• Product-related videos
• Product-related articles

That’s a large list of areas where they may be able to find the answer to their product question, that may be the only barrier to them converting to a sale. Seems like quite a bit to look through to get an answer to one question, doesn’t it? It’s because it is.

This is the reason why having the ability to easily search through and find product information within the product page is critical to ensuring that customers can easily find the information they’re looking for…and get on with the purchase.

This post covers how you can provide this capability to your ecommerce customers, to remove those barriers to purchase and increase your sales.

How do customers search and find product information now?

On most ecommerce websites customers don’t have the ability to search and find the product information they’re looking for….they’re forced to browse (more like “dig”) to find it.

Some ecommerce merchants make a good amount of product information available, which is great, but they expect the customer to read and browse through the available information on the page in order to find the information they’re looking for which will seal the deal.   That information can become so robust that it becomes unmanageable for a user to efficiently sift through.

Have you ever seen a lengthy product description? See this example:

What about a detailed product specs table? See this example on a product page:

And that’s not even starting on the hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of product questions and answers that have been addressed or product reviews that have been given, as well as any product documents where you can download the full product specs sheet or product manual.

It’s great that all of this information is available. What’s not great is that customers are being left with the burden of sifting through and reading all of those details just to find the specific information which will convert them from a visitor to a paying customer.

Your job as an ecommerce merchant is to make the access to that information as quick and painless as possible.

How can product page search be done better?

Let’s see how Amazon addresses this, because they’re doing a good job. Notice how Amazon provides this field before your get to the product description and more detailed product information on their pages.

They encourage the customer to ask any questions they may have about the product and Amazon will look to find answers in the following places:

• Product information
• Q&A’s
• Reviews

As you start to type in your question, it will search through all of the product information it has and auto-suggest the information to the user as seen here:

It gives you results from all of the product information sources that are available, and also allows you to filter whether you’d like to see the information from the Product Information, Customer Q&A’s, or the Customer Reviews. This ensures that wherever the information that the customer wants to see could be found…is presented to them as quickly as possible so they can get on with the sale.

Engaging customers through product questions

When customers are looking for product information, a search can typically be phrased in the form of a question and it’s a great way to engage the user in order to get them to that information. It’s a natural way for the user to see that there is a way to get the specific information they’re looking for, and engage.

You’ll notice on Amazon in their customer questions and answers section on each product page, by default they will show the most popular Q&A content underneath the ask question form as seen here:

But…as soon as the customer starts asking their specific question…they search through all the available product information regardless of where it can be found, as seen here:

Supporting product questions and answers on your ecommerce site is the easiest way to get those customers engaged and make it so they can easily find the product information they’re looking for…and move onto the sale. If the information isn’t currently available in the information you’ve already provided, it allows them to go ahead and pose that question to your team (and other customers if you’d like to enable that capability) and then that question can be addressed to help convert that sale as well as any future customers with a similar question in the future.

Answerbase (who powers product page Q&A) sees that up to 75% of the questions that are answered on product pages convert to a sale. That’s quite a lift in revenue by simply helping to ensure customers have easy access to content you’re already providing.

How can I support this on my own ecommerce product pages?

If you’re looking for a tool or an app to support a product questions and answers capability similar to Amazon’s on your ecommerce site, Answerbase powers ecommerce product Q&A and can also index your other product information including product details, product specifications, product manuals, and product reviews. If you’d like to speak with a representative about what Answerbase can do to help customers easily find product information and convert to a sale, Schedule an Answerbase Demo today.

The post Make it Easy to Find Product Information on Ecommerce Product Pages appeared first on Answerbase.

This post will explore how ecommerce retailers can most effectively display product question and answer content to get the best results on Google through proper page schema, structured data, and qualifying for getting that content displayed as rich results on Google.

What is the SEO goal for Product Q&A Content?

Potential customers are asking questions related to a product purchase every day on Google. If you’re an ecommerce merchant, your goal is to have content that fulfills that content demand and is displayed in results to drive traffic to your site and converts the sale.

Take a look at this great example of how this can be effectively done on a search result where product Q&A content results in a featured snippet result on Google.

That result is simply content that was created by the ecommerce merchant answering questions that were posted by their current visitors. The content has been published and distributed in a way that Google recognizes and in turn, other customers who are asking similar product-related questions on Google see that content, see the product that is related to the answer, and then is driven to the purchase.

What is the Value of Search Visitors to Product Q&A Content?

Ecommerce retailers see that the value of search visitors to Q&A content can notably impact their store through increased overall traffic and more valuable customers coming to their store through search.

These results show how relevant searches that match product Q&A content are, and where those potential customers are within the marketing funnel as they’re looking for product related information on Google.

Also, as you continue to answer questions from your existing visitors, it continues to grow brand new visitors to your site year over year. Here is a chart that shows only organic visitors only to Q&A content landing pages over several years.

As you continue to publish value product Q&A content, that fills the demand of thousands of inquiries every month as potential customers ask similar questions through Google and are led to that content.

How to Distribute Product Q&A Content for SEO

Online retailers with traffic will recognize as soon as they integrate a product question and answer tool into their product pages, they’ll start to receive questions about the products for them to answer. As they have their team (and sometimes other customers) post answers to the questions, then it’s a matter of distributing that content in a way that takes advantage of that content to get results in conversion and search.

Questions and Answers on the Product Page

The most obvious place to ensure effective distribution of Q&A on your site is on the product pages. This not only helps convert more visitors to paying customers but also ensures that Google can recognize that content on your page and you’ll start to see your product page coming up for queries related to that content.

See this example of a product page coming up as a result of the product question and answer content on the page as a customer asks ”Best performing Chamois for a 100 mile ride?” into Google:

Google recognizes that the product Q&A content matches a question that was asked by a previous customer on the page, and as a result the product page pulls up in the results.

There are ways of identifying structured data for Q&A content which we’ll cover below, but for your product page you’ll be using the Product Schema which doesn’t currently support identifying the specific Q&A content on the page. As product Q&A is becoming a staple on product pages we do expect that to be worked into the product page schema…but until then it’s enough to simply get your product Q&A content displaying on your product page which will get you results like mentioned above.

Product Question and Answer Landing Pages

You’ll notice when you view one of Best Buy’s product pages, that they display the most popular Q&A content on the product pages but each of the product question titles is actually a link that leads to a page dedicated to each Q&A thread.

Those landing pages get picked up by Google as they’re recognized as a page dedicated 100% to that product-related question…which leads to results like this on Google:

If this is optimized appropriately for Google and you’re ensuring quality answers are being posted to address those product questions, you’ll start to see that content showing up as featured snippets in Google’s results and many times showing the related product image along with the content.

These landing pages ensure that you have a page dedicated to ensuring each specific product query given the attention it should get, because other customers all over the world are asking similar questions on Google…and Google is looking for the content that most effectively answers the question.

It’s great to have some of that content on your product page, but when you start getting into having more than 10 Q&A pairs that have been posted per product….you’ll not want to publish all of that content on your product page to display by default. Sometimes that Q&A content gets up into the hundreds of Q&A pairs per product over time and you don’t want to lose the value of that content that you’ve created. Expanding that content onto other pages is the way to ensure all your valuable Q&A content is available for Google to crawl and display in results.

Product Q&A Schema for Google’s Rich Results

Google recognizes structured content related to product Q&A with the QAPage schema, so you want to take advantage of that for your product question and answer content when it makes sense.

The QApage schema is specifically for Q&A content pages where multiple answers can be submitted by a community of users, so it’s perfect for ecommerce merchants who want to not only answer questions themselves…but also want to get other customers who have purchased a product involved in providing answers. If appropriately executed, Google will be able to recognize the structured content on the page in order to identify the question, the suggested answers, the accepted answer, etc.

If you enable this schema for your Q&A landing pages…you can use the Google Rich Results Checker to ensure it appropriately picks up the structured data within the page. The results will look something like this if only one answer has been submitted to the question:

If more than one answer is available, Google shows a carousel of the potential answers to ensure they click into and view the answer that they find the most valuable as shown here:

The power of rich results is that it communicates to the person searching that Google has recognized that they’re asking a question…and showing within the results content that is specifically catered towards answering that question. This helps increase CTR and leads the user effectively to the answers which then drive product conversion.

How to Add Product Q&A to Your Ecommerce Store

Answerbase powers product Q&A for ecommerce merchants to ensure they can achieve the goals laid out above, and get the most out of their product question and answer content. We encourage you to Schedule a Consultation to discuss what product question and answer content can do for your store.

If you’d like to dig into the technology that powers effective product Q&A, you can also Start a Free Trial of Answerbase to review the platform and preview the tools to integrate into your storefront.

The post How to get Rich Results for Product Q&A Content on your Ecommerce Store for SEO appeared first on Answerbase.

Why Should You Care About Internal Links?

By setting aside an hour or two to add internal links, you can make your website more valuable in Google’s eyes, giving you a boost over your competition.

Internal linking may sound like something mystical, but it’s actually pretty simple. It’s just linking one page to another on your website. They’re called internal links because they’re all located inside your own website.

Seriously, that’s it: a link in the text of your pages that points to another page on your site.

What makes adding a few links so powerful? By pointing several pages at one really important page on your website, you’re helping Google understand the architecture of your website better, and which pages are the most important and relevant. Search engines love this kind of organization!

Adding internal links may not be exciting or complex, but it’s important and powerful. How do you figure out where to put an internal link? Let’s dig into the details.

3 Steps to Adding Internal Links to Your Website:

#1 – CONTENT CREATION & ORGANIZATION

You need to have at least a few pages of content on your website to get started. This content can be: articles, blogs, FAQs, product descriptions, customer reviews, or video posts on your website.

If you don’t yet have a lot of content on your website, then your first mission is to create some. Creating content can be overwhelming, but here’s how to get started:

• Brainstorm some ideas for content your customers could use. Making a list of your top 5 frequently-asked-questions (FAQs) is a great place to start. You could write an article or make a short video to answer each FAQ. Now you have a piece of content! Keep going!
• Once you have these 5 pieces of content, publish each piece to its own blog, web page, or FAQ entry on your website. Enlist the help of your web developer if needed. Each piece of content should have its own URL (web address).

Once you have a lot of great content on your website, then your next steps will be to determine which pieces of content should point to which other pieces of content. Is one piece of content, such as a product explainer page, more important than the others? If so, all your supporting content should point to the most important page, like this:

I’ll show you exactly how to add these links in the next step.

#2 – ADDING LINKS WITH ANCHOR TEXT

Now, you have all of these pages with great, helpful content so you can assist your site’s visitors – and Google – in understanding how your whole website works together.

Try to link from one section of your website to another. For example, when you post a new blog, include a link to the product page you mentioned in your blog. When you post a new product, include a link over to your FAQs page about how to assemble and use the product.

This cross-linking creates a web effect from one section to another on your website. The more you point to the important pages (like your main product collections), the more Google can understand those are the most important pages on your website.

When including these links, you should use anchor text, which is a word (or words) that you use as a clickable link in your content in place of typing the full URL (web address). Anchor text makes your content more readable.

Let’s use a real world example from a site I worked on, www.stickdulcimer.com. The site is focused on selling Stick Dulcimers, which are simple stringed instruments…similar to a guitar. The goal for this site is to get the website ranking for anyone who is searching on Google for “Stick Dulcimer” and related queries with those key words within them.

See these two approaches in linking to that site, one using just the link and then one using “anchor text” which Google values much more for the purposes of helping to drive their search results.

• No Anchor Text: “Shop our instruments at https://stickdulcimer.com”
• With Anchor Text: “Shop our Stick Dulcimer instruments”

Do you notice how the anchor text stands in place of the URL, but you can still click on it to get to the page? You still get the benefit of having an internal link, but your content is way easier to read for your website visitors and much more valuable to Google to understand what the destination page is about! If you need help creating anchor text links in your articles, talk to your web developer.

Your anchor text should always include one of your keywords. In our example above, we included the keyword “Stick Dulcimer” in the anchor text to communicate the product keyword we’re going after.

Adding a relevant keyword to your anchor text helps Google understand the content and architecture of your website better, and which pages are the most important and relevant. As I mentioned earlier: Search engines love when you organize your content for them. They reward this effort with better ranking for your website. Hooray!

#3 – Keeping Up With Your Internal Links

Once you get the hang of adding internal links, it’s easy! However, it’s not a “one-and-done” task. This can become overwhelming.

Here’s how to fight the overwhelm. The key is to dedicate a little time each week to work on internal links. You’ll want to keep a log of the various content you’ve created and identify where internal linking opportunities are.

For example, take 30 minutes to scan through last year’s blogs to see if you forgot a place you could link to a more recent post. Or if you’re posting new blogs regularly, add 5 extra minutes to your posting process to add an internal link from your new content to your most important page that it relates to.

Better yet, automate some of your efforts. There are tools available that automatically can recognize what pages are related to other pages on your site, and create those internal links automatically. For example, Answerbase’s ecommerce product questions and answers tool does this for ecommerce stores. When a new product Q&A page is created from a customer question and answer combination, Answerbase automatically creates relevant links going back to the related product page with the appropriate anchor text, automatically creating internal links for Google to crawl. If you own an ecommerce site, take advantage of easy tools like this in order to put your internal link building on auto-pilot and see the SEO benefits over time as that content continues to grow.

Wrapping Up:

Internal linking can sound intimidating. But as I mentioned earlier, if you just put in the time to regularly comb your website for linking opportunities or put the appropriate tools in place to automate it, you can make some serious headway in your SEO efforts. This will pay off big time when you start passing your competition in Google’s rankings!

If you have more questions about how to implement internal links on your website, feel free to reach out to us at Trigger.

In the meantime, happy link building!

Guest Post by: Ryan Pryor from Trigger, a Digital Marketing Agency for Ecommerce Businesses.

The post How to Add Internal Links: An easy way to maximize your content for better Google rankings appeared first on Answerbase.

What is Google Question Hub?

Google Question Hub is a services that Google offers where they identify questions that are asked in Google Search that don’t have good enough content to fulfill the need, and they feed those content creation opportunities to publishers who can create great content to fill that demand.

Did you know that around 15% of the queries that people search for on Google every day are brand new and Google has never seen before?  Shocking, I know.   All of those queries reflect a demand for online content where there isn’t adequate content to fill the need, and therein lies opportunity to create that content and fill that need.   Google knows the demand is there, and can track how many other searchers start searching for that same content….and then feed that demand to publishers who can benefit from creating great content to pull up on those results.

How Does Google Question Hub Work?

When Google recognizes that there is a new question asked through their search field and when they haven’t found content that effectively communicates a solution, they’re giving searchers the ability to submit their questions so that publishers can be made aware of the need for the content.

Google is collecting all of those questions and then has created an interface where businesses and publishers of content can see the demand for the content as it’s identified.   Here is a screenshot of how that looks for publishers when they’re browsing popular questions that have been posed through Google.

The businesses and publishers can then see the content creation opportunities and how popular they are, and identify the opportunities that can benefit their businesses.   This gives publishers a great tool in order to be out in front of content demand and ensure that they can fill those content gaps on the internet and be able to profit from that investment. 

PRNsit shared a video on Twitter browsing the interface of Google Question Hub so that you can have a better idea of what tools are available for publishers as you’re able to browse the questions by categories, submit content as an answer to those questions, and then track the performance of that content.

 Being able to understand what content creation opportunities can help lead to new conversions of online product sales, service sales, lead generation, etc. is important to grow valuable content that will reap eyeballs and profits in the future.

How Google Question Hub Will Impact Marketing?

Every product and service being sold is providing a solution to a problem that a potential customer is having, and by purchasing the product or service they are solving that problem.  The root of most searches on Google is users asking a question that they need a solution for and many times that solution is in the purchase of a product or service.   As companies are effectively identifying and distributing Q&A content that serves these needs, Google is reflecting that content in search results and leading new customers to the content and products that can solve those problems.

This connection between help content and marketing content is the future of content creation, and Google is enabling marketers to be aware of where the current content gaps are through Google Question Hub.   Established trends of Google queries are available through Google Trends, where you can see the interest level of popular queries over time.

But, what about the queries that haven’t reached a critical mass of queries in order to be identified as a trend yet?  Those opportunities will be addressed by Google Question Hub.  There, you’ll literally be on the ground floor of online content creation, and whoever is able to use that tool profitably will have a clear advantage over other content marketers.

How Answerbase Works with Google Question Hub

Answerbase is already in the business of ensuring that content gaps are filled through Q&A content creation, as we engage visitors to websites through them asking questions about products and services, and then those questions are published on pages optimized for Google to gobble up and display in results (SERPs).  As customers engage Answerbase’s Q&A tools on websites, we’re already able to judge content demand and give Content Insights to customers on what content they should consider creating in the future in order to fulfill the content demand.   Google Question Hub and working that data into Answerbase’s Content Insights allow’s us to enhance those recommendations further and gives businesses the tools to take the guess-work out of content marketing and focus on topics that they’re confident are in demand and can convert more sales.

Have Questions about Google Question Hub?

We encourage you to Contact an Answerbase Specialist who can give you more information about Google Question Hub and how it can help with your business’ content marketing efforts.

The post What is Google Question Hub? appeared first on Answerbase.

What’s the Norm with Product Q&A?

Ecommerce retailers who are putting Q&A content on their product pages, many times they have a static group of FAQs about the product.  Retailers who invest a bit more have a dynamic way to ask new questions and display the most commonly asked questions in a list below the form.   Those with larger communities even engage their customers to help answer questions related to products they’ve purchased in the past.

What you don’t see much of is the merchants understanding fully is that those question and answer pairs are many times valuable content marketing material, that are one of the most efficient ways of drawing more valuable customers to their store.   Best Buy is an example of an online retailer who has figured this out and has implemented product questions and answers in a way that not only increases conversions on their product pages but drives brand new customers to their online store in droves.

How is Best Buy Managing Product Q&A Content?

Best Buy recognizes that the most popular Q&A for each product is not only valuable in complementing the product pages, but each one of those product question and answer(s) combinations is a valuable piece of content in it’s own right and will satisfy the need of any potential customers that are asking similar questions on Google in the future.  What they’ve done is supported a landing page for each one of their product Q&A threads and Google recognizes that as a valuable long-tail search result and they drive traffic:

Customers are interested in the answer to their product questions before they are ready to purchase, so by dedicating a page for each product Q&A thread, Best Buy ensures that they will engage that customer with a page they’ll click through to and get the answer.  Then, on that landing page, Best Buy ensures that there is a call to action back to the product as seen here:

The intent of that visitor form search is high, they’re looking for a specific product that is solves a specific consideration and problem that they have, and they’re being serviced by content that provided the answers to a person with that same problem in the past.

The more quality the answers that you give in the Q&A engagement, the more likely Google is to feature that content even more prominently in the results.   See the below example where Google not only pulls up the result, but provides the content as a featured snippet and also shows the image of the product that can help satisfy the need.

These rich results can increase the click through to your content and help drive conversions.

Best Buy’s 3 Layers of Distributing Product Question & Answers

Best Buy has an approach that has 3 layers to making their Q&A content available to both users and search engines.

Layer 1 – Product Page Questions & Answers

This is where they engage users allowing them to ask their own questions and see the most popular questions about the product right on the product page.

You’ll notice they show how much Q&A engagement is available on hte page (similar to how Amazon manages that) and then leads users down to the Q&A content to fill in any information gaps related to the product.  You can see this example here, and then they give the option to “See All Questions” related to a product for customers who would like to see the full library of content.  This assists in both converting new customers as well as enhances the SEO of the product page.

Layer 2 – Product Questions & Answers List

This is where customers go if they’ve clicked on the “See All Questions” link, and shows a full list of all the question and answer threads that are available for that product.

You can see an example here, where you’ll notice that they have a clear call to action back to the product and a full list of valuable Q&A content related to that product.   This is valuable in attracting it’s own relevant search engine traffic and giving Google (and other crawlers) an easy way to get to the landing pages.

Layer 3 – Product Question & Answer Landing Page

This is where customers go if they click on the title of the question, and is a page dedicated to this specific product question and the answers that effectively address it.

You can see an example of this page here, and this page has the “QAPage” schema identifying the structured data within the page, so that rich results are supported on Google.  This is valuable in attracting traffic from Google, as customers asking similar product questions identify that the page is dedicated to providing a solution for that problem which increases click-through-rates to those pages and then leads the user to convert.

Best Buy has done a great job in displaying and distributing the content in a way that is easily accessible for both customers and Google to effectively find and lead them to a purchase of the related product.

How Valuable is This Approach to Product Q&A?

There are a couple little known secrets in managing product questions and answers in this manner, but they’re extremely valuable to the online retailers who have their product Q&A managed appropriately.  Answerbase has unique insights into this because we power this type of product Q&A engagement for ecommerce merchants.

Increased Average Lifetime Value of Customers

Answerbase sees that customers who manage the Q&A appropriately with these landing pages, the visitors that come into those Q&A landing pages through Google have an average lifetime value up to 2x higher than the other Google traffic that the online retailers are attracting to their store.   Why is that?  Because the intent of the visitors is high, they’re asking the same questions that other customers were asking when they were looking at a product on the retailers site and just a click away from adding it to their cart.

Year Over Year Organic Traffic Growth to Q&A Landing Pages

Answerbase has been able to see that the Q&A landing pages continue to grow search visitors year over year to that Q&A content as it continues to build.   See the chart below which only shows organic traffic that is going specifically to the Q&A content pages.

Anybody who is managing their product question and answer content appropriately should see clear and measurable results in organic traffic growth to their storefront.

Other Benefits You Should See from Product Q&A

The management of Q&A content to lead to results mentioned above is great for attracting new valuable customers to an online retailer, but there are other benefits that merchants should not settle for mediocre results because they also significantly impact the bottom line of their ecommerce presence.

Increased Conversions

If you have product Q&A implemented correctly on your product pages, you should be able to track the conversions that the Q&A engagement is assisting with and be very satisfied with the results.   Answerbase sees that up to 75% of questions that are asked and answered through the Answerbase platform convert to a sale, so that should provide a real and measurable lift to your conversions.

Reduced Support Costs

The creation of unique and valuable content isn’t only beneficial for SEO, but it also ensures that any customer in the future that asks on your product pages should immediately be shown a great answer if it’s a question that’s been asked before.  Answerbase sees that for mature knowledge bases of product Q&A content, up to 83% of the questions posed by visitors are answered automatically through existing content.

In Closing

Best Buy is a great example of product questions and answers done well.   At Answerbase, we’re passionate about this because we power this approach to product questions and answers for online retailers around the world to give those same results.  If you’re an online merchant who would like to see more examples of how product questions and answers can increase traffic and conversions on your site, you can schedule a demo with a Ecommerce Product Q&A specialist and we’ll talk through what product Q&A can do for you.

The post How Best Buy’s Ecommerce Team Hit It out of the Park with Product Q&A appeared first on Answerbase.

Merchants can reduce these returns by examining and learning from a tactic used in direct sales called Sales Qualification, which helps ensure that the product is the right fit for the potential customer.

This post will explain what sales qualification is and how ecommerce merchants can apply the concept to their online store to reduce ecommerce returns and increase profits.

What is Sales Qualification?

There is a part in the sales process called “Sales Qualification”, which is where the salesperson determines whether or not the potential customer is a good fit for the product that they are selling.   This process is different when selling products to customers through an online store, but the concept can benefit ecommerce merchants when it comes to reducing online returns.

Zoominfo defines Sales Qualification this way:

Sales qualification is the act of evaluating potential prospects to determine whether they possess the characteristics that make them a good fit for your product or service. In simpler terms – qualifying a lead or prospect means determining whether or not they are worth your time.

In the person to person sales process, Sales Qualification typically comes in the form proactively asking the potential customer a number of questions in order to determine if they’re a good fit for the product.   If they’re not a good fit, they won’t try to sell that potential customer because there is a good chance it’s not going to satisfy either them or the company selling the product.

How Sales Qualification Applies to Ecommerce Merchants

In the ecommerce space, the part in the definition of “determining whether or not they are worth your time” comes in the form of determining whether the product that they’re ordering is worth you packing and shipping the item…and the likeliness of that item being returned to you because the customer was not a good fit.

Up to 30% of products sold by ecommerce merchants are returned, showing a significant percentage of products being delivered that weren’t a fit for the customer.   That’s a very expensive problem.

Ecommerce merchants certainly won’t want to make each customer go through a questionnaire before they check out, that would be off-putting and you’d lose more sales than you’d save in returns.   What you do want to do is explore passive ways you can qualify your customers to ensure that the product is a good fit for their needs.  As a result, and you sell to  customers who are not likely to return the product afterwards and guide customers who aren’t a good fit to products that will effectively fulfill their needs.

How to Use the Concept to Reduce Returns

Let’s cover a few ways that you can passively confirm that the product is a great fit for the customer, so that the representation that they have in their minds and expectations are aligned with what will be delivered to their doorstep.

1) Confirm the Product’s Visual Representation

You want to ensure that the customer has a clear and accurate view of what the product is going to look like visually.   This typically comes in the form of quality product images, 360 views of the product, as well as product videos.   Letting them see the product at different angles allows them to inspect it and ensure that the picture they have in their head will be consistent with what they receive after shipping.

Product videos are great because you can have a person review the product, and the customer gets perspective of what a product will look like when in the hands of another person which may give perspective on size, dimensions,  and other aspects of the product that may not be 100% clear through just looking at an image.   There are negative reviews of products that say something like “This was much smaller/bigger than I expected”, you can help solve those misunderstandings by showing the product in context as another person holds the product in their hands in a video.

2) Confirm the Products Details and Specifications

Sometimes customers are using the product to fit a specific need with a very specific purpose, and product details are very important for these cases.  For example, if they’re looking for a house item which will fit within a specific place within their house or if they are looking for a replacement that needs to be compatible with another part, it’s important that they’re able to find out all the specifications they need in order to determine whether the product is a match for their needs.

Engaging product details are important to provide this information, as well as specification tables and diagrams which can help clarify exact length, height, width, and other details about the product that are important for the purchaser.

Make sure you provide these details in a way that let’s the customer find exactly what they may be interested within the description or specifications, and qualify themselves that the product is a fit for their needs.   This will save them a lot of headache and save you money, ensuring they get the right product that they’ll keep and not return.

3) Confirm Any Other Specifics They Want to Know About

There are bound to other specifics about a product that you don’t have covered in your images, descriptions, and specifications….or sometimes customers find it less painful to just order a product and return it for free than considering reading through all of the product specifications to ensure it’s exactly what they’re looking for.   Some product descriptions are very, very long…and not everybody wants to read through paragraphs to find the information that they’re interested in seeing.   You should make it easy for them to fill in these information gaps or find the specific piece of information they’re looking for, which will either seal the deal for that customer or save you from a return.

On the product page, this comes in the form of product questions and answers.  Give your users an easy way to specifically ask the question they have about the product and find a well-crafted answer.   This process not only helps you reduce returns, but you can also increase conversions.

We see that up to 75% of product questions answered through Answerbase convert to a sale, but for questions that reveal that the product may not be a good match for the customer…responses on Q&A can lead those customers to other products within your inventory that are a great match.   This not only increases conversions for the product that customers are looking at, but also turns potential returns into more conversions of other products where the purchase will stick.

In closing…

Everybody recognizes that online returns are a big problem, and costly.  Taking a tip from the sales process and sales qualification, you can passively qualify the visitors on your site to ensure they purchase products that are a great fit for their needs, which will be more profitable for your business.

The post How to Minimize Ecommerce Returns Through Passive Sales Qualification appeared first on Answerbase.