Hey there. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode. You know, everyone always asks me to talk about SEO, and I love to talk about SEO. But there is something else that most of my SEO students and clients actually need to be doing alongside their SEO updates if they want to maximize the results that they’re getting in terms of increasing their sales, and that is optimizing their product listings for better conversions.
See, all the traffic in the world isn’t going to increase your earnings if the product listing doesn’t convert those browsers, those shoppers to sales once they get to your resource. So that is why in today’s episode, I am sharing five questions to ask yourself if your product isn’t converting as well as you would like it to, and how to decide whether you should be working on SEO first, or product optimization first.
If you’ve heard me speak just about anywhere, you’ve probably heard me share the equation, that page views times conversion rate times price equals your sales. And if you want to increase your sales, then you need to increase one or all three of those factors. When it comes to increasing pageviews, the way that you would do that is to work on your SEO, or increase marketing for that product.
But when it comes to conversion rate and price, both of those come down to optimizing your product listing itself. In order to know if you need to update a product for conversions on TPT, you’re probably wondering what the average conversion rate even is or what a good conversion rate is. The statistic for you is that the average conversion rate on Teachers Pay Teachers is somewhere around six to 7%. So if your product is converting much lower than that, then you probably need to take a look at optimizing the product listing.
Once you’ve identified those products that need to be updated for better conversions, then it’s really important to take an objective look at the product. I know a lot of times we can get very emotionally invested in the products that we have created. There are babies after all, but when it comes to updating them for conversions, try to emotionally detach, take a step back and look at the product objectively.
Think about it through the lens of a teacher who is shot thing on TPT, What do they need to see? And what do they need to know in order to make a purchase of this particular product? It might be helpful to ask a TPT seller friend to look at your product for you. Maybe you can arrange a little trade off and look at each other’s products to get some fresh eyes on them.
Here are five questions that you can ask yourself when it comes to looking at your products to determine which things need to be updated. First of all, start with the cover does the cover look current? Can you tell from that small thumbnail in the search results or in your storefront, what the product is just by looking at the cover? It’s really important for those teachers who are browsing to be able to get a good feel for your product based on the title and the cover image that they see in the search results.
Because if they can’t tell what the product is, they’re not likely to be interested enough to click on it. So make sure that you are creating your cover images so that they can see a good image of what is included in the product and any vital information is big enough to read on the cover.
Your second question is once you get to that product listing page, have you used all three of the thumbnails. When I say use all three thumbnails, I mean, with images that you’ve actually created, not ones that were just automatically pulled from the product, you’ll want to use those to show off the product. The best practice for that right now is to use square images.
Question number three to ask yourself, do you have a PDF preview? If the answer to that is no, then you need to create one ASAP. This should be the first thing that you do if there’s no PDF preview, because TPT has told us time and time again, that one of the biggest factors in whether or not a buyer chooses to purchase a product they looked at is whether or not it has a PDF premium. So if you’re not creating those, take that extra step and create a preview for the product.
Your fourth question to ask yourself is, how’s my description? Is it thorough? Does it give teachers all the information they need about what skills are covered, about what is included in the product? Does it sell the product for you? If it’s not, then you might need to give the description a little update.
Question number five, how is your price? I always recommend looking at this one last, because all of those other factors tend to be more important than the price in terms of whether or not people will make a purchase. If people feel like a product is really valuable, they’ll purchase it regardless of the price up to a certain extent, because they see it as valuable. However, if you’ve already updated all of those other things, then you need to take a peek at your price.
I would recommend looking at other similar products in the marketplace to see if your price is competitive with those. Notice I did not say undercut everyone and charge less than everybody else. That’s not the direction we want to go. But make sure that your price is in line with the similar products that are in the marketplace. Or if your product is priced higher than others in the marketplace, that there’s a reason for that. For example, maybe yours includes differentiation options or additional styles of things that others don’t, maybe it just includes more activities than the others in the marketplace.
Those are all good reasons that yours would cost more. But those are also things that you will need to include in your description to make sure you’re selling that higher price tag. Once you have asked those five questions, you should have a plan together for what you need to be updating on your product. And you’ll want to get to work on making those updates.
One of the questions I get asked all the time about product listing optimization and SEO optimization is which one you should work on first. Now this is a lot like asking, which comes first the chicken or the egg. And it’s not that one without the other would be useless. You’ll see improvement from working on either of the two of these, but the best results always come from working on both of them.
As Jarrett from YDP, and I talked about last month on the podcast, you have a lot greater potential to grow your store by optimizing the existing products that you already have, than you do if all you do is create brand new ones, and you leave those old ones to fade away. So you definitely want to be working through your old products to keep your store growing. If you want to hear more of that conversation, you can check out Episode Six on using your TPT data.
What I recommend when it comes to making a decision about SEO versus product listing optimization is to let your data drive that decision. Take a look at the data, see what it’s telling you and let that be how you make your choice. If your products need more page views, but they’re converting really well start with SEO, if they need a higher conversion rate, because they’re not converting well then start with the product listing.
Now what about those products that need both, SEO help and conversion rate improvement, you really can go either way on those. For me, SEO is much faster and easier to do than updating those other parts of the product listing. So I would do that first. I like to update those, check my data and then come back and do the product listing optimization later.
But if you’re the opposite, and you can whip out amazing covers and previews in a flash, and that really lights you up, then you may want to start there first, see how it affects your conversion rate, and then work on your SEO. Either way, you’ll want to take one step at a time, so that you can compare the data and see what’s working and what’s not. Ultimately, your best results are going to come from doing both SEO optimization and product listing optimization. You really can start with either one!
Your action step for today’s episode is to sort your store by best sellers and just look at page one of the results. You might want to toggle the view to the grid view, so you can see all those covers and titles in a nice easy to look at grid. Give yourself the objective store checkup that I just went through with those five questions. Think about those products that are on the top of your store and give it an objective check up. What do you need to work on?
Now you might be wondering why I said to look at your best sellers, if their best sellers, they should already be doing great, right? Well, this goes right back to that conversation about how our store has so much more potential to grow if we work on our existing products. Just because something is a best seller doesn’t mean that there’s no more room for it to sell even more. In fact, those things that are best sellers are things that we have already tested and proven that teachers want and they are purchasing.
So, improving those to make them even better, has a lot of potential to increase your earnings. If you’d like a printable list of the questions that I just went through, you can download those in the show notes at Kristendoyle.co/episode12.
Thank you so much for listening today. If you want to learn more about analyzing your store data and updating your product listings, then I hope you’ll join me in the next profit booster boot camp session. You can get all the details at profitboosterbootcamp.com. Talk to you soon!
