Jan 14, 2021

Walmart's New Recommendations for Basic Content

1P Suppliers

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Walmart is always looking for new ways to improve the online shopping experience for their customers. To help their suppliers provide better content for their items, the world's largest retailer recently began releasing new Style Guides for each product type group and category. But alongside the release of these new style guides, Walmart has made some significant changes to its usual recommendations for basic content (namely, product descriptions and key features).

Less is More? Sometimes, Yes!

When it comes to search engine optimization, the usual rule of thumb is that more content makes pages easier to find. But we've found that recent changes to Walmart's search algorithms prioritize lower word counts in the product description and key features fields for some categories. Depending on your product type, a high word count in your description or key features may now lower its search rank.

This is a big change from Walmart's previous recommendations of long word counts in the Key Features and Product Description fields. While some of these recommendations are reflected in Walmart's new style guides, our team has found that the standard for high-quality content in a category is now being calculated based on its current top-ranked pages. That means that, depending on your category, the “best practices” for the word count of the description and key features fields can change based on how your competitors are performing in search.

Especially if you're in a category without a new style guide released, the best way to determine whether you have too much or too little content is to follow your page's Content Quality Score.

A page's Content Quality Score is a metric directly tied to Walmart's search algorithms that measures how optimized it is for search on Walmart.com and Online Pickup & Delivery. Click here to read more!

Tell the Story with Enhanced Content

Of course, there's more to your product page than its search rank. It's crucial to ensure you're following Walmart's new recommendations to improve your Content Quality Score, but once a shopper has gotten to your page, it's your content's turn to convert them to a sale.

But in some categories, new, shorter guidelines for word count can make it nearly impossible to tell the whole story and really sell your product. When adding more words to your basic content lowers a page's Content Quality and discoverability, rich media and enhanced content is an even better way to provide great information and engaging content to your shoppers.

Rich Media, also called Enhanced Content (or A+ Content on Amazon), is a term for any content on an item page that goes above and beyond basic content. Click here to learn more about the kinds of Rich Media that SKU Ninja lets you add to Walmart item pages!

In many cases, adding enhanced content can even improve your page's discoverability on its own! Just like Walmart's search algorithms raise or lower an item page's search rank based on how much basic content it contains, adding enhanced content like product video or 360 views can help improve a page's Content Quality Score in certain categories.

Keep Up with Walmart Best Practices with SKU Ninja

In ecommerce, the only constant is change. The only way to be sure your product pages are performing as best they can is to stay on top of any changes to search algorithms and content requirements. This can be a big ask for teams stretched across a large catalog of items, or multiple retailers with differing standards.

SKU Ninja can help monitor and optimize your pages' Content Quality Scores, so your items are always eligible to show up in search results. Our Walmart Search Boost tool lets you stay up to date on changing algorithms and see the specific changes you need to make to improve an item's discoverability.

Plus, our Rich Media Hosting subscription is the easiest and most affordable way to get the enhanced content prioritized by Walmart's search algorithms onto your item pages! For just $5 a month, you can add a video to all of your product pages to help improve their discoverability and convert more shoppers.

If you want more information about Walmart's search algorithms and enhanced content recommendations, we'd love to talk to you! Just either check out our Belt Subscription Packages, fill out the contact form below, or email info@whytespyder.com, and we'll be in touch to learn more about your items and determine how SKU Ninja can help.

About SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder: SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder is a digital merchandising company and Walmart Connected Content Partner with more than a decade of experience helping brands win online. We combine innovative and precise software with ecommerce expertise to solve the unique problems of omnichannel professionals.

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