When it comes to ecommerce, SEO and Content go hand in hand! Much of the time, just optimizing your item pages' content can go a long way toward increasing your organic rank in search results. This is because most search engines use a page's content to determine how relevant it is for the user's search terms. Walmart's is no different—their search feature is focused on showing shoppers pages with the content they're looking for.
As Walmart Connected Content Partners, our team has lots of experience helping suppliers optimize their items for Walmart.com and Online Pickup & Delivery. Here are a few pointers to help you on your way to winning big on Walmart:
The Importance of Basic Content
So much goes into optimizing item pages on Walmart.com, but it all begins with basic content. Your product page's title, basic photography, product description, key features, and back-end specifications are an essential part of ecommerce for shoppers, retailers, and suppliers alike. Shoppers are looking for it, so retailers require it, so suppliers have to have it!
There are many reasons why basic content like your pages' titles, photography, and product descriptions are significant. For one, this content is the first (and often only) content a shopper will see when encountering your product on Walmart.com. An item's title and first image, also called the hero image, is the only part of your item-level content that shows up in search results. Having an easily understandable title and a compelling hero image alongside your item's price and reviews can improve your item's click-through rate!
But your job isn't over when the shopper has clicked on your item! After they've made it to your page, the shopper can see the rest of your images and product description and use it to make decisions about your product. Photography and product descriptions that make a compelling case for your item's benefits and answer any questions they have can give your shopper the confidence to click add to cart!
Adding Rich Media is a great way to improve conversion on your product pages by going beyond basic content! Click here to read more.
What are Key Features?
When constructing the content for an ecommerce item page, it's necessary to consider all different types of shoppers. Long product descriptions are great for shoppers that like to get all the information they can, but not everyone is willing to read through 4000 characters of text.
That's where Key Features come in: a bulleted list below your product description that outlines the most essential information about your item. Many shoppers (and internet users in general) prefer bulleted lists to quickly get the gist of what a page is trying to communicate. That's why Walmart.com and SKU Ninja have two separate entry fields for Product Description and Key Features.
Fill In the Details!
One of the most important things you can do with your basic content is going beyond what's mandated by Walmart's style guides and requirements. eCommerce is competitive by its very nature, and you're not likely to beat your competitors in search and conversion without keeping up with them in terms of item-level content.
It's easy to look at a long list of specifications and only fill out what you think is most relevant to communicate about your item. But filling in details like your item's weight, dimensions, flavor, etc. not only makes your page more informative, it also allows shoppers to use Walmart.com's filtering functionality to find your item. These back-end attributes are also a key part of SEO, or search engine optimization!
Basic Content and Search Engine Optimization
It's not just humans reading your item-level content… it's robots, too! Among other things, Walmart's search algorithms use the content on your product page to determine if it's relevant to show up in the results for a given search on Walmart.com or Walmart Pickup & Delivery. Walmart wants to show its shoppers the best content they can when they click on an item page. To do this, they incentivize pages with good content in search and penalize those without it.
But Walmart isn't simply checking the words you use in your content, either. Its search algorithms take into account the quality of your item-level content, like titles not being in all capital letters, or your product description having a certain number of characters. These algorithms assign every page on Walmart.com and Online Pickup & Delivery a score that allows them to audit the content quality of their catalog of item pages.
These scores, called Content Quality Scores, are a score from 1 to 100 that Walmart uses to measure the amount and quality of content on your page, including copy, images, rating, reviews, and even rich media. Pages with a low enough Content Quality Score can be hidden from search results on Walmart.com. Click here to read more about how Walmart measures the quality of product pages.
Want to know exactly what you need to change about your item's content to make it more discoverable in search? Check out Walmart Search Boost!
Other Factors in Your Page's Search Rank
Pricing
Content is one of the most fundamental elements of your item pages for determining search rank, but it isn't everything. Walmart is committed to Every Day Low Prices—so much so that an item's price actually factors into how the retailer ranks search results.
Note: Speaking of pricing, it's also important to keep an eye on the Buy Box. Walmart sometimes allows third-party resellers to share an item page with suppliers if the item being sold is the same. If a reseller's price is low enough, they can take control of the Buy Box, so shoppers are buying from them when they click Add to Cart instead of you.
Sponsored Products
Advertising, also called Paid Search, is another facet of selling items online that can't be ignored. Suppliers can work with Walmart Connect (formerly named Walmart Media Group) to put their item at the top of search results as Sponsored Products. These pay-per-click ads are bid on by competing sellers and item pages. You can see which items in Walmart search results are there because of these PPC product listings by a Sponsored Product tag under their image.
This may seem like the easy way to get your item pages in front of more shoppers. However, Walmart still requires a certain level of quality content from the item pages placed on the first page of search results. That's right—to become eligible for paid search on Walmart, you'll need to work on your organic search rank using the methods detailed above.
Walmart Connect recently made their advertising solutions even more valuable by unifying ad placement across Walmart.com and Online Pickup & Delivery. Suppliers with items transactable on Walmart.com may now serve their Sponsored Product ads across both platforms. For anyone with items on .com and OPD, the time to get serious about Sponsored Products on Walmart is now!
Want to know what keywords your items are eligible to advertise for on Walmart.com & Online Pickup & Delivery? SKU Ninja's newest tool, Campaign Wizard, analyzes your items to recommend the keywords that offer it the greatest search rank increase. Click here to learn more and get a demo!
SKU Ninja's Content Management Solutions
At SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder, we have years of experience optimizing item pages for Walmart.com. We've worked with Walmart on big ecommerce projects and have a deep understanding of content and search on Walmart.com and Walmart Online Pickup & Delivery.
SKU Ninja is our all-in-one software platform for managing and monitoring items on Walmart.com, created to simplify and automate our work with Walmart eCommerce. The tools in SKU Ninja were designed to meet the specific needs of Walmart eCommerce professionals, with new solutions being tested and released all the time!
Check out just a few of the awesome tools in SKU Ninja for managing your basic content on Walmart.com and Walmart OPD:
Basic Content Management - SKU Ninja's Basic Content Management Software (or Basic Content CMS) lets you edit the title, description, images, and back-end attributes of your Walmart items with our easy-to-use editor! No more spreadsheets—update your items right from your SKU Ninja dashboard, anywhere you have an internet connection.
Content Comparison Tool – SKU Ninja's Content Comparison Tool automatically finds any discrepancies between the content live on your Walmart page vs. what you've entered into SKU Ninja. From there, you can import the content Walmart has, or submit all the content in SKU Ninja for publishing.
Content Trends – Content Trends keeps an eye on your item-level content on Walmart to alert you of any unexpected changes. Monitor your page's title, description, key features, and images for drop-offs or changes, as well as your price, reviews, ratings, and more!
Walmart Search Boost - The best way to improve your Walmart items' Content Quality Scores. From your Walmart Search Boost tool in SKU Ninja, you can see the biggest issues affecting your Content Quality Scores with specific instructions on how to improve them. Use SKU Ninja's content management software to make the changes necessary to improve your item's discoverability and optimization for Walmart.com and Online Pickup & Delivery!
Want to get a demo of SKU Ninja and learn how it can help your Walmart items? Email info@whytespyder.com to talk to someone on our team and start your catalog of items toward winning on Walmart!
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 ecommerce expertise with innovative and precise software solutions to meet the unique needs of omnichannel professionals.
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