What Should Brands Focus on in Terms of Content on Walmart.com?
Creating a strong digital presence, including brand content on Walmart.com, is essential to growing your brand and helping it succeed. However, narrowing in on the most important steps to improving your content can be difficult.
The big question: What should brands be paying attention to in terms of their content on Walmart.com?
This answer could be very long-winded and complex. While each portion of the page holds its own merit and importance, there are quick and easy ways to meet Walmart’s new requirements, differentiate from other retailers, and appeal to the consumer when showing up in search.
It comes down to focusing on your title, description sections, and images.
The Art of the Searchable Title
You must be strategic with your title and differentiate from what is on Amazon.
People often copy and paste their Amazon titles into Walmart, but Walmart has new requirements and style guides. When they switched over to the Item 360 system, they zeroed in on about 75 characters within the title. Amazon allows up to 200 characters, so you can see where copying and pasting can be an issue.
So how do you strategically create a shortened title? Focus on Keywords.
The title is the most heavily weighted written content in terms of search, which means brands must be extremely purposeful with the title they choose. At Harvest Group, we focus on putting those top keywords into the title because of the importance it carries in differentiating your brand from others.
The Importance of Description Sections
Many suppliers focus more on A+ content below the fold than they do on the written description. Amazon has smaller character allowances for written content outside of the six bullet points and short paragraphs, so most content is seen in the A+ section. While this is an important section at Walmart as well, A+ content does not give the same value as written content under “About This Item.”
What brands may not understand is the A+ content is read by the algorithm as images. Essentially, any words you put below the fold are not indexed as search terms. This means that you must put the time into your Description and Key Feature sections to get those keywords to be indexed and read by the search algorithm, ultimately giving your brand a platform to move higher up in rank.
Also, Walmart does not currently show any A+ content on OPD. If you have not built out the written content, your OPD items will look incomplete and mostly blank. Walmart’s new style guides require at least 100+ words in the Site Description and 50+ words in the Key Features section. Both attributes reside under the “About This Item” section, and they are paramount to both a healthy item score, as well as speaking to the algorithm.
An Image Speaks a Thousand Words
With shopping via app and browsers on smartphones increasing, consumers are more inclined to scroll through images to learn more about a product. Your keywords and content help your item show up in search, but it is many times the images that move a consumer to conversion. Below are a few practices to keep in mind when creating or updating imagery:
- Take Up Space – Cut down on the white space around your item and take up as much room as possible. The larger the actual item, the easier it is for consumers to see on their phones.
- Badges or Enhancement? – GS1 standards state that using badges is not an acceptable or compliant Mobile Ready Image option. Instead of building out a Mobile Ready Image using a badge, invest in the time to manipulate the image to increase the size of important callouts so they’re easy to see on a smaller screen.
- Multiple Angles = Not Helpful – Seeing eight different angles of an item is not helpful to consumers. Instead, build out infographics, lifestyle images, and other interesting visuals to show consumers the benefits of the item or how to use the product. This is also helpful when consumers choose not to scroll down to read the Description and Key Features sections.
Great, Searchable Content Leads to Conversions
As more and more consumers are turning to online shopping on both their computers and their phones, they are looking for brands that stand out and provide the necessary content to keep them on that page. But first and foremost, they will only get a chance to interact with your item when it shows up in search. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your A+ content and images are if they are buried pages deep on key search terms. The key is focusing on the quick, controllable steps to appeal to the consumer: Title, Written Description, and Images are a great place to start.
There are many important pieces to building out brand presence, item pages, and general content on Walmart.com, so keep in mind that the three points above are nowhere near an exhaustive list. If you’re interested in learning more about the world of digital and how Harvest Group can help your brand build successful content on Walmart.com, feel free to reach out!
