Drive and Convert

Today Jon takes a look at how to improve your category pages on your website. He'll explore what you should know about headers, footers, navigation, bread crumbs, and more! For help optimizing your category pages: https://thegood.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Ryan: Hello Jon, and welcome to the podcast. Ryan: I was digging through one of our shared clients analytics, and this is a rather large international brand that most of our listeners would probably recognize if we mentioned their name. And outside the home page, the largest volume of traffic to their site is condensed into just a couple category pages. Now that's not unusual for a lot of major brands because of Google's algorithm, on the organic side, favoring category pages over product pages. But it also means that there's a huge opportunity for a brand capturing a lot of this traffic to really make that traffic work better on category pages specifically. Ryan: So through this, I'd really love to hear some of your suggestions and best practices on improving those category pages. And maybe even at least some tests people can be testing as they're looking at their category pages to make some improvements. Kind of like our CRI name we coined. What do you think of that category pages and the importance of them? And should we continue down this path? Jon: I love it. Let's gain some knowledge on this. Ryan: Fantastic. So most of the listeners probably haven't had the amazing opportunity I have of hearing you talk about landing pages as much, and just seeing some of your tear downs. And so as with most of these, let's start at the top and kind of work our way down, and even some of your general best practices, probably, in header navigation can be applied to other places of the site. Especially if you keep it consistent. But do we need to think about mobile and desktop separately in this scenario? Or just pick one and go with it? What's your usual recommendation? Jon: I would recommend that we start with desktop and keep it to that for today. The reason being is that even with e-com, I think we're seeing the vast majority of traffic is now on mobile, but still a very, very large majority of conversions are happening on desktop. Now that varies from site to site, of course, but I do believe in what we see here at the good on a daily basis is conversion kings is still on desktop. And so it always makes sense to start there. The other reason is that if you fix your desktop experience and you have a responsive site, that should, for the most part, filter down to your mobile website. And so there's no longer just a desktop and a mobile version of a site. It should be responsive or adaptive for the most part. And so with that in mind, I would highly recommend starting with desktop. And then of course you could look at mobile later, but I think for the point of today's show, we could just stick with desktop. Ryan: Yeah. And if you do maybe have a mobile site and a desktop site, you may need to contact us because we may have some abilities to fix that [inaudible 00:03:12], because that's probably a struggle for your business. There's maybe some lower hanging fruit for you, before you get into Jon's conversation about it. Jon: The number of sites I still see, it's dwindling. But there is still a number of sites out there that they have mobile on a separate domain. And that's always... It's like M dot, the domain dot com. That's when I know there's a bunch of opportunity there to increase sales and conversions. Ryan: God, John knows he's going to make that company a lot of money when they listen to them. Ryan: Okay. So let's start right at the header, very top as you're scrolling down this page as soon as you come onto it, a lot of companies do things that are not great in the header. What are some of the things that they're putting in there maybe that aren't needed or that distract from the actual conversion that they're attempting to get these people to take on the site? Jon: Well, I think the first thing is that it always blows my mind when I see a header, and these brands invested so much to get people to their site, right? Whether it be content marketing or paid ads or SEO, whatever it is. And then they immediately show them social icons, and show them ways to bounce off the site. Right? Social is great for getting people to your site, but once they're there, keep them on your site. Don't send them back out to those channels. And so really be looking in the header to keep people on a site, as opposed to sending them back off through something like social links or icons, things of that sort. That's the biggest one I see. Ryan: Okay. So as far as distractions, social is the biggest issue there. What are the things that maybe companies are missing out on in that header that they should be thinking about putting into them? Jon: Well, I think that the biggest thing people miss out on is just communicating very simply what the brand is, what the value proposition is. Jon: Now, most people don't think about including that in the header. And I'm not suggesting putting your entire company story there, your entire value prop. But what I am saying is you can communicate these things through perhaps your navigation and the language that's being used there through the utility navigation, through what's the lines of texts that goes right next to your logo, right? Jon: So a lot of people will just put a logo up and expect that because they're on your website, they know exactly what you do. Well, think about it through the eyes of a new to file customer. That customer just got to your site by clicking on a link that a friend posted on social. They have a little bit of context, but it would be great to get that reinforced and the first place, especially in Western cultures, folks are going to look is the top left corner of your site. That's generally where people put their logo, but then they miss the opportunity there of including additional context. Could be just one sentence or one line, does not have to be very huge and it can be blended in with the logo, even. Ryan: Dang it. I am taking notes. I think I need to go to some of my brands and add some, maybe, lines of contexts. Jon: Well, if you want a good example just go to thegood.com and look what we do in the top left hand corner right next to our logo. Ryan: No, that's brilliant. And I think as a business owner myself, and working with brands constantly, I'm in the business too often that I don't step out of it often enough and think about the perspective of a brand new user. I clicked on a link, maybe not even necessarily thinking before I clicked, and boom. Logo. I'm supposed to know what you do right before that, but probably I don't. Jon: Well Ryan, this applies to you based on what I'm hearing right now, but it also applies to almost every e-com brand and e-com manager. Is that it's, and I've probably said this a hundred times on this show already, but it's very difficult to read the label from inside the jar. Right? You are so close to this, you probably helped to wire frame out the site, design it, define the navigation, lay out all the content. And so you're so close to that, that you know what each link does, you know what the site is, you know your value prop. So it doesn't occur to you that other people might not get that, might not understand it. And it could use a little assistance there. Ryan: Yeah. And you've helped me a lot on navigation so I'm going to jump into that in a second. But before that, site search is a often misguided location on the site. Do you recommend that as high up as you can, as obviously as you can in the header? Or do you recommend other places on the page for that? Jon: I am not opposed to having search be front and center. Having search front and center is great for people who are second time visitors or repeat visitors to your site. They know exactly what they're looking for. Think about things like a car parts dealership, right? Or car parts retailer. People may come and know exactly what model number for that very specific part that they need. They're definitely going to know what car model that they want to put that on, so they might just search by that car model. So anyway you can give people a shortcut down the funnel, and skip steps of the funnel so that they can just get to exactly what they need as quickly as possible, is better. And I can tell you that search is going to convert twice as much, if not more, than just a regular visitor. So encouraging people to use search can really help boost conversions and sales. Ryan: Wow. That is an impressive stat. So just on average from what you see when somebody uses at least a decent search, because there's different levels of search quality- Jon: Of course. Ryan: ... On a site, but an average search you see approximately 50% increased conversion rate on the traffic that uses search versus doesn't? Jon: Right. And an easy win for listening to this is just look at your top five, maybe 10, search terms that people are using and search those yourself and see what the results are. They're likely lackluster. You can easily fix that, just go through your product detail pages that are relevant and add some additional meta information to those pages to have them pop up in search results. Things like common misspellings or the plural of an item. I can't believe how many times people don't think to add an asset at the end of an item because people may search for it that way. And also just make sure that the search results page... The results themselves matter, but also that search results page that shows those results needs to be optimized as well. A lot of people just forget about it and just show no context at all. They just show the title of the page and link to it. Why not have the description there? You already should be, on your product detail pages, having some meta-description that Google can pick up, why not display that there if it's already part of the page? Ryan: No, that's great. And I think making sure that a search that happens on the site has a listing of products, generally, make sure that you can look at that in an incognito window when you scrape the URL and paste it. That way you can use it, from a traffic generation perspective, you can drive traffic from a paid search ad. But also, if you're having enough people search that on your site, you should probably make that a category page so that Google can start indexing that as well, because you're probably not alone on your site in people searching for that product. Or group of products. Jon: Exactly. Yeah. And an easy way to find out what people are searching for, just go into your Google analytics. Most platforms, I mean they all have a little bit different perhaps, but most eCommerce platforms, the search results page is just something that ends in a question mark S equals. So if you figure out what that URL pattern is, and then you can just run a filter for that question mark S equals or whatever, and then you can understand how many times people are hitting each of those search terms. Jon: So it's pretty simple to figure out with about five minutes of work and I can promise you it will increase your conversions immediately. Ryan: Awesome. Okay, one area you've helped me a lot in sites and understanding how to improve the experience for the users is navigation. And a lot of companies tend to do this wrong. They seem to think that more is better. What do you often suggest to companies when it comes to navigation? Jon: Keep it to five items or less, first of all. Anything over that and people just assume that it's going to be a lot of work and they're not at your website to do work, right? So they just like, "I don't want to weed through all these options," and it becomes more taxing than it needs to be. What I would recommend here is you keep it to five items, but also have the navigation copy, be in the context of your customer, not of yourself. What I mean by that is so many brands try to promote themselves in the navigation. They have things like about us. Nobody's coming to your website to learn about us. Now they may want to learn more about you, but not in the main navigation. They typically will scroll down to the footer and look for that, or that information that's on your about us page should be throughout your site in places that people are actually looking for it in context. Jon: So a lot of people will do things like put home as the first navigation item. Really, we all know, we've been trained over years, that if you clicked the logo in the top left hand corner, it's going to take you to the homepage. So you can eliminate home out of your navigation. That's a real easy one. Also, highly recommend if you're an e-com site and you have only a handful of categories, that you just list the high level categories in your navigation and leave it at that. That will do two things. It clearly tells people what you sell, how you can help them. And in addition to that, it gives them a quick and easy way to get to the place they want to go to. So that again, they're skipping steps that are in that funnel by having to kind of continue to drill down and find it. Jon: So there's a lot that can be done in navigation. It needs to be clear. It needs to be concise. You need to keep it to five items. And you need to try to keep yourself out of the navigation whenever possible. Ryan: Got it. Now on many category pages I will see, in addition to the top navigation, a left hand navigation or kind of a filtering system on the left hand side of the category page. Do you have an opinion on if that is good, bad, helpful, indifferent? Jon: I think it depends on the amount of product that you're trying to sell. So let's talk about that. We were actually, just before we got on the recording here, we were talking about a shoe manufacturing brand that had a left hand navigation that was filtering, that contain, I think, 40 to 50 different check boxes, right? That you could filter by. Right? And the problem with that, I mean, they had every single shoe size as a filtering option. It wasn't a dropdown, it was just a whole bunch of check boxes. So imagine being a consumer and trying to filter, but you have to look through all of these items just to find the ones that are relevant to you. It's really not that helpful. In the end it actually, I would argue, makes it more complicated. Jon: Filtering in that way can be helpful. I think it needs to be a high level filter. What are the main differentiating points? And then once they get down to the product level within that category, then you could start doing some other points, like size, availability, in stock, out of stock, et cetera. So helpful, but it depends. And the thing it depends on is how many products are you selling? If you have a handful of products, then you don't need it. People will scroll and look at your six or eight categories. If you have 50 categories, so many that you really just can't list them all on a page. Then of course you need some filtering for categories. Ryan: Got it. Okay. Makes sense. I've seen some that are great on that left hand side and the other ones that I get lost and I just leave. Ryan: So on each category page, generally speaking, best practices are to have a piece of content for the search engines, usually three or four sentences talking about that category. It's great for SEO. A lot of platforms default to having a place for that content at the very top. Have you seen that impact conversion rates being at the top, the bottom, the side, or is it kind of like it hasn't mattered too much to what you've seen? Jon: Well, I think that ideally I would put it below. If you need it for SEO purposes, that is. Right? Because most of the time that SEO type of content is not going to be helpful to the consumer. You're trying to write for Google, you're not writing for a consumer. So in that sense, I would get it out of the consumer's way. But I do think that some content above the products on a category page could be helpful in letting people know A, where they are. So any type of wayfinding you can do there, that type of stuff can be really helpful. I do think that if you're running a promotion on one category, that could be a great place to do it. If you have a little bit, or just maybe even some branding stuff where you have an image that relates to that category, showing it in use, something of that sort, can be really, really helpful. Jon: Say you sell tents and you are showing a family and you're on the category page for four people tents, right? And so you show a family camping and are sitting around a campfire with the big tent in the background. Right? Something like that can be helpful. You're setting the context and the tone. Ryan: Now also at the top, a lot of times you're going to see bread crumbs. And I've heard some good things from you about breadcrumbs and some bad things about breadcrumbs. So how do you decide whether or not breadcrumbs are helpful? Or are they always a terrible idea? Jon: I'm not really a fan of breadcrumbs. I think at this point that what has happened, it's a hold over from SEO practices of yesterday. It's not something that I see quite often anymore that is actually helpful for a consumer. And typically you're just giving them information either that they're already aware of, or that they don't really need. And if they want to go back up a level to the homepage, for instance, because you're only on a category so you're probably one level deep, maybe two. At that point they're probably just going to click the logo and go home or look at your main navigation. So overall, likely not that helpful. It's just another piece of content you're asking your visitor to wade through before they get to the content that they really are at your page for. Ryan: Okay, good. And so, just a general question going deeper, do you like them more on product pages that can get you back to a category page? Or is it just kind of across the board breadcrumbs are not a great idea? Jon: I think that it's helpful to have a navigational item that takes people up one level. Now, when you say breadcrumb I think that it starts out with homepage, next page down category page then, then your product detail page, right? So now you're four or five items long. Most people put the entire page title in those. It's not just so and so category. Look, the breadcrumb typically is dynamically built and the way that the platforms do it is that they will use the entire page title. And so they put that into the breadcrumb. Now your breadcrumb ends up being like 300, 400 characters long. It's massive. It's stretched across the entire page. It's distraction. It's not really helpful either at that point. And all of the eye tracking that we've done at the good over all these years, people never look at the breadcrumb. It becomes blindness because they see it and they stop, maybe for a split second, but they're definitely not reading the entire breadcrumb. And that's why I say it becomes a distraction and it gets in the way. Because you're making people stop and think before you're giving them the content you want. Ryan: Got it, okay. So sitting on a category page, you see a list of all the products. More and more often on a lot of these SAS platforms, I'm seeing the ability to add to cart from the category page or even just a kind of a quick view, popup JavaScript. Have you seen some direction on whether either one of those or both of those as good or bad? Jon: I personally am not a fan of those. Unless you have a product that's like a refill or something like that, where you have a limited number of products and you have a product that somebody is coming to the site and is quickly looking for that product and knows they're going to want to buy it without having to see any additional details. Jon: Here's the thing, on category pages people are still looking and browsing and trying to find the product or service that is going to solve their pain or their need. And the challenge here is that you're putting a really high intent to purchase call to action by saying add to cart, likely when they're not at the stage where they're ready add to cart. And if you just give them one image and a title, and maybe it shows the stars and the price, and then says add to cart, I would think most products, that's not enough to get somebody to purchase. So you're blowing an opportunity to send them to a page that you can convince them and show them all the wonderful benefits of your product and how great everyone else says it is in the reviews, and show it in use, and all these other things. So you're shortchanging yourself by just having the small little thing that comes up, gives minimal details and then asks people to add it to the cart. Likely not a good idea. Ryan: Probably [inaudible 00:21:29] in the quick view as well, just from, if nothing else, an analytics perspective. Where it's going to be much more complex to track that process or that funnel like category page, product page, purchase. Whereas if I go quick view, it's got to be an actions in Google analytics, if it's a JavaScript overlay, you don't get to do as much optimization on the JavaScript overlay popup necessarily. Jon: Yeah. Ryan: That's what I would say. Jon: You end up recreating that funnel in Google analytics and it's a lot of extra work. And I just think all of the negatives outweigh any of the positives. Then people say, "Well, I added this to make it easy for people to add to cart." Well, if they're not ready to add it to cart then it's not easier. Ryan: Moving down, anything else that I kind of skipped in that middle page where we jumped into the footer? You've seen products, is there a good way to put products? How many across? How many deep? How many products on a product page makes sense? What's your default response to that? Jon: I think on the category page, there's so many times where people will do a couple of things. They'll list hundreds and hundreds of products here. I think that's obviously the best use case for filtering, and I would do that filtering at the top of the page. Jon: Great example of this is we helped, a handful of years ago, to optimize Easton Baseball's website. Now, if you don't know what Easton Baseball is, they're the number one supplier of little league aluminum bats. In little league college, about 99% of swings are done with an Easton bat. They don't do anything in the major league baseball because they don't do anything with wood and aluminum's outlawed. So what does that mean? Well, the vast majority of people coming to the site are parents looking to buy their son or daughter a baseball bat. Or a softball bat. And if you went to their category page, all you saw was a wall of grid of bats. And if you can imagine what a little picture of a bat looks like online, they all look the same. Jon: They're all these sticks that are different colors, maybe. Right? But you can't communicate out of that picture. What the benefit is between the different bats, right? And they have wildly different prices. I mean, you can get a hundred dollar Easton bat and you could go all the way up to, I think, a five or $600 Easton bat. And so if you think about it, you're a parent, you get really confused. And right away, you're just upset, right? You're like, "Man, I don't know what bat to get. I'm going to be here all day clicking through all of these." And you just get frustrated really quickly. You probably just log off and go to your sports sporting goods store and just ask the guy which bat you should buy. Who's just working the counter. Not a great experience. Jon: And so once we dug in a little bit, what we found was that there are four or five different leagues, little league being one of them, that have certifications for different bats. And if your bat that you start swinging with does not have that logo of certification on it, then the umpire is supposed to not let you swing with that bat. And so the big problem is that all these parents were buying the bats based on price or the color they thought their kid would like best or whatever that is, and would end up getting to the game and the bat wouldn't be able to be used. And that's a huge let down, not only for the parent who just invested all this time trying to figure this out and got through that frustrating experience, but then the child who is up at the plate to swing, and they're being told that they have to use someone else's bat. Jon: It was creating a really poor brand experience. And what we found was that there were a couple of things parents knew about their children. What league they were playing in, and then they knew what style of hitter that the person was. So were they swinging for the fences or are they somebody who's just trying to get on base or something in between, perhaps. And then they generally knew what size of child they needed. So right? The bat is going to be different weights based on the size of the person swinging it. So they would say, "Okay, well I have a 12 year old. He can probably swing a heavier bat than my six year old," for instance. Right? So generally you have an idea of what weight you need based on the child who's swinging the bat. Jon: So what we did was we added some filtering and we made it three quick questions. With easy dropdowns. What league is your child playing? What type of hitter are they? And then do you know what weight bat you should be using? And usually what we found, we came to that third one because coaches would often tell the parent, "Buy this weight of bat for your son or daughter." So they already had that knowledge that they could bring. So what was really great there was we turned a wall of bats into something that now became three to four options. You answered those questions and it gives you a couple of options and a range of price points. And then you could decide, for your budget, what would work best and what was the bonus of stepping up a level? Jon: And it took all the frustration out of it. And their sales went up online 200, I think, 240 something percent Euro per year. Just by taking the pain point out of their category page. Ryan: So you're saying CRO has a return on an investment? Ryan: Little shameless plug for Jon's skill set there. Jon: We wouldn't have been doing it for 11 years if there's not a return here, I can tell you that. But at the same point, I think that it's all about just increasing that consumer ease of use. And if you just have a laundry list of products on a category page, that's not very useful. Especially if they all look the same or there's very minimal difference, or if they're all wildly different products. That also was a problem. And so it's like, "Where do you start as a consumer?" You think about walking into Walmart. If you didn't know what you wanted, when you walked into Walmart, you're going to be really overwhelmed because they sell everything. Jon: Yeah, it's a very similar type of experience to that feeling that somebody would have, and you want to make it as easy to use and help them to... Let them know they're in the right place, and help them make that decision as quick as you can. Ryan: Got it. And so I would advise people, a lot of times what I've heard you say, is take your category page to Starbucks. Buy somebody coffee and have them try to do something on it, to try to see some of that, because I'm guessing the Easton people didn't even conceptually think about that. Like, "No, we have all these bats. We know which one you want. Just get this one." Rather than, "Oh, you're not a parent trying to buy a bat." Jon: That's exactly it, is that they were too close to the product. They were inside the jar, and they didn't understand the pain points that the parents were having because the parents don't know as much about the product as the staff did at Easton. Ryan: Got it. Okay. So in conclusion, we've got all the way down to the bottom of the page. We've seen all the products. What are some of the things and quick best practices to be looking at in the footer of the category page? And what are some of the things you see that people do wrong down there? Jon: Well, the first thing in the footer that most people will do is they just dump all their links, extra links, down there. And it's just a grid of link after link, after link, no order to them. Maybe they put a header above them, but generally not that helpful. Jon: The first thing you should do in your footer is you should repeat your main navigation down there. And it should be the first thing on the left hand side of your footer. That way people don't have to scroll all the way back up to continue the shopping experience. If people scrolled all the way down to your footer, they are interested in your company and in your products and they want to continue shopping. So give them an easy way to do that. Ryan: And then do I add in all the navigation links you made me take out? At the top. Jon: I think there's a place here for a secondary navigation, and there's generally room for it. So that's a good thing you could add here. I think that another thing that you could add in here is your email sign up. That's always a great place. If people are still interested, but they're not ready to buy, they reached your footer, that's a good time to say, "Hey, you know what? Sign up for email and we can stay in touch." Ryan: You mean if they ignored my popup giving them 20% off their first order if they signed up with an email? Jon: Yeah. If you have those popups around by now, we're going to have some big issues because you obviously have not been listening to the questions you ask me. Yeah. Ryan: Yeah. Do not have popups. Everybody listening to this, do not have popups for email. Please put it in the footer. Jon: And maybe we'll do a whole episode on popups. And then I- Ryan: It'd be very short. Ryan: Simple answer, don't have it. Jon: Yeah. You can get me really riled up if you just keep asking me about them. Jon: Yeah. And I think the thing that should also be on the site in the footer there is your contact information. And that should be in the bottom right hand corner. And I'm always surprised by the number of sites that don't have contact information in their bottom right hand corner. But here's the thing, it increases trust if people see that you have a way to get ahold of you, but more importantly just put a physical address there. Let them know that you're not running the site out of your parents' basement. I mean, even if you are, just list your parents' address on there. It doesn't matter, right? Nobody's going to show up to this address. What they do want to know is that you're a viable business that's not just drop shipping and with no care. That you are actually reachable by either phone or support email. Ideally the physical address is really just a reassurance tool. We see that trust increases dramatically if you list one. So I would highly recommend that. Jon: So having your contact information in the bottom right hand corner is just standard practice. That's where people are going to go if they want to get ahold of you. Somebody comes to your site, they're immediately going to scroll to the bottom right hand corner if they want to reach out to you. Ryan: Yeah, I can actually vouch for this. Recently I actually didn't purchase from a site because they didn't have an address. That just, it made me concerned like, "Oh, you're just drop shipping, you're living on the internet, you're a fly by night organization." Just surprised me after I got done. I was like, "They just didn't have an address and that's all that caused me to not buy from them? That was weird." Jon: Yeah. It's surprising, right? I mean, the return on investment in this is pretty darn high because all you have to do is go to mailboxes et cetera, or a UPS store or any of those places, right? And just get a box from them for, what is it? Five bucks a month? And nobody knows that that's the address, right? People aren't Google Mapping this address. They're literally just saying, "Is it there? If it is, okay, I feel better." Ryan: Yeah. And I mean my wife and I, we have five businesses and live where we registered a lot of the businesses. And I have them on the internet, you can find my home address and nobody comes to us. Thankfully. Because I want to keep it that way, keep my privacy. Jon: Well now we're all going to show up. Ryan: Yeah. Ryan: But I think it does. I think it's a very simple thing that I've never really thought about, even until last week when I just didn't buy from a company. And I spent all day online looking at sites. And just the simple act of putting an address in a footer would have gotten that company a sale. Jon: Exactly. Ryan: Okay. Anything we've ignored or haven't touched on on a category page that you think we should be aware of? Jon: Yeah. Don't have popups. Ryan: Just email sign in at the bottom. They're not going to get a discount, it doesn't matter. Jon: Yeah, I think we've done a pretty good job of working our way through the entire page. So I feel pretty comfortable that we've answered the majority of concerns that I would have on a category pitch today. Ryan: And understand too, you'll never be done optimizing your site. You can't. Jon: There's always something. It's interesting you mentioned those tear downs that you see me do quite often at conferences and the like, and I'm never at a loss to find content for those tear downs. You can continually optimize the site and always be iterating on the site for a better experience. It's just a fact of life, but it's something that gives you a big return on that investment. It's well worth it. Ryan: Yeah, it's kind of like that Gordon Gekko thoughts. Like, "How much is enough?" More, well what's a good conversion rate? Better. There's no answer. Jon: One that is always improving. Ryan: Yes. That's your perfect conversion rate. Ryan: All right, Jon, thank you for the time and enlightening me as well as the people that are listening into us. Jon: Yeah. Thanks. It was a great conversation. Hopefully everybody's learned a lot today. Ryan: Thank you.