As every savvy seller knows, a lot of strategy can go into establishing a successful eCommerce brand. This extends to everything from advertising to R&D investments—in short, all of the most important elements of your operations. Selling on platforms like Amazon and Walmart can be overwhelming for those just getting started, but optimizing your product listings is one of the most essential to master.
If you want to make selling on Walmart as easy and effective as possible, use these tips to improve your Walmart organic rankings.
Key takeaways
- The quality of product listings can play a big role in consumer purchase decisions and can give you a competitive edge.
- Listing optimization should be a multi-pronged approach; focusing on just one aspect of product descriptions, like keywords or categories, while ignoring the rest can hamper results significantly.
- Better product listings can improve Buy Box position, increase your return on ad spend, and influence profit margins—some of the most important elements in growing your business.
Why is Walmart product listing optimization important?
There’s a lot to be gained when selling on Walmart Marketplace, one of the biggest being: reaching a new audience. This rests on your ability to market your products cost-effectively. Without optimizing your listings, there’s a good chance customers will see your competitors before they see you, while your advertising budget might get wasted on a listing that doesn’t speak to their needs. By focusing on making your listings as strong as possible, you can build trust in your customers and get a leg up on the others in your niche.
Here are some of the main benefits of Walmart listing optimization:
Product visibility
Ensuring products are visible is integral to sales success. If your offerings aren’t immediately seen at the top of search results, there’s a good chance a customer will never find them. Most shoppers don’t go past the first page of results, which can be a problem if your listings are appearing several pages back. With optimized listings, you can improve overall visibility for your products and your brand.
Higher conversions
Optimized listings mean higher visibility, which can translate into more conversions. Customers who click on a product page with limited images, limited descriptions, and inadequate information on product functionality are far more likely to find a similar product elsewhere that hits the mark. By maximizing every area of your product page, from text to rich media, you’re more likely to convert shoppers interested in your products.
Maximize ROI
For most sellers, paid advertising consumes a portion of their budget every month. However, when your product pages aren’t performing well, you risk burning ad spend. With better product pages, you can reduce the investment required to sell successfully, ensuring the most bang possible for your buck. When sales are high, slight optimizations can drive incremental improvements on your margins, creating huge gains in total profits.
In addition, Walmart seller fees are based on individual product sales, this means you’ll want to optimize your listings to keep the cost of sales as low as possible.
Scale through sponsored ads
Sponsored advertising on Walmart can be a great way to get product views, but when listings are lackluster, they’re unlikely to convert shoppers. When your listings are optimized, you are bringing more money in and appealing to a broader set of customers. This allows you to take advantage of more expansive reach by increasing budgets and expanding PPC campaigns. Visibility from strong product pages through ads can contribute to the position of organic search results generating additional visibility to generate more profits for your bottom line.
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How to optimize Walmart product listings
Walmart listing optimization is no doubt important, but mastering the process is another story. Below, we’ve put together the most important factors to focus on to improve your listings:
Keywords
Keywords play a central role in the performance of any online content, Walmart Marketplace included. The terms consumers use to search for products are at the crux of how listings appear on search results pages. If your keyword strategy is optimized, your inventory will likely get the boost it needs to edge out the competition. Take time to research the terms that work best in your category niche and work them naturally into the content on your listings.
Title
The title of a product may seem simple and straightforward, but it plays a major role in how customers find and perceive your product. The title you give to your products on Walmart’s marketplace helps buyers narrow their options, particularly when they’re shopping with specific needs in mind.
The best product titles will be specific enough to be enticing without being too complicated to understand. Ideal titles are between 50 and 75 characters and touch on the most important aspects of a product. Effective titles often include:
- Product brand,
- Make and model,
- Descriptions like size, shape, color, or primary function,
- Any unique features that might set a product apart from the competition,
- Number of products included, if applicable.
The purpose of a unique title is to show a potential customer exactly what makes your product a good fit. If, for example, a shopper is looking for a plant stand, a product title that includes shape, size, color, and special features like adjustable shelves or space for grow lights is going to be a lot more compelling than one that says “plant stand” and nothing else.
Description
A short, concise description is an integral part of Walmart listing optimization. This is a shopper’s third introduction to your product after the title and photos, so you want to be sure you’re providing the right information. A good description will include the most important features of a product, ideally incorporating sought-after keywords. Think about how customers might search for this item or what information they may be looking for as soon as they click on your listing.
Ensure all writing is clear and appealing; clumsy sentences or grammatical errors will leave a consumer doubting whether your company can offer quality products. Avoid long-winded descriptions, too. It may be compelling to cram every detail about your product into a description, but you want to entice a customer, not overwhelm them. Aim for at least 150 words but no more than 300.
Images
As a shopper, would you rather see a product or read about it? A good product page will, of course, do both, and images are just as important as text in helping customers understand exactly what you’re selling.
Shoppers should be enticed to learn more about a product from the photos or envision how they can use it themselves. So, any images you use should be high quality and cover as many angles and features of your product as possible.
Key features
As the name implies, key features offer a quick, high-level way to highlight the most important details of your product. This isn’t a separate section on a Walmart product page, but rather is combined under the “Product Details” heading.
When highlighting key features, stick to between three and ten bullet points and stay focused on what matters most. This can mean material, dimensions, best practices for use, and any other information that might be necessary to know before purchase.
Rich media
Taking advantage of rich media can be a great way to stand out in Walmart’s search engine results. Rich media refers to any media options that go beyond basic images. This can mean videos or graphics with additional information. Visually provide information like dimensions, product use details, or 360-degree product interactivity. While not all products will benefit from the time and effort invested in showcasing these features, brands that sell certain items, like those that require directions to assemble, will find a lot of value here.
Category
Assigning a product category is an easy thing to do, but it’s also an easy thing to get wrong. Product categories should be top of mind for your brand, especially since customers can use these to filter search results. As a result, picking a proper category means the difference between shoppers seeing your product or not when narrowing down their options. Some products will have clear categories, while others may be a bit more niche, but regardless, try to avoid using “other” as this is unlikely to be a category used in searches.
Attributes
Similar to categories, attributes are something shoppers use to determine the best products for their needs. When handled properly by your brand, attributes can ensure your listings appear to motivated buyers. These details appear on the left-hand side of a search results page, and include details like:
- Department,
- Price,
- Brand,
- Fulfillment speed,
- Availability,
- Walmart Cash Offers,
- Relevant filter options related to the assigned category or search term.
Assign the attributes that are most applicable to your product, and remember to be thorough. This isn’t a place where you want to cut corners, as proper information can be the key to visibility when shoppers get specific in their search.
Listing quality score
After implementing the above strategies and information, it’d be great if you could tell whether your approach is making a difference in your listings. With Walmart Marketplace, you can, thanks to the Listing Quality Score. A tool on Walmart’s Seller Center, it gives you a comprehensive rating allowing you to determine the strength of your product pages without guesswork. Listings are assigned an overall score which is broken down into the categories that have the most impact: content & discoverability, offer, and ratings & reviews.
Content
The content aspect of your Listing Quality Score relates to the quality of the content on a product page. This applies to virtually all aspects of the listing, including titles, descriptions, attributes, and images. If your content is lacking in keywords and strong descriptions or your images are of poor quality, your score will suffer.
Offer
The offer section evaluates what you have to “offer” your customers. This looks at details like how competitive your pricing is, how quickly items ship and are delivered, and high inventory levels. If it takes you more than a few days to get products into customer hands or your stock is always running low, you can expect low marks here.
Ratings & Reviews
Reviews and ratings make up a large portion of how customers view products when deciding whether to purchase, so it’s no surprise this is a big part of a Listing Quality Score. Product pages without ratings might cause skepticism among buyers, while pages with lots of positive feedback build customer trust and establish legitimacy as a quality brand.
The reviews category is among the hardest to nail because there’s nothing you can do specifically to increase your score in the same way you can provide faster shipping or beef up product descriptions. However, following product review best practices can boost your odds of improving in this area.
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When should you optimize your Walmart listings?
The short answer is that it’s never too early to start optimizing your listings. The very first products you post to the Walmart marketplace should be as perfect as possible using the practices outlined above.
However, optimizing your listings isn’t something you can do once and ignore going forward. Instead, this should be an ongoing process that evolves as your business does, with regular check-ins to verify that listings are performing as expected. If sales on former best-selling products drop off, for example, looking for pain points or missed opportunities can be a good place to analyze what’s gone wrong.
Keep in mind that even brands with optimized listings know there’s almost always room to improve. A few tweaks, like new product photos, the addition of video to an existing rich media suite, or tweaking keywords to better align with the search patterns you’re seeing, can make a big difference in product sales.
In Summary
When establishing a foothold in the Walmart marketplace, one of the most important steps you can take is optimizing your listings. By focusing on informative product descriptions, high-quality images, a captivating title, and proper categorizing and attribute listing, you can always put your best foot forward. When in doubt, take your Listing Quality Score into account to target where you’re succeeding—and what you can do to improve.
