5 ways to spice up your content when you have a ‘boring’ product

Make sure you’re found in the right place at the right time, by the right person

You want your product pages to rank for terms which are so relevant to your target audience’s needs, that your product cannot possibly be described as boring. By targeting the right searches, you’ll find the most receptive audiences.

To identify these searches, you’ll need to conduct some intent-based keyword research. If you don’t have the resource in-house to focus on this, our content and SEO teams can help you out. Or, if you fancy giving it a go yourself, here are some simple steps you can take to make a start:

• Speak to your existing customers or customer services teams to find out how people found your service previously
• Use free keyword tools to find search terms with volume
• Check your competitors’ keyword targeting
• Look at the search results for your suggested list of keywords and see if the results indicate purchase intent (are other product pages ranking, or is the results page full of publications?)

Once you have your target keywords, you’ll need to structure your page to target those terms and compete for organic visibility. Include the following:

Headers: These will go in order of importance and should include your target keywords and questions (the next section explains how to find these FAQs).

A standfirst: This short summary of the product will reassure the person who has landed on your page that they are in the right place.

An introduction: This may include a longer summary of the types of products or services within a category or an introduction to the service itself.

Main body copy: This should include related keywords and succinctly answer each header question.

Call to action: where do we want the customer to go or what action do we want them to take next, such as filling in a contact form.

For example, here’s our revamp of G4S’s card machine payments page:

Stand out from the competition

The competitive landscape for B2B, niche and ‘boring’ products and services can often be a rather neglected wilderness, full of dry, corporate jargon and thin product content. But the people buying these products have very real problems, desires and needs which are crying out for your attention, ideas and expert support. This is why we find putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer so helpful.

If you’d like to try some competitor analysis from the audience’s perspective, try this:

• Rather than approaching this as a brand looking to destroy the competition, get yourself into the mindset of an unbiased customer looking for a solution
• Search for your most relevant keywords
• Before clicking on anything, review the whole results page – are there videos, images, questions ranking? Are they useful, up to date, irrelevant or low quality?
• Now, thinking as the customer, click on the link which appears to be the most useful resource and make a note of why that’s the case.
• Review the content on the page and make notes, does it satisfy your need, will it help you find a solution, what works, what is missing, could the information be presented in a better format?
• Repeat the process for 5-10 other ranking URLs and you’ll soon start to see the gaps and opportunities to do something differently and improve this customer’s search.

By going beyond your industry’s ‘best practices’ and crafting something more personal with your real human audience in mind, your product and service pages will really stand out.

Answer all those burning questions

We all know how frustrating it can be to hunt around for information when you have a very specific problem. For those searching, your so-called ‘boring’ product and expertise could well hold the key to some sweet problem-solving satisfaction. Nothing boring about that.

That’s why in our content strategies, we always recommend going the extra mile to find and answer any and all questions your potential customer may have at this stage of the purchase funnel.

The simplest way to do this is as follows:

• Search for your ‘boring’ product or service in Google. For example, ‘Event Security’.
• Look at the ‘People Also Ask’ box towards the top of the page. This should give you a good indication of the types of questions that people are really interested in finding answers to.

Tip – click on the bottom arrow to reveal more results, or use this guide to pull the questions at scale.

Present useful information the most useful format

Our ultimate goal is to provide what I’d call ‘exceedingly useful’ content, no matter what the topic. We want to produce the kind of stuff that makes you stop in your tracks and applaud.

One way to make content exceedingly useful is to provide it in a number of different formats. A bullet point list, a subtitled video, an animated diagram – a good choice of format can bring your product or service to life for the customer and illustrate all the exciting benefits on offer. It doesn’t have to be complicated, it just needs to be the most suitable format to educate the reader. For example, we created this simple diagram to explain how easy the G4S Cash Delivery process is:

Make the page as long as it needs to be

As a rule of thumb, consider this: the more relevant content you can get onto your page, the better. Relevant being the operative word here – don’t add content for content’s sake. This rule keeps both search engines and real people happy:

People: the more relevant information your page contains, the more educated and informed they will be, and therefore the more comfortable they will feel about proceeding.

Search engines: search engines love rich content that provides thorough answers to popular questions.

So, there you have it, hopefully that little list has given you some food for thought and put you in the mood to spice up your so-called boring product pages.

At Builtvisible, we’ve helped countless brands bring their services to life via on page copy and creative. Read the full G4S case study and see how we helped them increase their share of search with some simple but highly effective content work.

You can also read more about our approach here, or contact us today to see how we can help!