There are many possible decision points in a website: some visitors will catch your phone number on the homepage and give you a call, some will read your blog posts and respond to the calls to action included in them, and some will browse your whole site and then go to your Contact page.

One of the best places for conversion, however, is the page or pages where you describe your goods and/or services.

There is no one size fits all solution for these pages, simply because what you have to offer will be quite different from what another company has to offer.

The first example here is from a solar energy company. Their site is for lead generation: they don’t do e-commerce, and they want people to call them. They are essentially a service, even though they deal in a physical product, because they normally do the design and installation rather than just selling photovoltaic cells.

They describe the various options they can provide for residential and commercial customers in quite a bit of detail, because their customers often have no idea what the options are and only the vaguest ideas about the product.

Some visitors don’t want to read all this and don’t need so much information. Don’t let that scare you — those visitors won’t come to this page. They will see the basic message on the home page and contact the company from there. The detail pages are for the people who want more detail. Give it to them.

The second example requires much less description on the face of it, because the product — books — is much more familiar. Customers can shop directly and there are many more products available.

However, people do expect to be able to see samples from books, where they don’t expect samples of solar power. In the screenshot below, you can see that a shopper can pick a page to view.

Once they’ve chosen a page to explore, shoppers can click on it to enlarge it:

For consumer goods, anything that allows visitors to get more information about the product, from samples to reviews to videos, improves sales. Content that sounds like ad copy doesn’t usually fare as well.

There are some common problems we see with goods and services pages:

• Duplicate content in descriptions of products — either cut and pasted descriptions from manufacturers, or lots of overlap in the descriptions used on a single site. These do you harm from an SEO standpoint.
• Lack of information or unclear descriptions and photos. We’re working right now on a website that had dozens of thumbnail-sized photos with numbers as captions. That’s not enough information.
• No easy path to buy. It should be easy to get whatever you’re selling: anything that makes people stop and try to figure something out will discourage purchases and contacts. “Buy now” or “add to cart” buttons and contact numbers on every page are good.

Testing is always a good plan, but it’s especially important on these pages, since there’s no standard approach.