Your catalog is more than a complete listing of all of your products. It’s a chance for you to sell your customers on each item, so your listings should look more like an ad than a basic description. When you optimize your catalog with this approach, you can improve your revenue.

Keep it Simple

You don’t want to overwhelm customers with information. Focus on the most important details, such as the way that the product improves their lives or solves their problems. Go over the text multiple times to edit it down as much as possible.

Create Attractive Titles

Many people skim through the catalog, so you want to capture their attention through attractive titles. Try to keep it short and to the point. You only have a few seconds before they turn the page or move on from the catalog.

If you have a blog on your website or an article library, look through your website analytics to see the headlines and titles of the top performing pages. You can use this information to create these headers for your catalog.

Use Clear and Easy to Understand Descriptions

Read through your descriptions to determine whether they are clear and easy to understand. You don’t want to leave any room for confusion with these listings. If possible, try to get multiple members of your target audience to read over the catalog copy. They provide a valuable perspective and can show you if anything is unclear.

Double-Check All Links

Broken links frustrate visitors and make your company appear unprofessional. Use a link checking tool to find broken links or those that lead to older versions of pages. Test each page of the catalog thoroughly prior to making it live.

You can use a website monitoring solution to continually check links on the catalog site. If any page has an error or is otherwise inaccessible, you receive notifications quickly.

Select High-Quality Images

Online shoppers don’t have the chance to pick up your product and look it over. They have to rely on the images that you show them to make their purchase decisions. Get high-quality photos that show every angle of the product.

Consider all of the platforms your visitors access your site from. The images need to work well on different size monitors and devices. Many people use mobile devices when they’re researching products, so the images also need to have a size that loads quickly over cellular connections.

Create Different Size Images

Another consideration for your photo content is its size. When you use different sizes, you can choose the format that best fits the product and you can draw the eye to those areas.

Make it Aesthetically Appealing

Consider the overall layout of your catalog and how to best present your products. White space works well for simplifying the layout and allowing your offerings to stand out. Avoid distracting elements that could take away from the listings. Use headings, bullet points and other formatting to emphasize the text on the page. The most important details should jump out at the buyer as soon as they look at the page.

A lot goes into a highly effective catalog. When you optimize all parts of the page, from the layout to the text, you can boost your revenue and improve your branding. A complete overhaul can take some time, but the results speak for themselves.