Syndicating your Amazon content to Walmart or another retailer may sound like the most straightforward and easiest approach. But if you are not optimizing your product pages for Walmart's unique platform, your items will be difficult for shoppers to find.
96 percent of online shoppers visited Amazon within the last year, and 78 percent also said they visited walmart.com to research or make a purchase.
The fact is Amazon and Walmart approach search algorithms vary differently. Content that is perfectly optimized for Amazon's search engine will likely come up short on Walmart's specific metrics and vice versa.
The content on your product pages serves two purposes. First, retailers use the page's content to determine which search results it shows up in and how highly it ranks within the search. Secondly, it helps answer all your shopper's questions, so they have complete confidence in making a purchase.
75 percent of online shoppers never scroll past the first page of search results.
So, let's take a look at a few ways that Amazon and Walmart's content expectations differ:
Content & Search Engines: Amazon vs. Walmart
Amazon's search engine ranks pages based on their relevance to the search and specific content requirements within a few unique categories. Their approach to content development is a templated, one-size-fits-all approach, with only a few slight variances.
Consumers spend 55% of their purchase journey on the initial research stage.
The Content Quality Score is how Walmart measures how well product pages are aligned and optimized for their search platform. This metric measures a page's content, images, back-end attributes, and additional requirements based on an item's category.
Tip: If you are curious about your product portfolio's Content Quality Score, the information is available in Walmart's Item360.
Both retailers also factor in a product's sales and in-stock status to populate search results. Great content will not save your product page from being pushed to the bottom of the search results if your product is out of stock and unavailable for purchase. Retailers want to make it easy for shoppers to find the things they are looking for most often to make an easy purchase. Content that makes your page discoverable is essential to converting shoppers to customers. Your search rank and sales depend on it.
Amazon Title Length vs. Walmart's
Amazon prefers long titles. So, the more keywords you use in your title, the more searches your item will show up in. Amazon's search engine checks the first 100 characters and the character limit is 200.
Walmart titles should never exceed 52-69 characters. Their algorithm prioritizes short, readable titles with the standard capitalization of brand names and abbreviations for units like weight and volume. Mobile shoppers only see the first 36-52 characters in your title. So it's essential to put the most crucial product descriptions at the beginning of the title. Titles are the first thing a shopper sees in search results, so it's essential to write titles that are easy to read and are recognizable.
Enhanced Content: Amazon vs. Walmart
Product page experts know that titles, descriptions, and images are the cornerstones of e-commerce content. They also understand, enhanced content, or rich media, is critical to making product pages more competitive and converting more shoppers.
Rich media is anything added to your product page that goes beyond traditional descriptions and photography. It includes videos, 360-degree photos, comparison tables, and other parts of the product page that combine photography and text. Amazon calls this A+ content, and Walmart refers to it as Feature Sets.
Conclusion
The secret to getting your products to rank highly on Amazon and Walmart engines is to design copywriting, photos, rich media, and attributes to each retailer's unique set of rules.
Woodridge Retail Group is a Walmart and Sam's Club supplier based in Northwest Arkansas. Whether you need Sales & Marketing support, SEO writing, product photos, videos or an experienced e-commerce partner to manage your entire e-commerce portfolio, Woodridge is here to help you thrive online and on store shelves. Contact us today!