One thing that has always frustrated me about the site is that the brand pages are a bit boring. They are essentially a “product dump” that just gives you a long list of everything that I sell from a particular manufacturer.

They get the job done, but when Rigu is a specialist in bringing unusual camera products and brands to the UK to make them available without the hassle of importing them yourself, often from small brands you might not have heard of… I think they need to be more than that.

I’m slowly creating new brand pages which will give people a much better idea of what a brand is about, as well as what they sell. This is partially for SEO reasons, and I’ve always believed that a good customer experience should naturally follow through to also be positive for search engine visibility and results. If I’m giving people what they want, I’m probably giving a search engine what it wants too.

Simplr are the first brand where I’ve taken this approach, and I think the difference is pretty dramatic. Simplr are a one-person brand based in the US producing minimal straps for people that want to carry their camera securely, safely, and in the most lightweight way possible. People that buy their straps are looking for something specific, and a product dump brand page doesn’t get that across at all. This improved page let’s you know more about the product and what kind of cameras are appropriate for each of their strap models. It also just looks nicer and is more attractive to browse on both mobile and desktop.

There’s also now a block at the bottom of the page that lets people know more about Rigu too. If you’re looking for Simplr in the UK you might not necessarily have heard of Rigu before, and getting people to understand that I’ve been around for almost 15 years, stock everything in the UK (no drop shipping, and no import fees to pay), and have an excellent reputation is important, and I’m not that comfortable boasting about my service levels and reviews, so I probably don’t talk about this enough on the site.

Has it made a difference?

I’ll caveat this with 2 things. The first is that it has only been a month, and the second is that brand pages don’t get that much traffic for small brands, so I’m not working with much data and there’s a good chance that any real changes are also being influenced by natural month-to-month variability which is making any improvements look bigger than they are.

That said, most metrics look positive. As a landing page rigu.co.uk/simplr has received double the search impressions, and also double the clicks according to Google Search Console. The average position in search results has dropped, but I’m actually taking this as a good thing, because I can also see that the page is showing up in a lot more generalised camera strap searches, whereas before most of the clicks were from very focused terms like “simplr camera strap uk”. I’m still getting those people, but the additional content on the page now looks to be gaining some ranking with people looking for an ultralight camera strap and even really general terms like “nikon camera strap.”

Looking at Google Analytics, people are spending 80% more time on the page, and rather incredibly, the bounce rate has dropped 88%, going from an already pretty respectable 32% to 3.7%. To be honest, that number is so low I’m not sure if I can trust it.

But have you sold more Simplr straps?

Put simply, no. Sales were same this month as last month. As I said, we’re dealing with fairly small numbers here, so with the amount of traffic gained to that landing page I wouldn’t expect it to lead to a big jump in sales, but over a longer time period I think it would make sense to expect a small rise.

Any other thoughts?

Ultimately, I made this change to sell more Simplr camera straps, and that hasn’t happened (yet), but I still think it was worthwhile. More people are visiting that page and they’re spending more time on it, which suggests to me that I’m providing a better visitor experience, and that can only be a good thing for Rigu and the brands that I stock.

It will be a slow process but I’d like to roll this out to more brands to see if it does cumulatively help improve the customer experience, search traffic, and ultimately make more sales.

I also think that it’s probably good for me to write about these things openly since ecommerce these days is hidden behind paid courses and “gurus” that aren’t willing to share any data, or accept when things have gone wrong or they made a mistake. If people want to hear more about the ecommerce side of Rigu and think it would be interesting I’ll be happy to write about it.