Unlike some other parents, though, Natalie decided to start her own online store, listing only carefully selected products from the best manufacturers - many of whom are artistic individuals, or are UK-based, meaning purchases from A Kid's Life help to keep money within the country's economy and cut down on the carbon footprint associated with importing goods made in the Far East.
I don't have kids of my own, but I do have nephews and nieces, and I fully appreciate the difference it makes when you give a child something they can cherish for years to come - not to mention the fact that sturdy wooden toys and games often survive the kind of rough handling that would smash plastic into a million tiny, sharp pieces.
What Natalie Needed
Like any new eCommerce venture, A Kid's Life needed patience and nurturing, almost like a child in its own right, while Natalie needed someone she could work with and trust.We talked through her needs and came up with a plan - a flexible, scalable plan, to add more search-visible and keyword-optimised text to her main category and product pages, following up with the more niche areas of the site as time goes on.
It's not a sprint, but it's increased the number of words on A Kid's Life by a few thousand, with unique category and product descriptions that help potential customers to decide if Natalie's products are right for them, as well as filling in some of the background detail about the companies and individuals who design and make each product.
Natalie is proud of her product research - and rightly so - so it was important to make sure the pedigree of her portfolio comes across in the on-site text, something I think we have managed to achieve well.
However, brevity was also important, so product descriptions have been kept to the essentials wherever possible, with bullet points for key characteristics such as the size dimensions and the materials used.
The Results
We're still working on filling in all of the product categories and descriptions, but there are already positive signs in terms of search traffic.Many of the pages we've already worked on are now among the most-visited on A Kid's Life, and make much greater impact when they appear among search results, as there is now a greater amount of text for Google to select its summary/snippet from.
On top of that, though, I think we're building a strong degree of visual consistency for the descriptions - we're consistent in the font used (Comic Sans - it is a toy shop, after all) and in the use of bold and italic for certain specific parts of the text.
There's still a way to go, and it's a real pleasure working with Natalie to target the areas of her site that she's keen to develop - and with her own ongoing product research and portfolio work, it's likely to be a neverending task to keep everything up to date.
However, I think the pages we've already done, and the effect they've had on A Kid's Life's search engine and on-page impact, are testament to the enduring power of words for eCommerce sites, regardless of the quality of their product images.
Click here to visit A Kid's Life.
