Do you slave over product descriptions or do you pull some text from the supplier’s website and hope for the best? If it’s the latter, you need to rethink your approach.
Product descriptions are more important than many e-commerce website owners realise. A good photo sells a product, but an insightful product description is just as critical.
Entice Buyers
A well-written product description explains to a customer why they need the product. Would you buy a new car based on a sexy photo? No, of course, you wouldn’t. Even if it looks amazing, you would still want to know how economical it was to drive, what features it had, and other pertinent details. Most internet shoppers are no different.
You can’t pick up and examine an item when you buy online. All you have to go on is the product photos and description. Your product descriptions need to be detailed enough to answer any questions a customer might have, from size to care instructions.
Create Compelling Copy
This is your chance to write compelling copy and entice visitors through your virtual shop doors. You need to grab the reader’s attention and make them really want to buy the product. Well-written, persuasive copy converts much better than generic text copied and pasted from a supplier’s website. Or worse, a box of technical specifications that is drier than a sheet of sandpaper.
Look at your content from a reader’s perspective.
SEO
Don’t ignore the importance of SEO. Google takes a dim view of duplicate content, so scraping information from a supplier’s web page will harm your website’s search engine rankings. Search engines often ignore product pages because they have very little or duplicated content. Zero product description text means there is no way the page will rank highly for a search query. Quality images matter, but search engines can’t see the gorgeous colour or stylish design of a product, so it is up to you to describe it in the text.
Crafting original content is the best way to boost your search engine rankings. Put effort into your product descriptions and it will pay dividends in the long run.
You need enough text, but not too much. Readers don’t want to read a 5,000-word essay on why they should purchase this particular pair of boots. In fact, it is sensible to test out different amounts of text in your product descriptions to find out the amount of content that converts the best.
Start with the content on your main category pages and work down the hierarchy to each individual product on the site. Include keywords, specifically long-tail keywords to help users and search engines understand what you are selling.
When Product Descriptions are Unnecessary
The only exception is when you have pages of inventory that are fast-moving. There is no point writing product descriptions for items that are only available for a short time. If you have pages you don’t want indexing, add a NO INDEX meta tag.
We understand that writing compelling product descriptions isn’t much fun, especially when you sell thousands of blue widgets, but a lack of original content will seriously hurt your site’s SEO efforts. However, don’t worry as we have the perfect solution…
It’s dead simple really – contact Ink Elves and let us write your product descriptions!