For one of our fashion clients in the past, our primary focus was to optimise their product descriptions using our years of eCommerce experience & SEO best-practice. The results? After just the product description optimisations for their top 20 products, we saw a 34% increase in non-brand SEO traffic & a 48% increase in non-brand SEO revenue. Incredible, right?
Here are our top 5 tips to make sure you write your product descriptions as optimised for SEO as possible:
Write helpful content for buyers, not for the search engines
It’s 2019 – and what is the primary thing we rave about to our clients here at NOVOS? Produce helpful content. Customers will become customers if they feel like you’re helping them to buy, rather than forcing them. Not only that, but search engines are now favouring content that is perceived as helpful because people use these same search engines to find content to answer their queries… 2 +2 = 4.
When you’re writing product descriptions, always ask yourself “does this help the user to buy my product?”.
A good example of helping your user is our client The Bottle Club, and you can see their product description here. It offers users a deep insight into the drink, incorporates the keywords we want including malt whiskies, whisky etc, & most importantly it helps the potential customer really feel & taste the drink before they even buy it.
So, to summarise, remember these 3 points when writing helpful content:
- Will this help the user through the buying process?
- Does it answer any frequently asked questions?
- Does it describe our product as thoroughly as possible?
Explaining your product is great, but how do you make them need it?
So you’ve done the helpful part. You’re helping the user with their queries, giving them a picture of what your product is like. This is brill. But how do you now make them need & want your product? Make sure to include the benefits.
When writing your product descriptions, it’s super important to list how the product will make them feel & why it’s better than a competitor. For example, if you’re selling running shoes, make sure to explain that your shoes have been specifically designed to prevent blisters. If you’re a childrenswear brand, make sure to explain that your clothes are soft on the child’s skin. If you’re a men’s shirt company, make sure to mention that the shirts are non-iron. You get what we mean.
These should be listed as bullet points within the product description, and you can even have a “benefits” subheader for even more optimisation.
A great example is our client Instrmnt, who promote the benefits of their rubber watch straps here. The explanation of it being durable & comfortable, as well as having the semi-punched holes which result in a better wrist-fit, are great examples of outlining benefits.
Structure your product descriptions for mobile phones
Next, you need to think about the structure of your descriptions. You don’t want them to be long, essay-type, nor do you want one-liners.
You’ll want your product descriptions to be easy to scan, but full of the information you want. So our recommendations are:
- Use your bullet points in product descriptions too
- Keep the descriptions within 2 short paragraphs maximum, depending on the design of your website. E.g. Instrmnt have a wider site so can get away with more words, The Bottle Club don’t so break them up in 2 different locations
- Use links in your product descriptions to cross-sell if you can.
You can also have the content designed to be in drop downs so it’s even more scannable on mobile, like our client OPUMO does here. This allows you to also talk about a sizing guide and more – we’ll go through this later in the article.
Include sizing guides & delivery/return policies
Not only will this help your users, but it allows you to target even more keywords within the same product page.
We’ve written multiple sizing guides for our clients and every single one of them drives a lot of traffic if backed by data & search volume. For example, we were able to help OPUMO now rank on the first page for “common projects” by boosting the rank of their Common Projects sizing guide which links to the brand page.
If there are users searching for sizing guides for product categories, which our research can help us identify, then you should feature information on sizing on the actual product page underneath the main product description. See our client The Sports Edit & an example here, where they have “sizing” underneath the main description as well as a link to the sizing next to the main product. The more information you can include, remember, to help your potential customers, the better you’ll perform on Google.
Last but not least, make sure to do your SEO keyword research
This should be done before you even write your product description, but make sure to understand your top target keywords to feature in the product descriptions.
We use paid tools such as SEMrush & SEOmonitor to identify the high-value keywords for our clients.
For example, for our client Chipex, we identified that “high shine gloss” & “car protection” were keywords we wanted to include for specific products, and as a result included them in the product descriptions.
This will help you rank higher for more keywords, resulting in more traffic & revenue, simply by optimising your product descriptions based on data.
If you have any questions about writing product descriptions or need any help, make sure to reach out for a free consultation here.
Alternatively, if you’re writing a lot of blog content, read our guide on how to optimise your content for Google’s featured snippets here.