Having worked with many different ecommerce brands and websites at varying stages and levels of success, this has to be one of the most common dilemmas and challenges facing ecommerce businesses; should you invest real resources, time and money into your product descriptions?
Over the years, I’ve optimised several hundred product descriptions and tested multiple ways of going about improving descriptions with varying levels of success.
I’ve followed advice, adhered to best practices, I’ve tried and tested theories and I’ve even tried launching products without descriptions at all to see what the impact would be (in short – don’t do this 😅).
After all my time experimenting and trialing, I’ve come to a pretty clear conclusion:
The uniqueness of your product descriptions isn’t what matters. It doesn’t even matter how descriptive (or how long) your product copy is. They’re not the components that matter here.
In this blog post, I detail the pros, cons and discuss the right time (or not) to invest in your product copy based on what I’ve learned (and the mistakes I’ve made) over the years.
First, let’s address the biggest question head on:
Do optimised product descriptions actually help with it comes to SEO?
So in a nutshell? Yes – they do. But possibly not in the way you might think.
There are two ways to look at this question. Purely from an SEO perspective and then there’s arguably the more important perspective of sales and conversion – the life blood of ecommerce. We’ll come back to this later.
First, let’s dive into answering this question from an SEO perspective
Optimised product descriptions can absolutely help when it comes to SEO; specifically these three factors:
- Getting your product indexed in the first instance
- Impacting how well your product ranks in the SERPs amongst your competitors
- Improving CTR from the SERPs
These three points are even more critical if you resell products that other competing ecommerce sites sell too. So for example, electronics, branded beauty/cosmetics products etc.
The issue here is so many retailers simply copy and paste the product description provided by the manufacturer and leave it at that.
Although that’s not going to cause any great harm to your SEO or make you vulnerable to a penalty – you will most likely be leaving money (and customers) on the table.
From the perspective of SEO, doing the basics and copying a description from elsewhere isn’t going to maximise your ranking potential. For a description to work hard at driving organic clicks, we have to put in a little more effort.
Taking your product descriptions to the next level
As mentioned earlier, What we first have to understand is that improving your product description is not simply just rewriting it to make it unique. It’s not even necessarily about text length or how descriptive it is either.
What takes your product descriptions to the next level is to make your description as helpful as possible for your customer.
One great way to make your product descriptions much more helpful is to address the key questions surrounding that specific item and answering them within the PDPs description – thus making it one of the most helpful PDPs online for that item.
By doing so, it will allow your PDPs to not only rank better for the item’s core keywords, it also allows the product to rank for relevant ‘blocker keywords’ (more on this shortly) and answers their questions directly on the product page.
Now that they’ve their questions answered, they’re now more likely to go ahead and purchase that item from you on that very same page.
So, what exactly are ‘blocker keywords’?
Blocker keywords are how I personally refer to keywords that fall in the realm of, “I’m ready to buy but first I need to know if…” territory
Ultimately the final questions a potential customer wants answers to before parting with their cash. By creating and supplementing your product descriptions with this content, your PDPs can begin to rank for these blocker keywords.
Now, you’re not only removing those blockers for potential customers, you’re now also providing the perfect page for the customer to continue their purchase on too.
Examples of blocker keywords
To give you a better idea, here are some examples of what I like to call ‘blocker keywords’.
For context, this screenshot was taken from Google Search Console and demonstrates some of the keywords product descriptions are now able to capture clicks and rank for.
Ultimately highly specified questions people are asking about an item before they go ahead and purchase.
As a result of these product descriptions being optimised, helpful and targeting key questions, my products are now ranking and capturing clicks for these keywords too.
How targeting key questions in your descriptions also helps your products rank better for core terms
In most instances PDPs (product description pages) rank for queries and keywords that have a very strong purchase intent. That’s because a PDP is primarily designed to allow people to purchase specific products from you. Where better to purchase a specific item than a PDP?
ℹ️ Note: The problem here is keywords with strong purchase intent are often super-competitive and dominated by the big players in your space. They’re some of the most difficult keywords to rank for.
By enriching your product descriptions with helpful and informative content, you’re not only providing potential customers with a much better experience, you’re also able to rank for valuable yet less competitive product keywords too.
Better yet, as you’re providing a more fulfilling and engaging experience on your PDPs, you’re also more likely to rank better for the product’s core and more competitive purchase-intent keywords.
Search engines ultimately want to provide their users with the best possible and most satisfactory results for their queries. If more organic visitors are spending more time on your pages and are bouncing less – this demonstrates to Google that your page is a great fit for the query in question.
ℹ️ Note: Targeting these blocker keywords and questions is also a great way to compete against the big retailers in your space
A perfect strategy for grassroots / newly launched ecom brands
Every ecommerce brand has to start somewhere. If you’re familiar with launching an ecommerce site from scratch, (particularly with a new domain with little to no authority) you know how tough it can be to get a product to rank on your site when it’s available at a much more established and authoritative retailer.
Scrap that – it can be a serious mountain to climb even if you’re in a low competition niche with no heavy-hitting competitors in the SERPs.
By answering these questions, it allows you to rank for less competitive, but still highly relevant queries to gain traction.
How to find your product’s blocker keywords
Using tools like AlsoAsked or AHREFS can be great tools to pull the specific questions and blocker keywords for the specific items you sell. Then you have questions to target.
ℹ️ Note: You may not necesserily wish to answer them all – specifically if there are a significant number of questions that are returned for a given item. However, I recommend targeting at least 3 of them prioritising the most occurrent and most popular questions.
When is the right time to invest in your product descriptions?
Spending time and money on your product descriptions can quickly become incredibly expensive, particularly if you have an extensive inventory with lost of different products.
This is often one of the biggest pushbacks to ecom brands investing into their product’s content. However, to make this easier, I always recommend to clients to start with 10 or so of the best performing products and optimise those as a proof of concept. However, if you have the resources and budget to handle more in the first batch, then absolutely do so.
Once the changes are live, wait least a month or so before analysing the data and changes. In many cases, the results speak volumes and that can make it easier to get the business onboard and to take their descriptions more seriously.
ℹ️ Note: Identifying the ****best performing products is subjective. For some brands this could be the products that rank the best, get the most traffic across all channels, is searched for the most onsite, get the most impressions but low clicks or it could also be items that consistently sell well each month.
Whatever your criteria for best performing, identify those 10 or so products and optimise those descriptions as a pilot.
If you feel like amending or adjusting descriptions of your best performing products could be dangerous, pick products that are more mid-table or have the most potential (for example high impressions in GSC but low clicks)
Think about choosing products that get enough traction for you to be able to see the difference but of something does go wrong, it won’t be catastrophic for business.
More helpful descriptions also drives greater conversion
Coming back to the conversion side of the question; there are also widespread benefits to optimising your product descriptions – beyond that of purely SEO. Solid and truly helpful product descriptions can also have a profound impact on your conversion too.
Don’t forget, optimising conversion is often channel agnostic – so not only is your conversion likely to increase for organic traffic, but traffic from all other channels coming to your optimised products too.
Naturally, a more helpful description is likely to erode more of their hesitancies and therefore encourage more customers to buy more of the time.
Final tip: Don’t forget to leverage internal linking
Internal linking is also one of the most effective ways to influence rankings and the queries you’re able to rank for.
Of course, that’s nothing new, but way too many retailers fail to leverage internal linking within product descriptions; particularly when there’s an opportunity to link to a complimentary product/brand or category that you’re detailing.
So, there we have it! Hopefully this helps to answer (and put to bed) one of the classic questions when it comes to ecommerce.
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