You boast of top-notch experience in the physical stores. Your pages are running smoothly. Your product images are also drool-worthy, per se. However, remember that nothing turns on the search bots except your SEO optimized product description.
Don’t take our words for granted. Instead, take a look at the statistics we retrieved.
The length of your product description primarily depends on 2 factors.
Both these factors are interrelated and in most cases, not mutually exclusive.
Online buyers tend to have low product awareness of exotic products. Naturally, low knowledge leads to low trust. Therefore, you need to educate these customers first so that they have the level of awareness to make a purchase. Hence, the product descriptions for exotic products tend to be long and segmented.
For instance, New Chapter sells fermented multivitamins. There is a high chance that this is the first time you have heard of such products. Hence, the product descriptions for New Chapter are long and segmented. Each part of the description is intended toward different levels of users.
For instance, the first short copy is targeting users with high brand awareness. These are the people who bought from New Chapter on earlier occasions. However, as you scroll down, the description gets longer.
New Chapter constructs the next sections for buyers with low brand awareness who are still in the consideration phase of the customer journey. As we see, each product is broken down into even minute details.
On the other hand, buyers tend to have high product awareness of mainstream products. High cognizance leads to high trust. Therefore, these customers need fewer words to be convinced.
For instance, here’s a product description for a simple white t-shirt from Amazon that is constructed for buyers with high product awareness.
There isn't, and shouldn't be any elaborate discussion segment. Because everyone knows everything about a basic t-shirt. However, you can have a verbose product description for even a t-shirt. Maybe the t-shirt is manufactured from high-end fabric or sewn in an unorthodox way or perhaps sold for a noble cause.
Whatever the case, your customers and their cognizance level should determine the length of your SEO Optimized product description.
It is natural to get hyped up about your product features. However, most customers couldn't care less about features. Instead, they care about benefits. Features don’t land your customers; benefits do.
Features are objective and impersonal attributes of a product. Features are what make up the product. They merely describe what a product is, what it is able to do, and what it looks like.
This is what a feature-jammed description looks like. This description tells you that this is a leather-boot, and you can wear this round-tipped pair of boots with laces.
Are you interested? I definitely am not because this product description does not address why I might need the boot. At this point, I have already bounced from the page, and never wish to go back.
So, how can you better inform your customers and make them hover over your product longer? This is where a benefit-packed product description comes in.
Benefits, on the other hand, describe what impact the product has on the consumer’s lives. Benefits are what renders the product attractive in the eyes of people. They address how the brand fits into people’s lives.
Describing benefits is far more rewarding to your SEO efforts than simply listing features. Because benefits ideally answer your customer queries and push them to the next stage of the customer journey. They make your product look relevant and thus approachable to the buyers.
So, here is another example of a product description for men’s boots from Timberland.
Notice the following line. The outsoles are made of “Gripstick Rubber” (a feature) that provides “dependable traction on both wet and dry surfaces” (a benefit). This is how you can efficiently translate your features into consumer-friendly benefits.
Remember the gospel truth for product descriptions. Crawlers do not ultimately buy from you; customers do. Search engines merely provide a channel for your customers to visit your website. Hence, write for humans, not for bots. Nonetheless, a successful SEO optimized product description is all about maintaining practicality and technicality.
For optimizing the product descriptions, you must target and include the right keywords in a humane way. Doing so will help the bots crawl your product pages and present them to interested buyers. So, how do you find keywords to target for? And how do you include them in your product descriptions subtly but strategically?
Start with the following questions.
Longtail keywords are usually the right keywords to target. The basic assumption is that the longer the search phrase, the more convinced the person is to buy the product. Besides, research has shown that longtail keywords usually lead to more sales conversion.
After you have done your research and accumulated the right keywords, it is time to insert them in your SEO optimized product description.
Pro-tip: As tempted as you might be, do not stuff your description mindlessly with the keywords. Trying to inject a keyword more than 3 times in a 300-word text is likely to downgrade your product ranking on the alleged grounds of keyword stuffing.
Instead, follow this simple rule. Insert the targeted keyword only once in the-
Using a product description template for all your products will undermine your SEO efforts. Besides, it also makes your product page boring. Instead, try to create copies that reflect your brand personality.
Creating similar product descriptions can potentially confuse the web crawlers. As per Moz, search engines tend to avoid product pages that have near-duplicate product descriptions. Hence, ensure that every title, description or copy is completely unique.
The last thing you would want to do is copy product descriptions on the internet. Search engines are now smart enough to understand advanced semantics and identify meaningless reconstruction sentences.
Moreover, since product descriptions are short, copying even the tiniest copied sentence may cost your site a plagiarism tag.
While there is no right length for an SEO optimized product description, we suggest that you don't turn it into a novel. The primary idea is to host information that is, simply put, edible in one gulp. Creating a bulleted list surely does the trick.
However, in case you need to make longer product descriptions, make sure to segment them. Keep an easily scannable bullet list of the most highlighted features and benefits in the first segment. Then keep other supplementary information a customer might seek in the other segments.
This is regarded as one of the best industry practices by Amazon and other major e-commerce sites.
Writing an SEO optimized product description is surely a daunting task. Nonetheless, the rewards are surely befitting.
The bottom line is to understand your customer’s inner needs and preferences. Then, implement the best copywriting practices to ensure that your product descriptions are getting attention from customers and search engines alike.
If you further need help with writing solid product descriptions for your e-commerce site, contact BlogWriters, your dedicated content marketing team
