Follow These 5 Tips To Write SEO-Friendly Product Descriptions

As an e-commerce retailer selling products online, what are some of the biggest challenges you face?

Some may think about optimising page load time and making sure the site does not have a lot of load latency. After all, a site that takes an awful lot to load often leads to a bad user experience. Others may stress out about using high-quality images and designing websites for great user experiences. But even if you have all these matters sorted, you are losing out on lots of sales opportunities if an average user is not even able to locate your website on search engines.

Your business can reach a larger audience and convert more people into paying customers if your product descriptions are informative and maintain an appeal to both buyers and search engines at the same time.

Consumers today are leveraging the ease of searching for products online and purchasing them on e-commerce websites. So, it's important for you to optimise your content so that your website comes up when users search for keywords related to your products.

When written with SEO in mind, product descriptions directly impact your sales. So it makes sense to cultivate best practices and write content that promotes visibility on search engines and persuades people to buy your products at the same time. To evaluate which web pages to feature at the top of the result pages, search engine algorithms evaluate the originality and relevance of content.

Having said that, how do you increase your ranking on search engines?

Here are five tips that will help you write SEO product descriptions that boost your search engine ranking!

1. Know Your Buyer Persona Inside Out

Ask any salesperson about crafting your sales strategy and s/he will tell you it is to narrow down your target demographic and get as much information about it as you can. It can be helpful to compile a list of details about each segment that you are targeting — this includes age, gender, geographic location, marital status, and income level.

If you don’t know how your buyer thinks, how can you guarantee that your content will convince him to choose your product over other options? When you identify your buyer persona, you can place the primary focus of your content writing on targeting this type of person first instead of search engine crawlers.

In order to optimise your product descriptions for search engines, pay special attention to the tone of voice your target audience use. Then your content can be written deliberately to highlight keywords that your target group would search for online.

2. Focus on the Benefits

You may think that your product’s features are worth shouting out from the rooftops, but the truth is that customers only care about the direct benefits they can get from using these products.

Features are impersonal — they describe the properties of a product in a technical manner. On the other hand, benefits talk about exactly how a product can enhance your buyers’ lives. Features sound great on paper, but do buyers really care?

Do you think your customers are looking for bland descriptions that describe what the product is and how it is used, or would they be more likely to purchase if they perceived the direct benefits of your product by reading the description on your website? This is another area where it helps to know your target audience — the way you frame the benefits of a product might be different based on the intended audience. If you have different sections for men’s wear and women’s wear on your website, you will have to craft the product descriptions to make the most impact on the corresponding audience.

When writing a product description copy, ensure you present readers with a vivid image of what it would feel like to use the product. Let your customers know what's in it for them when they buy your product.

3. Make Sure Your Copy is Scannable and Use Plain Language

On average, visitors to a webpage read only about 20% of the content. This means that your customers are going to scan through the product descriptions on your website as well. Good product description writing is when you present your content in a way that highlights the most enticing points of your products to increase your chances of making the sale.

Search engine algorithms try to deliver relevant information rather than pages with deceptive information. Generic phrases like ‘greatest’, ‘top ranking’, and ‘second-to-none’ can do more harm than good to your rankings.

E-commerce websites are frequented by lay people who are not used to reading technical vocabulary in product descriptions. By staying away from verbosity and focusing on getting your core message across, you allow your users to grab the gist of your product at a glance.

4. Highlight Keywords on Your Webpage

Search engines understand your web pages through keywords, and your site should leverage this fact to include relevant keywords in your copy. Here are some tips to keep in mind when coming up with keywords for your product descriptions:
 

• Avoid using jargon unless you think your customers are going to search for those keywords. Verbosity is not your friend when you write content for a layman audience.
• Use commonly searched keywords in your titles, subheadings, and body text. These portions weigh heavily in SEO rankings, so use them wisely to boost your ranking on search engines.
• Make sure to optimise your images by using relevant keywords in the file name, alt tags and the image description.
• Avoid adding unnecessary keywords that take away from the message. If your content loses its meaning because of keyword stuffing, the search engine algorithms penalise your website. It can be tempting to maximise references to keywords in short product descriptions of around 300 words but fight the temptation and use language that flows naturally.
• Again, make sure you strike a balance between optimising for search engines and writing content that your readers relate to.
   

The above points should take you far when it comes to using appropriate keywords in your product description copy.

Search engine algorithms try to imitate human readability when assessing relevant content, but at the end of the day, a lot depends on how keywords are picked and sprinkled through your web content. So make sure you put in enough time into coming up with a list of keywords that are apt for your products (such as ingredients in food items and materials in clothing and accessories).

Make sure you don’t go overboard with using keywords since search engines are able to detect when your content doesn’t flow in a cohesive manner.

5. Make Sure Your Content Uses Unique Language

In the past, content marketers often plagiarised their competitors' product description copy. But today, search engine algorithms are smart enough to know that rephrasing content does not add any value.

An important part of SEO websites is to avoid duplication of content at all costs. When different pages on your website have similar content, search algorithms get confused and don’t know what to do with them; this can affect traffic driven from search engines. To counter this, make sure all your descriptions are written from scratch and do not overlap with content on other websites. All your product descriptions should be unique, including product titles.

If for some reason you are unable to avoid duplication because of a large volume of content, you can add a ‘no-index' meta tag to pages with duplicated content. This tells search engines to skip the page, which prevents them from penalising your site for redundant content.

Conclusion

It is fairly straightforward to write a product description talking about what the product is and what it does.

But to write content that persuades buyers, you must showcase how they can benefit from the product’s unique set of features. Rather than writing a list of features, focus on how they make a customer’s life better. Driving search engine traffic to your website can result in greater sales for your products, which means you just cannot afford to take SEO copywriting lightly.

Writing SEO product descriptions can be a time-consuming process, but the returns are worth the investment. For any business focused on improving its discoverability on search engines and boosting sales, writing content optimised for search engines is a necessity.

So, are you ready to incorporate these SEO tips in your product descriptions? Which of these tips do you think will lead to the most sales for your business?