Founder of 2021 “SEO Agency of the Year” finalist LSEO.com. Serial Entrepreneur. Best-Selling Author (over 100,000 books sold).
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If you are or aspire to be an enterprise-level business owner, it’s important to present your business with enterprise-level professionalism, accessibility and optimization. And when you’re a mercantile specializing in selling products online, that means making sure your product page descriptions are up to snuff.
Product descriptions, like any other piece of content on your website, are subject to the whims of the almighty and ever-changing Google algorithm. Making sure product pages find their way into the search results of the customers who need them means making sure your product descriptions are SEO-ready.
With that in mind, here are five essential tips for writing enterprise-level product descriptions for SEO:
Know your customers.
The biggest mistake people make when optimizing content for search engines is trying to “game the system” by writing product descriptions that are geared toward machines, not actual human beings.
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Of course, you do need to include keywords, alt text, interlinks and other SEO features in order to increase your page authority and search rankings. But that should never come at the expense of the user experience.
When writing your product descriptions, you should always be asking yourself how the information you’re providing and the tactics you’re utilizing can help the customer. If it doesn’t, then why are you including it? If you don’t have a good reason, then you probably need to rethink your strategy.
Know your products.
Just as important as knowing your audience is knowing the products you’re selling. Specifically, you have to know why people should buy your products instead of a competitor’s. What is it that makes your products unique? What kind of features do your products have? What benefits do they offer the user? What are their strengths and what are their weaknesses?
Key to writing good product descriptions is accentuating the strengths and deemphasizing the weaknesses. That doesn’t mean hiding them or lying to the customer, but it does mean shifting your focus to the positives. It also means making sure users know what those positives are.
Think about what kind of customer might be looking for your product. Think about why they might be looking for it. Think about how your product can help them. Then, tell them.
Make it easy to read.
When writing product descriptions, there’s a temptation sometimes to use a bunch of flowery language to “sell” customers on an item. The thing is, if a customer is on a product’s page, they’re already close to converting. They don’t need a sales pitch; they need the facts.
A great way for improving readability is to use bulleted lists. This makes it easy for users to scan a product description and have all their questions answered in an instant.
Also, avoid keyword stuffing. While strategic keyword use is essential to any enterprise-level SEO strategy, keyword overuse is more likely to get you penalized by search engines like Google and Bing. Worse, it reduces the readability of your content, which could easily result in lost customers and a higher bounce rate.
Use resources strategically.
Ideally, every product page on your website would be well written and unique, with no duplicate content or information copy-and-pasted from manufacturer descriptions. But when you’re doing business at an enterprise level, that could mean altering hundreds of thousands of product pages, which takes a lot of time and resources.
That’s why it’s important to think strategically about how you go about making and updating product descriptions. Prioritize your most important products first—the ones that sell the most, have the highest profit margins or that you have the largest inventory of.
Remember, you can always go back and clean up the descriptions for less important products later, but your top sellers and biggest money-makers? Those are the ones that need your attention now.
Find the right length.
If you’ve already followed the advice outlined above, the length of a product description might seem like a fairly trivial thing in comparison. It might even seem contradictory; if you’re supposed to showcase the features and benefits of a product while also answering your customers’ questions, doesn’t that mean that longer product descriptions are obviously better?
Not necessarily. Again, you have to think strategically, and you have to know the audience you’re selling to. Consider the kind of search queries that drive the highest traffic to specific product pages. If the queries are highly specific, that indicates most customers coming to a page are already well informed and know exactly what they’re looking for, so you probably don’t need to write a long description. Conversely, if the queries are very general, it means you’re attracting users who need more information and could thus benefit from a longer description.
We can get pretty into the weeds when it comes to product descriptions, but it all adds up into one perfect picture that we call enterprise growth. The e-commerce space is surely a competitive one, but the right kinds of product descriptions will put you in the best position to succeed.
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Author: Kristopher Jones, Forbes Councils Member
