Web Design
How to nail product Descriptions for Ecommerce
6 min read
Web Design
Writing product descriptions is time consuming, laborious, and often dull if you have more than a handful of products.
But here’s the thing...
Having excellent descriptions are a must! It saves you time, money, and numerous potential headaches.
Here are a few extremely useful benefits of half decent product descriptions:
Product descriptions are one of the most important parts of your product page where Google is concerned. To benefit from the billions of searches undertaken on Google every year, you need to make sure that Google know what your product pages are about. Your product description allows you ample room to do this. Perform keyword research and discover the keywords your audience is using.
Plus, having a product description already written makes it super-fast to setup a Google Shopping campaign, which is one of the best paid marketing solutions available for online retailers.
Tip: Discover what your customers are typing into Google and include some of those terms in your description. Read more on Keyword Research.
Having a description allows you more room to sell your product. It’s features, benefits, and why your product is important help your readers understand more about what they are buying. Unlike a physical store, you aren’t able to influence a purchase through your own enthusiasm and advice, so use emotive language along with the key selling points to increase the chances that your online visitor becomes a buyer.
Be sure to include buzz words such as free delivery, and free returns, you can also use the description section to make the customer feel more at ease for using your services.
Emotive language is just one of the ways you can improve your conversion rate. Check out our guides on Conversion Rate Optimisation for more ideas you can implement today.
Returns cost money, agro, and headaches. If a customer buys a product which doesn’t match their expectations of what they thought they were going to buy, they will likely want to return it.
If you don’t let them return it, they will likely complain and write bad reviews, which will put off future business.
A good product description allows you to change their expectations of the product, and reduce the possibility that the customer is buying something they don’t actually need, and will inevitably want to return.
We’ve already covered a few of the key points above, but here’s your ultimate list of what to include in your product description.
Highlight as many features, benefits, and uses for the product. Have a picture frame to sell? Be sure to include its measurements. Can it be hung or be stood on a shelf? These are all questions that a visitor to your store would be able to answer easily when looking at the product, but online, the description is where they get this information.
The number of words really doesn’t matter, so don’t get hung up trying to reach XXX number of words. What’s important is that all the most important pieces of information about the product are available.
By adding a sense of urgency to a product sale you might be running, you can encourage the customer to purchase today, instead of waiting and potentially forgetting to make a sale later on.
Bring the product to life with emotive language to make to make it more relatable. When matched against lifestyle images of the product (ie, how a frame will look in a home), this can be a powerful combination.
Avoid jargon that your audience may not use themselves. Try to speak in their language. If you’re not sure what they is, you can research your customers on social media and forums to get a taste of how they speak.
Here’s a guide on how Good Copy can Improve your Conversion Rate
This one is more for SEO best practice. In short, if you have the same description on Amazon as your own website, you will likely see your Amazon listing taking precedence over your own website as Google decides that Amazon is a more powerful website than your own. That likely means lower profit margins.
Add bullet points and separate the description into different easy to read sections to speed up the time it takes for someone to get the information they want. Consider sections to product measurements, delivery information, be sure to keep these areas consistent across your website.
“Free delivery on this product” instantly relieves a customer’s concern about how much delivery could be.
“Free returns” removes a potential barrier for customers who may be worried that the product isn’t going to right for them.
Both of these are proven to improve conversions.
By allowing reviews on your product pages, people are going to get more information on what the product is like from real life customers. This can improve your chances of gaining a sale, and provide valuable feedback about your products.
You can also integrate star ratings which could be included in your product category pages, and within your Google search listing.
Here’s how your business can integrate Google star ratings
You likely already know what META is. And if you don’t, I can guarantee that you have already read a META or two whilst using Google.
META is the text that accompanies a Google search result, as show below.
You have the ability to change what appears in your META, and it’s a good idea to do so. You can change it so that it is more descriptive, emotive, and eye catching compared to the other search results.
This improves your click through rate (the number of people who have seen your website appear in search results and clicked through). This, in turn, can improve your search engine rankings.
The most important lesson to remember is that product descriptions are worth writing. They may take a while to complete if you have a large store, but by getting them done now, you’ll be looking at better rankings, more traffic, higher conversion rates, and more revenue.
For more information on how you can improve your SEO, check out this post on how to optimise your blog for SEO. It has a lot of advice which can transfer over to your product descriptions.
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