In my previous blog I shared with you some of my tips for writing better meta descriptions. It reminded me that there are other places where writing repetitive content can be a sticking point.
One that we frequently come across is product descriptions on online shops. Many a site owner has groaned in horror at our suggestion that (a) there needs to be at least 200 words of copy about the product on the page and (b) they can’t just copy it from the manufacturer’s web site.
In truth, I can think of very few clients who have taken up the reins of this challenge and run with it. And yet, it is one of the greatest things that you can do to boost your search engine visibility. Once you’ve fixed all those nagging problems with your shopping cart system and sorted out the URL structure and decided on your keywords, the content still somehow seems to come second fiddle to linkbuilding and other SEO tasks.
However, just like adding new content to your site via a blog or a news section, adding more text to your product pages creates more varieties of phrases and more information for search engines. In some ways it can be more valuable than news or blog content in that adding content here will enhance the very pages that you want potential customers to land on. Just one click brings the customer direct to the money page. They will also be given more data right when they need it, which will hopefully lead them closer to a purchasing decision.
So why would you need help writing this content. Well, like with meta descriptions it is something that you might work on in a batch, either as an SEO project, or as you add a list of this year’s products from a manufacturer. And you might have little or no differential information between different varieties of one product.
Let’s say for instance, that you sell dog food. You get in the 2011 product range to add to your site from a new organic dog food company. And it comes in 8 flavours. So you have got 8 different descriptions to write, all completely unique, all about essentially the same thing, but with one important difference – what it tastes like. As I doubt you are going to be doing your own taste tests, this will push your creativity.
So how do you write different exciting copy about the merits of chicken versus lamb versus rabbit?
Start by doing some keyword research. It’s basic, but may go beyond what you have done for that site as a whole. Look up the way that people search for the manufacturer’s name. Is it two words? Do they concatenate it? So the product is organic, do people search for [organic dog food] or [dog food organic]? Use the tools available, (and one of my favourites is Search Suggest for it’s speed) to create longer phrases to incorporate into your descriptions.
Use synonyms for the other words in the piece. Look at the number of different ways that I’ve referred to a product description on this page – text, copy, words, description, information, data, content. So talk about dogs and puppies and man’s best friend. Talk about packets and packages and boxes.
Change the order of sentences. If you’ve talked about the flavour at the bottom of one description, use it as the opener for the next. You’ll find a different flow of text naturally happens by starting from a different angle.
Use descriptive words. If you did proper grammar at school, they would have called them adjectives. You’ve seen them used in dog food ads, choicest, flavourful, delightful, tasty etc. Don’t neglect your keyword research here either, as some adjectives will be used in searches. Not the flowery ones, true, but ones that mean something to searchers. Anyone who has done a lot of keyword research across a number of sectors will know that the apparently most popular colour of any searched for item is pink. Everything from luggage sets to cat beds is searched for in pink, because for the pink lovers of the world, this is the aspect of the product that appeals to them the most.
So take up this challenge and decide to boost the power of your product pages. Google loves unique content, so you’ll be helping your site overall as well as the individual pages. Here’s a situation where sales copy does more than just sell.
