How to Write Great Product Descriptions for E-Commerce Sites

There is no doubt that an effective product description will help boost sales on your website. 

When customers feel well informed and feel connected to your product, then they are more likely to make that purchase.

In an age of online shopping and e-commerce, your product description is effectively your sales pitch; just like a salesperson in a store would inform the customer of the product, its features and benefits. 

So other than an increase in organic traffic and online conversions...

What are the other benefits of having great product descriptions for e-commerce sites?

• Reflects positively on your brand 

• Can help bridge the gap between what your brand represents and your target audience 

• Higher ranking for online shopping sites - higher conversions indicate to Google and other search engines that you are a good website! 

• Further improve your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (EAT)  

Ultimately, this will all help to generate a positive feedback loop - with more people finding your site, you’ll get more visitors. This should lead to increased sales which will further boost your ranking, so more people are able to find your site… and so the cycle continues. 

Having great content in your product descriptions is one way that will help get you there. 

Top tips for great product descriptions 

Know your audience 

Before you even put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, it is important to be able to define your target audience - the specific group of people who are most likely to demand/want your product/service. This could be based on a myriad of demographic features such as age, gender, ethnicity, income, location and interests. 

According to research by Marketing Evolution, $37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year that fails to engage the intended target audience. So above all, there is a huge economic incentive to get it right.  

Ideally, you should create a buyer persona and ask yourself questions such as:

• What are their desires?

• What stimulates them to make purchases? 

• What hesitations and reservations do they have?

• How can you overcome these?

This should all be reflected in the character of the brand, using a tone that is relevant and relatable to your intended demographic.

Focus on the benefits and highlight the key features

This is a careful balancing act; benefits are personal so consider outlining how your product will benefit the buyer and improve their life. Use storytelling and a lifestyle writing technique in order to tap into the emotive side of e-commerce.

However, highlighting the key features of your product helps to increase your authority within the market so consider including things like:

• Purpose and use of the product 

• How it works (maybe via a demonstration video)

• Technical details of the product

Remember: online shoppers are often in a hurry and demand convenience so highlighting the key selling points will aid scanning and skim reading. 

Make it easy to read

This feeds nicely into the previous tip. 

Keep your product description simple and informative; short, concise sentences of no more than 20 words and the use of bullet points will guide the reader through your landing page more smoothly. 

Avoid the use of hyperbole and superlatives as much as possible such as something is good, excellent or the best. This will throw doubt over your product; best to let the customer realise this for themselves. 

Also, consider that not everyone absorbs information in the same way. After all, two-thirds of the population are visual learners so consider using a range of materials to present your information such as images, screenshots, videos and data visualisations.  

Use keywords strategically 

In order for your e-commerce business to be successful, you will need to ensure that you have a clear search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. 

To achieve this, you must tailor your content so that Google will help you rank on the search engine results page (SERP) and give your visitors the best results. 

A common own-goal is to try and manipulate your content in order to artificially rank higher on SERPs through the use of keywords. However unnecessary or inappropriate use of keywords can actually harm your SEO ranking. 

Your content should always be written with your target audience in mind and user intent (see tip 1) and not for search engines (buyers over bots). 

Simple tips for optimising keywords:

• Undertake keyword research beforehand 

• Avoid keyword stuffing wherever possible 

• Use latent semantic indexing (LSI)  

• Add them once in your URL, heading, sub-headings and then two or three times in the main content of your landing page 

• Use them in ALT tags for your images

• They should be used in a meaningful and natural way

Also, you should use a mixture of long and short-tail keywords. 

Amazon - the number one online shopping site in the world - makes a staggering 57% of sales from long-tail keyword searches. The aim is to select keywords with a high search frequency and low competition. 

Generally speaking, the longer the search query, the higher the buyer’s intent of purchase. 

The aim is to increase the useability of your website - making it as user-friendly and accessible as possible will naturally generate traffic and boost your SEO rankings without the need for an artificial injection of keywords. 

Focus on meta titles and meta descriptions

A meta title is important for both users and search engines as it highlights the primary topic and purpose of the web page. 

It should be considered low hanging fruit due to its high potential to impact the click-through rate (CTR) and ranking on SERPs. Research from Zero Limit Web found that the top five organic searches on Google resulted in 67.6% of all clicks.

For effective outcomes, meta titles should contain:

• The main topic/keyword for the page 

• Company/brand name 

• Descriptions of the content and purpose of the page/product

• Between 50 and 60 words

• Information unique only to the page/product  

Despite there being no direct SEO benefit for having a meta description, they are still useful in generating click-throughs as it can help people to ascertain what your webpage is about and whether it is useful to them. 

For effective outcomes, meta descriptions should contain:

• Between 120 and 155 characters 

• An active voice and be actionable 

• A call to action 

• Your focused keyword(s)

• Unique content that matches the page it is describing 

So remember to spend time producing high-quality meta titles and meta descriptions as the pay-off will be. 

Avoid duplicate content 

Duplicate content means that similar content appears on multiple pages across the web and search engines struggle to ascertain what the original source was. 

This can have an adverse effect on your page ranking if they suspect that this has been directly copied or lifted from another source. 

So, uniqueness is a key element of SEO, whilst allowing you to avoid plagiarism penalties. 

By all means, take inspiration from others but ensure the content you produce is your own, original work.  

Use AI as part of your content marketing strategy 

According to Statista, content marketing is considered to be one of the leading foci of any digital marketing strategy. 

Thanks to technological developments, AI-powered marketing automation tools are making it easier for marketers to create and optimise content, particularly when it comes to the world of e-commerce.  

Programs such as Jasper AI and RYTR can create high-converting copy without the person-hours or additional cost of hiring a copywriter.  

Quite simply, you can insert a topic, the intended tone and format of the copy you require and, at the click of a button, your content is ready. 

There is even the inbuilt plagiarism checker to ensure that your content is unique and SEO friendly. 

The future 

The definition of AI is broad and encompasses:

• Data mining - gathering of data (current and historical) to make predictions 

• Natural language processing - how computers interpret the human language 

• Machine learning - using algorithms to help solve problems 

As technological systems improve, AI will develop the ability to remember and learn from customers online behaviours in order to provide a highly customised e-commerce experience for users. 

In the coming years, many core responsibilities of e-commerce companies, such as writing product descriptions, translating into different languages and adjusting prices, could well be handled by AI systems. 

AI definitely has the potential to provide an optimised user experience (UX) by collecting business and customer data to make more informed business decisions and predictions through targeted marketing and advertising. 

Through seamless automation, it is likely to increase customer retention - by up to 15% according to omnichannel personalisation - by providing the smooth, uninterrupted shopping experience so many of us enjoy and demand. 
 

Conclusion 

Product descriptions are most definitely not something to be overlooked. They help build connections with your target audience, answer key questions the user may have and secure that all-important conversion. 

Whether directly or indirectly, they can have a profound impact on your page’s ranking in search engines and the subsequent amount of traffic to your online shop.

Make your product descriptions easy to read and accessible for your target audience, carefully consider the use of keywords and avoid duplicate content and you will be well on your way to developing all-important organic traffic and online conversions. Better yet, hire an experienced Shopify SEO company to do it for you. 

Originally written by Victoria Affleck in 2019, updated for 2021 by Sean Rainforth.

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