6 Tips How to Write SEO Product Descriptions that Sell
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Many online merchants have an inspiring concept, a mature business plan, and a talented, motivated team – the perfect conditions for economic success. Nevertheless, even these companies may fail to increase sales, instead stagnating or even declining. One major area for improvement is Ecommerce automation and auto generate product descriptions for the shop from a SEO perspective.
Poor product descriptions frequently contribute to these three e-commerce plagues:
- Lack of impulse to buy: Customers look but don’t buy
- High return rate: Customers buy but send back many items
- Too little traffic: Too few hits by search engines
The importance of good product descriptions
Product descriptions are key sales tools for the items in your e-commerce online store. The customer’s decision to buy depends largely on the information and emotions that you convey through the product description.
Studies show that a main reason for stagnation of sales is inadequate and unattractive explanation of products:
- Errors in the product text immediately lead to a decline in sales. You should always keep in mind what you, as a customer, expect from a product description. Most likely, it is a combination of accurate information and detail-rich text that helps you to know this purchase is exactly the right product to buy. Above all, the accuracy of the description helps ensure a low return rate, which increases post-purchase conversions.
- There are also e-commerce stores that suffer from too little traffic due to a poor ranking in search engines: a good ranking is an important prerequisite to win new customers and to grow.
These and other problems can be avoided with good product descriptions.
Below you will find an overview of some of the most important rules. Follow them and you will increase your sales.
6 Tips How to write Good Product Descriptions
1. SEO - for a better ranking
The days when product descriptions were based on real keyword clustering are finally over. A moderate and above all qualitative use of keywords is required. Help search engines to better understand what products you have, and you will also help the readers, i.e., your customers.
The importance of product descriptions should therefore be a SEO tactic that should not be underestimated, as is unfortunately often still the case. Search engines reward unique and valuable texts with a better ranking. Simply populating product texts with SKU codes or the text copied from the manufacturer is unfortunately not enough for good SEO performance since this affects not only the the ranking but the conversion rats and eventually the business, too. The AI behind our Natural Language Generation tool generates SEO-optimized content for every product description.
In addition to product descriptions, category texts also have a significant influence on visibility on Google.
The example below shows how content based on product data and refined with search requests leads to a better ranking. MyTheresa had an increase in Google ranking of up to 20 places for important search terms in six months after publishing the automated category texts.
2. Communicate the benefits
When writing, stop turning lists of features into continuous text. Don’t overwhelm and bore your customers with technical details that are already mentioned in the product details. Show the readers the practical benefits for them and trigger an emotional response.
Example: Instead of writing that a television has 4 HDMI connections, show the customer what added value this achievement has for him in concrete terms: “No more knee pain due to cumbersome plugging and unplugging! With this TV, you can connect up to 4 devices at the same time.”
Doing this you may already answer questions before the customer is asking them. This way you give him the feeling to know what he needs and you are building up trust. Adding benefits along with your product features is a great way to make people buy your product and with this is more effective than only giving a pure list of properties.
As an example see the following product description from a Salt Lamp. The text does not only refer to the product features but clearly highlights their benefits, too – also on an emotional level.
3. Increase purchase impulses
In the mass of products one must stand out. So of course it is essential to explain on your product page to what extent your product stands out from the competition and why your product should be bought. This is what good product descriptions are all about.
Another method is to set an additional purchase impulse with the delivery time, i.e., “If you order now, the product will arrive in 2 days.” Another method is to offer particularly convenient payment options. The main question you should ask yourself here is: “What makes it convenient to order the product now?”
4. No false promises
In online trading there is nothing more fatal than disappointed customers. Not only do false promises result in a high return rate, which is associated with high costs, but we also cannot afford to reduce our customers’ purchase satisfaction afterwards. This kind of bad marketing nobody wants to have.
It is better to address product problems openly. After all, nobody would book a second holiday through the same travel agency that booked a stay in a 5-Star hotel but only got a cardboard box with two light slots.
5. Live your brand and know your buyer persona
Write product descriptions that match your brand and target group. A content personalization software can help here. The tone of your label should remain throughout the text, wether it is humorous or more serious. It sounds like you – this way you gain authenticity and recognition.
Not only a consistent tone is important but also to know whom you are addressing. Are you selling a product most people are familiar with? Then maybe your description doesn't need to be too long. But if you are selling something that is not common for most people or that people don't buy very often they probably need some more detailed information maybe even an instruction of how to use it.
Keep your buyers in mind: are they end consumer or do they have a wholesale account? What else do you know about them that might be important to address your customers correctly?
6. Unique content and variance
When writing, make sure your descriptions and other text are varied. For example not all televisions should be described with the same sentences or with only a change of order. That would be boring and not very eye-catching and maybe the potential customers would have a hard time finding the right product for them. If in doubt, they would then go to another store. Another way to vary content is to make seasonal adaptions in the text depending on the product area, e.g. light hats for spring or thick bobble hats for winter.
Besides the linguistic variance the optical variance can also be obtained by:
- the use of bullet points – for a good scannability and easy overview
- the use of mixed media, meaning next to pure words also images and videos – for a varied look
How to optimize product descriptions in a scalable way
Set the above listed tips into practice right now and benefit directly from the positive effects they will have on your sales! If your capacities are too small to manually create all the texts in your shop, this is no reason to miss out on the benefits of superior product descriptions! A new key technology can help: Our Product description generator with its Hybrid Content Editing. This type of Augmented Intelligence supports you in restructuring your texts.
The picture below shows a product description of billiger.de, created with the product description generator from AX Semantics.
When you have a lack of time or just too many products to write descriptions for, when you think of the need to avoid duplicate content and you also want to make sure you rank high in Google then this is the optimum solution for you! Hybrid Content Editing allows you to generate millions of repetitive text items, such as product descriptions, in a resource-saving and error-free manner and to translate them into any desired language.
