Before you work yourself up into a blind panic, yes, SEO is still very much relevant, important and vital in any business strategy. However. If you ignore great content when you’re writing the descriptions for products on your website, much like in other areas of marketing, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. Why? Because you’re not appealing to the right people: your customers. Here’s how it’s done.
1. Remember People Buy Products, Not Search Engines
Keywords are great - for you and your traffic. But take your typical consumer. Say they’ve found your site, due to the fact that you sell shoes for women and they would very much like to buy some, because they are a woman who needs a new pair of… you guessed it, shoes. So, the average shoe buyer, they’ve seen the nice picture you’ve uploaded of the product next to your product description. They get it. These are shoes in front of them. Yes, shoes. Women’s shoes. Shoes for women.
OKAY we all get the point. Now stop. Find a way to describe the product people are looking for and hopefully going to buy in a way that doesn’t make them want to click the ‘x’ in the corner. Repeating the name of the item over and over isn’t doing you any favours, it’s called keyword stuffing. And, if you lost track of the amount of times I used the word ‘shoes’ here, you can probably see that it’s super annoying.
2. With That In Mind, Focus On Audience
Look at your key demographic. Of course you want to target as wide an audience as possible, but don’t isolate the people the content is actually for. As an example, if you’re selling a pair of s… just kidding, if you’re selling pretty much anything, imagine yourself as the intended audience. That way, you’ll have an idea of the tone you should use, the purpose somebody might want it for and finally, but most importantly, how you should market the product to generate attention and sales.
3. …But Don’t Lose Sight Of The Competition
As much as you want to speak to individuals directly, there are still SEO benefits to writing product descriptions, after all. This is why you’re doing it from a business perspective, but that does not mean that your creative side can’t shine, too. You can stand out against competitors with some clever ways of incorporating the words you want to rank for, without them looking unnatural. Things like spellings, good sentence structure, and of course, not in any way duplicating any of your product content descriptions across your site will go a long way in improving how search engines view you.
4. Don’t Make Bold Claims You Can’t Back Up
It can be tempting, for both the purposes of rankings and seeming generally impressive to customers, to brag. Forget the superlatives. If you can’t justify why this particular product you’re selling is ‘absolutely 100% the best in the industry’, then don’t assert it. (Most) people aren’t stupid and can see right through any blatant mistruths. Best case scenario? They’ll think you’re a little full of it, perhaps overly keen (read: desperate) to sell. But as a worst case situation, they’ll find you unreliable and question the true merits of your products.
5. Be Descriptive & Research Well
On that note, take some time when writing the perfect product descriptions. Ensure that you’ve done the legwork to back up what it is your product actually does. Research pays off, as does being interesting and fully comprehensive in what you’re writing. Provide plenty of information – the more helpful and honest you are, the more accurate you’ll be. Accuracy leads to satisfied customers who’ll come back to your site, and even recommend it. Your ROI will increase - in theory - so that’s a job well done.
