Product descriptions are there to inform your customers about your product and compel them to purchase from you as opposed to one of your competitors. They are essentially your sales pitch.
Why should they buy your product? What makes your product superior to other alternative products? What makes your company better than other companies?
The product description sells the product, and the way it is written and what is included in the description sells your business or brand. It is important to get a good balance between selling the features and benefits, and selling yourself as a good supplier of the product.
You shouldn’t be focusing solely on your visibility. While it is important to be discoverable in search engines, you also need to convert the visitor into a customer once they have found you.
Here we are offering you 8 useful tips to make sure your product descriptions are improving your visibility, standing out against the competition, and persuading visitors to buy your product.
Why are SEO friendly product descriptions important?
Before we get to our tips, it is important to understand what SEO friendly product descriptions can do for your business and why you should be prioritising them when creating content for your website.
Writing good, high quality and SEO optimised product descriptions can help you to attract relevant traffic to your website, improve your page ranking within search engines, and boost your revenue. They also act as an opportunity to deepen your connection with your audience and establish your brand as a credible source.
SEO product descriptions convert visitors into customers by increasing product visibility in unpaid, organic search results. Using SEO product descriptions for eCommerce sites helps products to rank higher for keywords consumers are searching for that are specific to the product.
How to write product descriptions that convert
8 things that you should be considering when creating your product descriptions:
Incorporate specific keywords
The important thing to take away from this is that you should be targeting specific keywords, as opposed to vague ones that hold some relevance for your product. This is key for converting visitors into customers.
It can be tempting to look for keywords that are somewhat relevant to your product, but have a large search volume, and incorporate them into your descriptions. The issue with this is that you will encourage a lot of irrelevant traffic to your website, and when they inevitably leave the site without having explored or purchased, your bounce rate and conversion rate will have been jeopardised, and your ranking may suffer.
The other issue with vague keywords that have high search volumes is that there are so many websites competing for the terms. Getting your website to the first few pages of the search engine will be a nearly impossible task, so your visibility will be poor. If customers cannot find you, they cannot buy from you.
When you use more specific keywords, however, you are likely to attract highly targeted traffic, which will positively impact your sales conversion rate. Imagine you sell 2m wooden ladders, is your target customer more likely to be somebody who searches for “2m wooden ladders”, or someone who searches for “ladders”?
Furthermore, if fewer pages are competing for the term “2m wooden ladders” then your page is more likely to rank high up the search engine results page, making you more visible to potential customers, and more likely to sell your product.
When you incorporate your keywords, make sure the description flows naturally. If you use the keywords too often you may be penalised for keyword stuffing, which is in violation of Google’s spam policies as it may be seen as an effort to manipulate rankings.
Consider your target audience
The language you use and your tone of voice in your product descriptions should demonstrate an understanding of who your target audience is. If you get this wrong, you may dissuade potential customers from purchasing from you.
In order to stand out against your competitors, you need to establish a connection with your audience. The best way to achieve this is to show them that you relate to their pain points, and that you understand what they need by offering them the relevant information. This is the problem, this is how it makes you feel, this is what we can do to help.
Offering a detailed description that encompasses these key points will put you in a good position to secure a purchase. If you struggle to write for your audience, create a customer profile. This would be a typical example of someone that would be interested in your product. Once you have an idea of who that person is, write your descriptions as if you’re writing for them.
Your company tone of voice and customer profile should feed into each other as your tone of voice needs to correlate with your industry and audience.
Establishing a tone of voice not only deepens your connection with your customers, it keeps your brand consistent. Having a strong brand identity engages your audience and improves your credibility and authenticity.
Focus on the features and benefits
The features and benefits are what give your product value. When visitors to your site find value in your product, they are more likely to purchase it.
The features of your product are easy to state, but they are not enough to convince your audience that they need it. You need to explain how those features will benefit them, and why they should value those benefits.
Let’s look at this Shark vacuum cleaner description;
The feature is the Pet Tool with a bristle brush. That alone would not persuade your audience to buy the vacuum cleaner, however, the benefit of removing embedded hair from rugs, stairs, sofas, curtains and more would.
You need to have a good understanding of your target audience when considering the benefits of your product. Remember to be positive and utilise adjectives to highlight the features and sell their advantages. Elegant, excellent, exceptional, easy, fast, lightweight, sturdy, resilient. Tailor the benefits to make sure your product appeals to your target audience.
To make the benefits even more convincing, why not use statistics to support your claims? Star ratings, customer testimonials and surveys can generate persuasive facts and figures that can inspire confidence in your business and products.
Prioritise readability and user experience
You want the information to be easily available to your audience, so consider your language choices and the structure of your descriptions. Make sure you use proper spelling and grammar, remove any unnecessary words to keep sentences short, break up large sections of text with bullet points and headings, and avoid using the passive voice.
For more expensive products you may use longer descriptions with more ornate language, but this should be considered when creating your customer profile. In most cases you’ll want to keep your descriptions short and simple, while ensuring you cover all the necessary information.
Bullet points are a great way to clearly present information, and are great for those users that like to skim read and skip over large sections of text. You can provide a written description as well as a list of bullet points to cover all bases and elevate your user experience by accommodating different people.
Bullet points are also great for SEO as you can use key features to target keywords. Listing things such as sizes and materials etc will help you in attracting highly relevant traffic to your site.
Include an FAQs section
Preempting the questions your audience might have and providing them with an easily accessible answer will help you to build a stronger relationship of trust, which will encourage them to buy from you rather than from a competitor.
FAQs demonstrate to visitors that you take the time to listen to your customers and respond to their questions, queries and reviews. When it comes to choosing a brand/business to buy from, customers are much more likely to buy from someone they trust to help them through the process, and that they feel will be helpful should anything go wrong or need to be returned.
The term ‘frequently asked questions’ also helps to instil confidence in a buyer as it suggests that you receive a lot of customer feedback, and therefore a lot of customers. This makes you appear to be a more reputable provider of your product.
Persuade with storytelling
Emotions inspire people to act, so appealing to the emotions of your audience is a great way to encourage them to purchase your product.
How do you appeal to emotions? Create human driven stories that highlight how your product has changed somebody’s life. Sell the experience your product can offer by tapping into the desires of your target audience.
The customer profiles you have created are great at illustrating your target audience’s potential pain points, goals and values. Once you’ve defined these, you can use them to build persuasive stories.
Use photos and videos
It can be difficult to envision a product through a description alone, so you should think about incorporating different types of media into your product page. Images and videos give your audience a better understanding of the product, and they can improve your site’s SEO.
When you upload product pictures, make sure the images are of a high quality and a suitable size for the page. Poor images, or images that don’t load, could affect your page ranking. Make sure your pictures are varied, offering different angles and distances to ensure your audience can get a proper feel for the product.
Videos are also great to offer varying angles, as well as instructing how things work. Depending on your product you can include; tutorials, installation guides, runway clips, reviews etc.
Remember to add alt tags to your images that are optimised for SEO. Alt tags are the written copy that allows you to describe the images for search engines so they can index and rank them accordingly.
Not only are alt tags great for SEO, but they also help with accessibility. Descriptions can help anyone with visual impairments who may not be able to see the image, or see it with clarity. Inclusivity is a great attribute for a brand as it demonstrates the care you have for your customers.
Take advantage of AI
If you’re struggling to create your own product descriptions, or you don’t know where to start, ask AI copywriting tools to provide an example. You can give ChatGPT, for example, a topic, word count and some simple instructions, and it will generate a response.
AI is incapable of producing new content because it relies on existing data, so you have to check that everything is factually correct and you are not committing plagiarism. It also cannot understand your specific audience’s pain points, values and emotions, so it won’t be able to create a truly compelling description, nor will it be able to tap into the desires of your audience to persuade them to buy from you.
AI responses will be very generalised, which is proven to not be as effective for converting visitors into customers. It is that personal feel that customers crave as it evokes trust, and trust translates to sales.
What AI is good for, however, is providing a starting point or some quick and easy suggestions. If you have hundreds of products then AI can help you be more efficient.
The more you tailor your SEO product descriptions, the better they will perform for your business. Try not to get complacent by generating everything with AI as the algorithms may punish you for it, affecting your search engine rankings. AI can be used as a guide, but the generated content should always be edited to ensure it is tailored to your brand and product before publishing.
Summary
There are lots of things to consider when creating SEO friendly product descriptions that increase your sales conversion rate. Your two main focuses are making yourself visible in search engines, and providing the necessary information to persuade your visitors to purchase from you.
By focusing on specific keywords, offering your target audience with features and benefits that appeal to them, providing answers to their questions and ensuring the information is accessible, you can drive relevant traffic to your site, improve your page ranking and boost sales.
Get more tips on conversion copywriting or delve into our guide on producing high quality content to improve your SEO and get real results from your marketing strategy.
