Sell More By Optimizing Your Product Descriptions
Running a successful ecommerce business is all about the small details. Once you have a good website, clear funnels, and a marketing plan to last you until December, it’s time to find the little things that can make a difference in your sales.
Writing the best product description you can, for all of your entries, is one of those small things that help your store convert more. It’s not the easiest thing either. You need a good mix between flawless copy, catchy benefits, and SEO-optimized content to make the most out of your product descriptions.
Today, we’ll take a look at how you can go about writing the best product description.
The Anatomy Of A Good Product Description
If you have a good idea of what your product description should look like, it’ll be much easier to pull it off, so that’s why we want to start by analyzing a really good product description, and how you can use its formula on your online store.
Take a look at this description:
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It may not seem like much, but it’s got everything a good product description needs. For starters, I found this entry on Google, so it’s well optimized for SEO, featuring the right keywords at the right cadence.
Second of all, it has a clear structure for praising the product. It takes a feature, then uses it to explain the intrinsic benefit of that feature. Lastly the text flows well and it has the perfect tone for this website’s audience.
That’s what you should be aiming for. But how can you recreate this model? Let’s find out.
SEO Research For Product Descriptions
The first thing you’ll want to do when writing the best product description is to understand what keywords people use to search for your products. For example, if you sell phone accessories online, you shouldn’t just paste a product’s name in its title and description, like “Phone case with Marvel character”.
People might not use those specific words when Googling for a Marvel-themed phone case. What you want to do instead is go to Ubersuggest, and paste the name of your product as a seed to find similar keywords:
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Then, Ubersuggest will show you what kind of terms people actually use to browse for your products.
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Analyze the ones that have the most monthly volume, with the least competition, and use those as a title for your product, and throughout your product description.
A Point About Ecommerce SEO
Keyword research and the proper use of keywords is important for getting organic traffic to your ecommerce store. However, this won’t be enough. For SEO to work, you need to spend some time building the authority of your website, as well as optimizing every small aspect that Google takes into account when ranking websites. You can read more here.
Structure The Information You Deliver
Writing a story about your product in its description might be catchy, but rambling on about it will never convert website visitors, since they’ll just be left confused. That’s why you need to structure the information you deliver in a product description, so you know your visitors retain the benefits of buying from you.
The easiest way to do that is to use the feature>benefit structure. Before writing a product description per se, write down the features of the product, as well as the benefits entailed by each feature, and mention them throughout the article as you go along. It’ll help cement information about your product in your audience’s mind.
On top of that, we recommend featuring a detailed features table, with every information you can mention about your product:
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This type of table can go a long way in converting visitors that do their due diligence before purchasing something online.
Pro Tip: If you’re an online reseller, make sure you feature the product code somewhere on the page (it’s probably best left for this technical features table). This way, if any other resellers have a shortage of a given product, people can still Google the product code and find your product there.
Write Flawless Copy
The last step is to actually start writing the best product description. And that’s not always easy. But the best place to start is with your audience. Ponder what they’d like to read in a product description, keeping tabs on:
- The perfect tone and style
- The right description length
- The features and benefits they’d appreciate the most in a product
This will be an ongoing process of understanding your audience. But you can skip a few corners by analyzing competitors and studying the descriptions of their best performing products. It’s the easiest way to get a grip on the basic details about copy.
And then it’s off to writing. You should aim to be informative and catchy, without sounding overly salesy. A good tip when writing product descriptions is to sit down, write a few of them in bulk, then take a break and come back with fresh eyes to edit them.
Another tip, and this is something Ray Edwards stands by, is to take some time to imagine you’re the target audience of a product. He actually claims you should sit down in front of your PC, close your eyes, and live out a day in your target audience’s shoes. It may sound like a far-fetched imagination exercise, but it can provide outstanding results in terms of understanding your target audience and what message they’d respond best to.
In Conclusion
Writing the best product description can be broken down into three steps:
- Finding and using the right keywords
- Structuring your information clearly
- Writing flawless copy that converts
However, once you get into the nitty-gritty of it, you’ll notice that a perfect product description is not as easy to pull off. The key to overcome that is consistency – keep writing and you’ll get better at it.
Oh and, if you want to power-up your ecommerce store, you should know that payment processing matters a lot to a customer when they decide if they trust your business or not. We can help you with that.