Product descriptions are an essential part of the success of any ecommerce merchant. When you’re building up your online store – or adding new products to your ecommerce business, one of the key contributors to your sales – and eventual ecommerce mogul success is your product descriptions.
Product descriptions work 24/7 to help your customers:
- Understand exactly what you’re selling
- Smooth over doubts and concerns they may have
- Convert traffic into sales and profits
- Improve your SEO with the right keywords
Clearly, they’re an important part of your business – so you’re going to want to have killer product descriptions that kick some serious ass and do all of the above.
How can you do these? If you follow these tips, you’re off to a great headstart. So, let’s get started…
At all times, you want to put yourself in your customer’s shoes (or head, even), because ultimately, your product description has to speak to them.
Consider What Keywords Work Best For Your Product
This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many people forget this. Your traffic and potential customers are looking for something – the fact they’re on your website suggests that you likely have that product or service.
Keywords are fantastic for helping to guide organic traffic toward your website, and also for bringing attention to individual products in your store.
Let’s take the example of “bespoke coffee mug.” It’s clear what this is, but it’s unlikely that people are searching for the word bespoke. Search phrases like “custom coffee mug” and “personalized coffee mug” are far more likely to hit the spot.
Don’t focus on being fancy – focus on speaking the language that people (and search engines) are looking for. This is basic, workaday stuff that brings people into the store: why play with a formula that works?
Use Sensual Words To Make People Feel Your Products
One of the downsides – perhaps the biggest – of online shopping is that you can’t really touch or properly examine products before you buy them.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t appeal to a fecund imagination, however. You can use your words to speak to their senses of smell, taste, and touch to help them visualize what it would be like to own the object.
This visualization via the imagination of words is an important copywriting technique, as it also puts people in a frame of mind that they’re actually holding it – with the implication that they own it. It’s subtle, but very powerful, pushing them to buy just that little bit more.
Push Those Benefits – They’re Your Best Friend
Benefits are amazingly good at showing just how useful your product or service is by solving a series of problems in a pain-free or otherwise useful way.
For example, your clothes may be incredibly soft and made of the finest downy material that feels silky-smooth on the skin. Or perhaps your coffee is not just 100% organic, but also fair trade. Every product has different benefits, and the description has to get these across clearly.
You want to show people what sets you apart from other online stores when it comes to this particular item – and benefits are your biggest drawing point.
This is also a really good time to make sure that you’re answering all the basic questions that people will ask about your product – the 5Ws – What, Why, Where, and When, along with How. These help to paint a fuller picture for your customer. If you’re missing any, then you’re ready to launch into the next part – the details.
Get Into The Juicy Details To Max Out Your Product Information
Details matter – especially when overcoming the hurdle of simply not being there to examine your products in person. The more specific you can be, the better.
Details work particularly well when you’re explaining how a product works. It’s also worth taking a deep breath and noting some not-so-positive qualities of your product.
No, don’t start shaking your head – this won’t kill your sales! In fact, it can have quite the opposite effect by showing your transparency – a great way to build trust while alerting people to something that may simply be a common issue due to the nature of the product. Think woolen clothes that shrink, and advising people to buy x sizes larger to account for this. This isn’t big and scary – it’s actually a great part of a product description.
All in all, a good product description needs to be accurate. The more accurate you can be while selling, the more satisfied a customer will be when they finally get their hands on your goods.
The reason is simple: their expectations were fulfilled – and maybe even exceeded. In turn, this satisfaction often leads to returning customers, which means more business for you.
Make Your Product Descriptions Easy To Read
Did you know that the average reading age of Americans is around Grade 8? With this statistic in mind, it’s best to keep your descriptions easy to read.
That doesn’t mean writing like you’re back in elementary school so much as it does making things clean and simple. You can achieve this in many ways:
- Use bullet points and lists for increased scannability
- Skip the long paragraphs and go for easily digestible, shorter ones
- Bold important words
- Make use of glorious white space
A lot of these are visual tricks that simply make it easier for people of all reading levels to read your description and understand it – something that’s vital for a successful online shop.
Don’t Copy Product Descriptions – Google Will Hate You
Google won’t personally hate you, of course, but it will tut at your duplicate content and may even penalize your site. What that essentially means is that your website goes slipping down the rankings where nobody can find you.
Harsh.
All you need to do to avoid the ire of Uncle Google is simply to ensure that your product descriptions are unique and filled with lovely relevant keywords that help your page and overall site to rank better.
These are all the things that you should be doing with each and every product description: yes, it is a lot of work. However, the results make it more than worth the effort, and in time, you’ll refuse to have anything less than a good, hard-working product description in your store.
