So, you’ve set up an online store and stocked it with great products… or at least products that, to you, scream “great”. Unfortunately, though, that screaming might not quite be loud enough for many shoppers to hear. This could be the crux of your problem if too much of the stuff you are offering just isn’t selling.
If each of your products has its own page on the site, we advise you to investigate whether each of these pages includes a description sufficiently conveying why exactly the product is worth buying.
Include details likely to answer customers’ questions
There’s likely to be quite a lot that the customer wants to know about the product but they can’t really discern from the product image or possibly even the product supplier’s description.
Imagine that you are a door-to-door salesperson and trying to succinctly pitch the product to the customer’s face. In this situation, you would most probably get straight to the point by outlining the product’s practical benefits; hence, that’s exactly what you should do with the online description.
Make the product description textually unique
Yes, you will likely have to replicate the supplier’s description to a certain extent – since both descriptions would be referring to the same product. However, you should still be careful to paraphrase the main points that they mention and you know are relevant to your store’s customer base.
One good reason why you need to create unique content like this is that it would please Google’s search bots, thereby making it easier for your site’s product listings to rank prominently in Google search results.
Keep both customers and bots in mind
As bots won’t tire of reading seemingly endless paragraphs, including those could help you to channel a lot of valuable SEO juice to your online store. However, such a copious amount of content wouldn’t be good for readability from a human user’s point of view.
You could accommodate both humans and bots by listing the most important points in an easy-to-digest chunk of text and saving the heavier details for a separate section a customer could bring into view simply by hitting a ‘more info/read more’ button.
Heed the three Ts: typos, typography and testing
It’s a bit of a copywriting-for-beginners point, but you should keep your product descriptions as free of spelling and grammar mistakes as possible, lest visitors notice such blunders and assume your business isn’t a professional enough outfit to warrant buying from.
As for typography, that should be carefully chosen to keep your content legible. So, resist the temptation to go overboard with the number of different fonts you use. You should also be selective with where and how you place bold and italicised text.
Testing is important because how effective any product description is can very much depend on both the product and the business offering it. For your website, we could establish a Content Management System (CMS) so that you would be able to regularly tweak your descriptions quickly and easily.
