You’ve created an online store and you’ve uploaded your products but no one’s coming to buy them. If you’re wondering what you’ve missed out on, it could possibly and probably be the product descriptions.
The way you write your product descriptions can change the way your products appear to your customers on the internet. If you take care to properly optimize them for SEO, they will show up frequently near the top of the SERPs, where they will be able to get maximum exposure.
In this post, we are going to be looking at some ways and steps that you can follow in order to achieve that.
But before we get to that part, let’s digress a little to understand the importance of SEO for product descriptions and the effect it can have on their efficacy.
Why Do You Need to Optimize Your Product Descriptions?
Just as optimizing websites can help reach a larger audience and get more exposure, the same thing happens with product descriptions. When your product description contains the right keywords and is properly written, then it will project your product to the people who will be looking for it on the internet.
There are a number of different aspects that need to exist in product descriptions in order to make them optimized for SEO. Using keywords is just one of them. You will learn more about those as we go along in this post.
Create a Keyword Strategy
The first thing that you need to do in order to create awesome SEO product descriptions is to look up the right keywords. This can be a lot easier if the products you are offering on your online stores all belong to the same niche. That way, you can use more or less the same keywords in most of your descriptions.
Nevertheless, even if this is not the case, you will still need to look up proper keywords related to your product and use them properly in the product descriptions.
As for looking up proper keywords, it’s easy enough to do by using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. These types of tools can provide you with necessary metrics and information about the keywords as well as give you more suggestions that you can use.
As for using the keywords properly, here are some tips that you can follow:
- Use the keyword 1 or 2 times in the main body of the description
- If possible, use the keyword in the title or heading of the description
These tips pertain to the main focus keyword. If you want to use some LSI’s in the description, you can do those as well, but try to keep them around 2 – 3 at most. That is because LSI keywords can stand out and they can somewhat ruin the engagement of the content if used incessantly.
Don’t Forget to Use a Grammar Checker
Once you have your keyword strategy in place, you will need to move on to actually writing the description itself.
When you want to write a description, make sure that you use a grammar checker simultaneously with it. You could use it afterwards, but using it simultaneously has the benefit of letting you update the content as you go rather than dedicating a separate session to it.
The purpose of using a grammar checker when writing product descriptions is to make sure that they don’t lack…professionalism.
Any sort of content that has grammatical errors in it can look amateurish, and being so, it can be ineffective in performing the function for which it is written. In the case of product descriptions, that function would be to attract customers and generate sales.
When it comes to Google, grammatical perfection is not something that it takes into consideration when ranking pages. Nevertheless, grammatical perfection can still play a role in the SEO of a website/webpage since it can have an effect on the bounce rate and dwell time.
Keep the Descriptions Readable (Try using a Paraphraser)
Another factor that you have to be careful of when writing product descriptions is to keep them readable.
There are two dimensions to this, actually. Let’s look at them one by one.
The first way in which your descriptions can get difficult to read is when your hired copywriter gets overly energetic with the vocabulary. An example of such an instance would be if a writer wrote a product description for a lawn mower as follows:
Deracinate the excesses on your pastures by utilizing this invention. The whetted and serrated blades of this mower will expunge those long leafy stalks that have blemished the look of your lawn.
You get what we mean here? 😉
In order to avoid these types of readability issues, you pretty much need to just watch the complexity of the vocab used in the description. If you are writing the descriptions yourself, it won’t be that hard. However, if you have hired a writer for this purpose, then you can advise them to simply use a readability checker after completing their work.
Another way in which you can make your descriptions readable is by using a smart paraphraser. Note our emphasis on ‘smart’ because not all paraphrasers work well to improve the readability of the entered content.
For example, here is what the above abomination looked like after we ran it through a paraphrasing tool:
Using this technology, you may eliminate excess on your pastures. This mower’s whetted and serrated blades with remove those long leafy stalks that have marred the appearance of your lawn.
Although it still doesn’t look very nice, it’s a tad easier to read than the original.
The other dimension that you have to be careful of regarding the readability of the descriptions is the usage of keywords. If you use the focus keyword too many times or if you put a lot of LSI keywords in there, it will ruin the readability. This is some advice that you will find quite a lot online. You basically have to remember to write for the people and not only for the search engines.
Find and Remove Plagiarism
This is yet another useful tip that you can use to write awesome SEO product descriptions.
When it comes to online content, plagiarism can be fatal. It can cause the site rank to drop and it can even get the site de-listed if the offence happens to be severe enough.
In order to avoid getting trapped in these consequences, you have to make sure that you find and remove any plagiarism that may have found its way in the description.
To find plagiarism, you can simply use a plagiarism-checking tool. As for removing it, you can either use a plagiarism remover or you can reword it manually.
Conclusion
Writing your product descriptions properly can help you generate sales and maximize the exposure of your store to online users.
In this post, we looked at some tips and techniques that you can follow to write awesome SEO product descriptions. In a nutshell, you pretty much have to make sure that your descriptions are grammatically perfect, unique, readable and keyword-optimized.