Product Descriptions And SEO: Another Way To Make Your Site Stand Out From The Competition

When loading your store with products, take some time to reflect on how you are populating your product descriptions. Think about your online competitor’s for a moment. How are they describing their products? Did you know that most online merchants use the same word for word product descriptions that come from either vendor feeds or manufacturer descriptions? The majority of online vendors ‘cut and paste’ or load their product descriptions from a feed file or vendor’s website. In any case, using the exact same product
description that a majority of other online store owners do, lacks originality, but more important is that it
can effect your search engine result positioning.

Now step back and think about how a search engine indexes a web page. The search engine’s job is to
gather information about your page and apply an algorithmic formula to determine your web page’s ranking
based on relevancy to a set of search terms. How does your plain old vanilla product description compare
to the hundreds of other websites listing the same items? What specifically makes your page special from the
other hundreds or thousands of product pages being indexed if they are basically the same? You do so by not only providing content that accurately describes the product, but also by providing highly useful and unique descriptions. And the reason it works is as follows.

If we take a specific look at Google (or any search engine for that matter), its main business is providing search engine results for a given set of terms. Since their job is to return relevant results back to their searchers, then what incentive to they have to return the “exact same” results to their searchers? They do not have any reason to do so. There is no need to return content that the prior result had in it. For search engines to provide value to their searchers, they must vary the results somewhat in order for their searchers to find what they are looking for. If its not in the first position, try the next. If it’s not there, try the next result. Search Engines that do not return what searcher’s are looking for, do not stay around very long.

So when creatng your product description pages, each description should still be similiar (e.g. item title, etc), but the content should be different enough for the search engine to want to show it as a “differentiator” from other results. Remember, there are many, many ways to describe the same item.

Take time to accurately describe your products, and be sure to speak naturally when you do so. Do not overstuff keywords. Be honest in your descriptions and describe the item just as you would to one of your site visitors over the phone or in person. The best litmus test is to read the product description out loud. Hearing it out loud makes it sound like others hear it. Reading words silently tends to make you skip over or infer what you are reading, and may mask bad grammer.

Over time, you will improve your product descriptions and make your online store stand out. This is true not only with your online competitors, but with search engines as well.