Unfortunately, Products Don’t Sell Themselves. How to Write Product Descriptions that Sell? You Need Flawlessly Optimized Product Descriptions that Customers as well as Search Engine Love!
In your mind, you’ve done all the hard work. First of all, you secured a place for your website on a reputable hosting service at cost-effective rates. Then, with the help of a web developer (or two) you managed to design and build a fully functional website from the ground-up. Now, you’ve even managed to add some killer content about your company, and what it does with a few pictures of products and services peppered in.
Surely, it must be time to sit back and watch the conversions and sales come in, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
There’s still the small matter of convincing visitors, that your offerings are better than your competitors’, and the best way to do this is with well-written, concise and catchy product descriptions.
Importnace of Product Descriptions
In the same way that getting a product on the shelves of a major retailer isn’t any guarantee of business success, getting your product image up on a far more niche online storefront isn’t going to mean surefire conversions either. Therefore, knowing how to write compelling product descriptions is a must if you’re looking to get the results you’re looking for.
What Can Product Descriptions Do For You?
A lot, actually.
Yes, product descriptions tell your customers what you’re selling and how they can benefit from it, but they do so much more than that. They also give your website a professional look and establish your style, making you stand out from among the thousands and thousands of other websites in your niche.
More than that, they build a level of trust with the visitors to your site. An e-commerce study put out by researchers at NNGroup revealed that in 20% of cases where customers failed to complete a purchase, the reason given was the lack of clear and complete information. After all, if you can’t tell your customer what your product is, or why they should buy it, then they’ll simply go to a business that can.
It is a vital fact to keep in minds that product descriptions are the final step of the conversion funnel, so you have to make them compelling enough for the push to the ‘Add to Cart’ button.
Just before a customer clicks the checkout button, the last thing they’ll see is the picture of your product or service and the text that describes it. If this description is crafted to entice your target audience, with a slew of attention-grabbing features and benefits, then you’re far more likely to complete that sale.
However, leaving that picture up without that accompanying text is equal to leaving your storefront unmanned. Any questions or concerns your visitor has are likely to go unanswered, and your product is far more likely to stay resting on the shelf. To solve your issue, this post is going to let you know accurately how to write good product descriptions for higher conversions.
They Bring Better SEO Outcomes.
Properly optimized product descriptions help you gain better SEO results, so it is vital or rather essential to know precisely how to write product descriptions for SEO.
Let’s be honest; it’s difficult to optimize your website’s main landing pages for more than a few keywords without ruining flow and readability. But with product descriptions, you get the time to really hone in on more niche keywords that might not have been as relevant on your homepage. By including these keywords in your captions and product descriptions, you make it much easier for Google’s web crawlers to organize and index the information, increasing your Google search rankings.
A word of warning, however, Google will penalize duplicated content, so don’t copy and paste descriptions from the supplier’s site or other online sources unless you want your website to drop down its rankings like a stone. Each description must be unique in order to get that SEO benefit. I hope you realize the significance of how to write SEO product descriptions properly.
They Provide a Space for Customer Reviews
The majority of customers trust reviews by others as much as personal recommendations. Often, when you are thinking about buying a product, the first thing you’ll do is scroll down to see what other customers think about it. By dedicating a page of clear, detailed information to each product, you can create a review space at the bottom to allow purchasers to give their own feedback about whether it actually functions as advertised.
The benefit is constantly updated unique information on each product page; a factor that will keep search engines like Google coming back to capture your page, constantly boosting your overall SEO.
How to Write SEO Optimized Product Descriptions?
Creative Writing 101
It’s a lesson we all learned in English class, but it needs reiteration. When writing for any audience, your main goal should be to answer the following 5 questions.
• Who is your product for?
• What features does your product have?
• Where is your product primarily used?
• When should customers use it?
• How does your product work?
Start by Creating a Buyer Persona
If you’re going to write a product description that convinces visitors to buy, then you need to figure out who your target audience is. This profile needs to encompass more than just simple demographics. You need to develop a clear model of how your ideal customer thinks and feels. Think about what other websites they visit, what other products they buy, what their strongest held personal values might be.
All of this information will help you answer the other four questions in the most effective manner.
Remember, Customers Don’t Want to Know What Your Product Is; They Want To Know What It Can Do For Them!
When writing killer product descriptions, the first thing to remember is that accurately representing your product is perhaps the most important part of a product description. So make sure vital information such as sizing, materials, and features are correct. But once you’ve listed all these details down, you need to figure out how to present them in a way that actually drives conversion.
You do this by framing these features as either directly beneficial to customers or indirectly beneficial, as reducers of the inconvenience and stress that customers may face with certain tasks in their daily lives. In marketing terminology, this is referred to as “selling the sizzle, not the steak.”
Write for Someone in a Rush
Research suggests that customers only read 16% of the actual text on a web page. That means you need to convey important details about your product and promote its value within a limited amount of content. After you’ve written your first draft, look through the content and replace complicated jargon with simple words that get the same message across, where possible.
Because you only have a few words to get your message across, remove any vague descriptors, with more specific ones. Customers love specific details.
If you have vital specs that you need to communicate, then include them in bullet point form at the end of the description to improve readability.
Tell a Story
Storytelling is a powerful tool to use to create a link with your customers. If you can get your visitors to imagine what it would be like to use your products, then you can actually get them to feel like they’ve already bought it. From there it only takes a few clicks to replicate the experience for real.
Be Clear
While storytelling is a great way to get the message out there and be as convincing as possible, there has to be an element of clarity to your product descriptions. What do we mean by “clarity?” In simple terms, no filler.
Get to the point and explain why the visitor needs the product and how the product can address a particular pain point of theirs.
A great way to do this is via bullet points. They get the point across in a short, clear way, and have the added benefit of being visually pleasing.
The 800 Pound Gorilla in the Room
In the United States alone, Amazon sells 200 million products, categorized into 35 different departments bringing in millions of visitors every day. That’s some cutthroat competition.
While hosting your offerings on Amazon may bring an exponentially greater number of eyeballs to your products, it also puts you in contention with a thousand other brand offerings in the same niche. That means you have to write your product descriptions in the full knowledge that customers can easily compare your products to your competitors’ with the click of a button. In addition, you now have Amazon’s product description guidelines to learn how to write product descriptions for Amazon, which means no more keyword stuffing and no over-the-top descriptions. In fact, these guidelines are the precise solutions to learn how to write ecommerce product descriptions for most of the online stores using different ecommerce platforms.
Differentiation
If you can’t muster up any excitement about your product or service then nobody else will either. You know your brand and offerings better than anyone, so any indications you can give about what separates you from your competitors need to be front and center in your product description.
Remember, you don’t just want to be “a leading provider,” you want to be the ONLY provider for your customer.
Titles are a great way to catch the attention of casual browsers. While some sellers will try to entice buyers with extremely long titles, this strategy risks running afoul of Amazon’s TOS, which places a 500 character limit on titles. Instead, go back to your buyer personae from before and think of the key adjectives which will appeal to your target audience, string these together in a short, elegant product title that covers no more than 10-20 words.
Read, Re-Read, and Re-Re-Read
This applies to any piece of writing, but it’s more so important when talking about product descriptions. Imagine the scene – your website’s look and the products you sell have convinced a visitor to become a paying customer. The visitor clicks on the product page, is just about to click “add to cart,” and then they see it… a typo (the horror)!
Now, you might think, “So what? It’s just a little spelling mistake!” Well, that spelling mistake could cost you A LOT of money. Remember what we said earlier – your product descriptions build a level of trust between you and the visitors to your website. When this trust is broken, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to rebuild that trust.
A little proofreading goes a long way, so before uploading the descriptions, read through them a few times. It’ll save you a lot in the long run.
…Which neatly brings us into our final point.
Hire a Professional
At Content Development Pros, we’ve written highly effective product descriptions that convert well for a host of industries such as clothing, jewelry, fashion, tech accessories, home appliances and many others for display on Amazon, Etsy, and other ecommerce powered platforms like Shopify, Magento, etc. which you can think of. From sunglasses to business intelligence tools, we’ve applied the best principles and professional guidelines to every single one, and we get results. Our clients go away with hundreds of accurate and killer product descriptions, tailor-made for their target audience, and we get another great review for our content writing services. It’s a win-win!
No matter what the requirements of your project are, let us know, and we can apply our practically result-oriented know-how and professionalism to boost your brand’s conversions.
