Valuable = unique
Let’s start with the most important point: your descriptions must be unique and shouldn’t be too short. A solid minimum of around 100-140 words should be ok – remember to try and expand on the topic as much as possible. When a user visiting your store receives accurate information about what they are looking for, there is a greater chance that they will buy your product.
How do you gain the interest of a customer?
You want your descriptions to be interesting for your potential customer. It will therefore be extremely important to match the content to the type of products or services you offer. Instead of creating an almost literary description, consider what information may be most important from the customer’s perspective. This applies especially to “technical” issues, which should be described as precisely as possible – regardless of whether you’re describing a face cream or car parts.
Try to answer some of the most basic questions about your products or services. How will they affect the life of a potential customer? What distinguishes them from other products? Which products might they like the most? These aspects are most important whenever the purchase will be primarily determined by individual impressions. Stimulating your audience’s imagination will be perfect for fashion, furniture or beauty products. However, a good copywriter can even turn a description of car accessories, rich in technical details, into a fascinating story, full of specific examples of use.
So try to combine a comprehensive description of the basic functions and applications of a given product with a story that will stimulate the imagination. You can smuggle across interesting content in various ways that will make the potential customer spend more time on your website. Thus increasing the chance of making a purchase – and additionally improving the website’s position in search engines.
Advise and tell stories
A good idea for creating content that engages the audience’s attention is to create mini-guides that will be an integral part of the descriptions. This approach works especially well for specialized services.
Product descriptions are also a chance for some storytelling. By creating short stories about your products, you can easily emphasize their biggest advantages and describe their most important functions. Every salesperson knows that stimulating the customer’s imagination is one of the most effective marketing tools – but let’s not forget about the details.
Language issues
This brings us to the next aspect of creating effective category and product descriptions – style and language. On the one hand, they should be simple enough for every reader to understand – on the other, they should be factual enough to contribute to building an image of your brand as an expert in your niche.
The old rule of communication (not only in written form) says that the message should be directed towards a single recipient. So try to imagine that you are writing for one specific person who is interested in the described product. This way, you will make your text more coherent, readable and simply more pleasant to read.
Prepare a template
Before you start writing, be sure to take a look at the content that is already on your site, as you want everything to be as coherent as possible. If you’re creating descriptions completely from scratch, you’ll have a lot of room to show off. You will often have to write several dozen or even several hundred descriptions, so remember to look for ways to improve your work. A detailed, but also flexible template, according to which subsequent texts will be created, will be useful.
A similar structure of each description will have a positive effect on the user experience of the website’s visitor: the potential customer will know what to expect regardless of where they are on the site. In addition, a description created according to a uniform template will confirm the recipient’s belief in a well-thought-out and orderly structure of the viewed page.
The most important information (e.g. brand, manufacturer, product application) should be placed at the very beginning, and any additional information should be placed in further parts of the text. Also pay attention to the form of each description. Break down long blocks of text into short, but concise paragraphs. A reasonable maximum seems to be 5-6 lines in each, but when determining the length, always take into account the page layout.
A unified description template will be useful for both when you have to create content yourself and when you have to work with outsourced copywriters.
Start with keyword research
The next step on the way to creating interesting descriptions will be to research your target group and prepare a set of keywords. Researching your audience group will be important mainly from a PR point of view, but it will also help the copywriter: the language used in each description will become better suited to the brand’s communication strategy.
When it comes to keywords, it’s worth preparing a list in which you should include not only a single main keyword, but also several other phrases related to the topic being described. Exact match sales phrases (i.e. strictly matched to the queries for which you want to position a given subpage) should be used primarily in the headers. Ideally, they should be in all of them – but remember about the most natural and grammatically correct wording of keywords.
Google algorithms will also appreciate you for the differentiation of phrases: not only grammatical, but also quantitative. This includes placing natural-sounding, partial match and long tail keywords into the mix.