Knowing What’s Right to Write for Product Page Content

August 17, 2007 | In Best Practices, Getting Started, SEO/SEM | 8 Comments

All too often I see merchants with stores that have recently opened (or have been open for a while but are complaining about lack of natural search traffic), with product pages that lack sufficient original content. Now while writing for the web means you write less (and make your text scanable with bullet points and shorter line lengths) than you would for a catalog, embracing minimalism with your product content is a sure way to rank poorly with search engines and also deter visitors from becoming buyers.

So how much product content is enough? I have seen sources that list 200-300 words as an ideal and others that recommend 500 words; the trend seems to be moving towards higher word count but use conversion and not just traffic as your overall success metric. The next question then from newer merchants is typically, “How do I write that much?” or “What do I write about to get that many words?”.

Realize though that it is not simply the volume of content you write for products, but the quality as well (hint: keywords). Assuming you have done your homework on keywords and keyphrases research for which you wish the product to rank in search engines, I would recommend two articles with helpful tips on what to write about and the questions to answer for your various buyers.

Writing Smart Copy For Your E-commerce Product Pages

The folks at SEO Igloo have put together an article about 5 topics you can use to shape product content. The topics include:

  • Historical
  • Modern
  • Trends
  • Psychology
  • Scientific

Some of these will work better than others depending on the type of products you sell, but at the very least they hint at the ways you can transform simple product pages into content-rich pages which search engines may rank higher.

Dishing Out What the Customer Really Wants

This is a great article from the smart marketers at Future Now. I was fortunate enough to hear Howard Kaplan from Future Now speak at the Internet Retailer conference this year. Kaplan talked about the different personas of online shoppers:

  • Competitive: cutting edge, early adopters
  • Methodical: research and compare, need all the details
  • Humanistic: speak to emotional benefits of the product
  • Spontaneous: impulse shoppers

The article lists the various questions these visitor types have when shopping. Imagine your job as a copywriter is to be the sales person on the page answering the questions asked by these different personas. The spontaneous buyer may need only a persuasive headline and a compelling price to buy. The methodical buyer will want to see all product specs, any testimonials from other customers, and why to trust you with the purchase. You may not have all of these personas but viewing your product pages in this framework can help overcome any writer’s block and when done properly can boost search traffic and drive additional sales.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

8 Comments »

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  1. Hi Rob,
    I am trying to have education in website building. Though i had Pack of tools to enhance my page rank, I failed to suceed in getting enough traffic. Your suggestions sonds good. will you give some indepth analysis of your package.

    Comment by evan — August 18, 2007 #

  2. Great subject! Thank you. For some of us, 200-300 even 500 words is nearly impossible. I sell cables. I cannot even begin to think how much information I can say about a USB cable that would fill up 200-300 words…but that’s just my product. There are a lot of products that I go shopping for, and when all they list is a really brief explanation of what it is – I just go elsewhere. I simply want to see someone actually “trying” to sell their product. By the way, for those interested, the first 3 paragraphs of your articl are 225 words, and your whole article comes out just over 500 words :)

    Comment by Pat — August 18, 2007 #

  3. Evan–Rob did not write this post. If you have a question for him, I would post it to his blog at ystore.blog.com.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — August 19, 2007 #

  4. Pat

    Yes–there are some products where this will be a challenge for sure. Are your cables different in some way than others? Are they better quality? More durable? A better value with similar quality? If so, that’s one place to start. Another thing to try may be posting customer testimonials about your products. They help persuade visitors and provide original content on the page (just be sure to insert your actual product names where the commenter just writes “cable”).

    You could certainly write a page about why USB cables are better than serial and then go on to explain the “modern times” aspect of “S video” (higher quality) and so on (all the while sprinkling the page with links to your section pages for these categories of cables).

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — August 19, 2007 #

  5. It is also important to remember to keep pages fresh. Search engines love fresh copy. We have found that new words- especialy in section pages, have resulted in improved search engine position.
    Ken K
    http://www.MisterShop.com

    Comment by Ken — August 22, 2007 #

  6. Good point Ken. Spiders do love sites that are updated frequently. I would emphasize keeping the keywords for which you are trying to optimize in the content, but you can always work in new content which includes those same keywords. Again, easier in some stores than others. For a men’s clothing store such as yours, it would be easy enough to work in seasonal clothing copy, or cover the latest trends seen in fashion magazines or what male celebrities are wearing.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — August 22, 2007 #

  7. Thanks for all the tips! As I have been told that it is considered to be spamming by the robots if the keywords are roughly over 10% of the total words on a given page. Is this true?

    Comment by The Dog Clothing & Dog Collar Company — September 4, 2007 #

  8. I haven’t heard a specific percentage thrown around lately that backs that figure. I think keyword density and such certainly play a part but likely less so than quality inbound links and other factors. I recommend reviewing the following article at SEOMoz on search engine ranking factors. Note the poll at the bottom that seems to indicate 91% of those surveyed think one of two factors apart from keywords play a more important part. Also note that overuse of keywords is listed in the top negative factors.

    So how much is too much? If you read the page and it sounds a bit silly to repeat your keywords so often, then know that search engines are able to pick up on this as well. Better to work on other factors listed as important than spend too much time tweaking your exact keyword to other content ratio for that magic percentage (it would likely change anyways).

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — September 4, 2007 #

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