Writing a good product description that sales and "SEO"
Learn how to write effective product descriptions for Shopify that boost sales and improve SEO
What is a product description?
Whenever preparing a product on Shopify, you need to write at least two important pieces of text: product title and product description. Besides the good-looking product images, the product description can help your customer with their purchasing decision by providing details and features regarding the product itself.
A product description can vary in word count, style, and format. Sometimes it is represented in the mutual voice, and sometimes in a brand's unique voice. It depends on how the brand communicates with the customers.
What makes a good product description?
A good and well-crafted would be able to deliver these goals:
Informs customers about product features, how to use them, and benefits. This helps customers quickly scan for information about the product and how it works.
Showing value and style. It can show customers how this product can solve a real-life problem, showing the brand voice over their product.
Besides what it can deliver to customers, a good product description can help search engines scan and understand your product information and show your product to the desired customer intent.
How to write a good product description
This day, you may find that many people recommend you use AI tools like ChatGPT to write your product description. However, these are a few things that so-called AI-generated descriptions can miss out:
Failed to use inline formatting: bold, italic, and underline to make the text legit.
Failed to provide in-depth product information such as features, details on manufacturer, material, or anything that customers specifically care about.
Failed to provide internal, and external links to pages on your store or on the internet because the AI cannot understand the store as much as you do, and it cannot trace back the information reference.
To stand out in the market, you will need to leave your marks by writing a product description that speaks on behalf of your brand.
Highlight your product
If you look up on the Internet, some others might say that while writing a product description, you should focus on the benefits, not just the features. In plain English, it just means that you should explain clearly how each feature will solve the customer's problem and enhance their life quality over just a few bullet lines of fancy feature names, which are hardly comprehensible to customers.
Take the product description from Casper below. They did quite a good job by explaining their features not just spamming the jargon: Zoned Support, Snow Technology, or Hybrid Technology. Last but not least, there is a punch line that sales: Don't lose sleep. I would definitely fall for that.
There are a couple of things that Casper excels in writing product descriptions:
Use inline formatting with bold and italic format, and even color.
Break the content with bullets
Call to action with a simple punch line.
Format your description for easy scanning
As I mentioned earlier, not just AI-generated content is missed out on the formatting, the same goes with human-generated ones if they are not well-crafted. Here are a few tips for a better visual format of your text:
Keep it compact: Try not to write a lengthy product description. If it is less than 50 words, keeping a short and single paragraph would be fine. A good Shopify product description should range from 50 to 150 words combining below formatting techniques.
Use headlines: If your description is beyond 150 words, you should begin to break down the content with subheadings, which is not just good for the customers, but also for SEO.
Use bullet points: Break up information into easy-to-read bullet points like features, and highlights. It can be a number or a non-number. Or just break the line and use the inline formatting like bold, italic just like AllBirds did.
Use high-quality product images (optional): Normally the product description does not need to include the image of the product. Sometimes, you can include size chart images, or how to use images. But they are not required since the product image section already does its part.
Use outbound links (optional): Although it is optional, it is highly recommended to attach links to your content like Allbirds attach links to their Carbon footprint labeling commitment page. This shows customers that the brand does really care about environmental impacts and will highly appreciate the product. Learn more about the outbound links.
Be your own version
Some might say that a brand should tell a story, show its product vision, etc. However, you are maybe just starting out small, ordering a few products from the manufacturer, and setting up the store. So, what story to tell in the description apart from copying the boring product specification from the manufacturer? Well, then don't.
Unique content performs better in search engine rankings and also in customer's hearts. So write your own version, add your own story, visions, and your own experience trying the sample product. This practice will also help you understand the customer persona by looking at the product from the customer's point of view.
Beyond product description
So far we have been talking solely about the product description as a copywriting composed of text and images, stored in the Shopify field called description. Nonetheless, the product description is more than just plain text. The product description can be anything within the product page of your store
Showing additional data
The product additional information, which you store on Shopify Metafields and pull out using Shopify Dynamic Source can be displayed on the product page. It is recommended to store this information in Product Metafields instead of using Text Block in the Theme Editor or using Page Builder to store that information.
In addition, you may want to add a FAQ section for your product page, which is highly recommended for both customers and search engines.
Showcase social proof
You can showcase social proofs such as collected reviews as a way to help your customer with their purchasing decisions by providing indirect pieces of advice from trusted sources. While writing the product description, you cannot be a neutral third-party voice. This is where customer reviews and industry testimonials come into play.
Finding product review apps these days is not so hard. Try rewards to suggest your customers leave organic reviews, and opinions on the product that truly reflect the customer experience. Gaining that over time also helps you to gain your credibility over time.
Treat it like a landing page
Customers do not just stop scrolling at the product image and description, they scroll for more down the way. Add more block section content below the product information sections showing highlights of your product with banners. See Casper product page to understand the idea.
You can design illustrations, and banners that visually showcase your product's best features and benefits that easily catch customers' eyes. Bear in mind this, the product description is for customers and search engines, meanwhile, the image banners are for customers solely, so make it count.
It is worth the while. Trust me
Writing a product description is not just about listing out a bunch of features, but is a means for you to connect with your potential customers and audience, and persuade them that your product can fit into their lives.
It is a good sign that you enjoy writing it. Paying attention to perfectly craft it as you may do to your website and products.
P/S: Furthermore, it is good for Search engine optimization anyway. Google cares about high-quality content, with no tricks all the way around. Find out more on The Google Algorithm leak and what it has to do with your SEO in Shopify
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