SEO for Product Descriptions

SEO for product descriptions refers to the things you do for and on your individual product descriptions to increase their visibility online. We're going to walk you through the steps to take when writing SEO friendly product descriptions, plus what details your customers need when making their buying decision.

Using SEO for Product Descriptions 

The goal of SEO is to increase the amount of traffic to your website, and in the case of SEO for product descriptions, increase the number of potential customers to your online shop. Just increasing website visitors isn't enough though, as you need those visitors to be interested in learning more about and purchasing your products.

Keeping these things in mind, there are four key SEO things to ensure each of your product descriptions have:

1. Unique descriptions which are written for your target customers
2. Key features and benefits for each product
3. The right keywords
4. Headings and meta tags containing the right keywords

Write Unique Product Descriptions for Customers

When writing an SEO friendly product description, your first consideration must be for your target audience. They are ultimately the ones who will decide whether or not to purchase your product and their opinion matters more than the search engines'. In saying so though, your product descriptions need to be written with good SEO practices in mind. Ensure each description is 100% unique as duplicate content is often penalised by search engines, resulting in low rankings and less traffic to your website. Our Guide On How to Write Product Descriptions explains in detail how you can write high converting descriptions. 

List Key Features & Benefits to the Customer

Bounce rate, which refers to how many people visit a specific page but leave without going any further into the site, is one of the metrics a search engine uses to rank a particular page or site. A high bounce rate will occur on a product description that does not contain the information a customer needs, or if the information they expected to find differs greatly, often due to misleading meta descriptions. Listing the key features of a product gives customers details they need to decide if this product is what they need. Providing the key benefits helps them picture how purchasing the product would solve their problems. Together they help keep the customer on your website longer and increase sales. 

Do Your Keyword Research

What you think your customers are searching for and what they actually are entering into search engines may be completely different. That's when keyword research comes in handy. Keyword research helps you identify which words and phrases are being used, their average monthly search volume, how much competition there is for ranking with it and which websites hold those top ranks currently. There are many free and paid keyword research tools which we list in our SEO video on What is Keyword Research, or check out our article What is Keyword Research instead. 

Use Headings & Meta Tags Correctly

Headings and meta tags play a key role in SEO for product descriptions, just as they do for other pages on your website. Both meta tags and headings are used by search engines to help identify what the key topic is for a page and which parts are the most important. These give search engines the knowledge it needs to decide if your content is the most relevant option it could show its users. Our articles Using Heading tags to Improve your SEO and How to Optimise Your Meta Tags explain best practices and how to use them on your website. 

For further information on search engine optimisation, we recommend watching our SEO Videos and viewing our SEO Resources.