In mid-2019, more than 800,000 merchants across the globe were using Shopify. With COVID-19 pushing online shopping to even new heights, Shopify saw more growth in early 2020. Whether you’re launching your first ecommerce shop or you’ve been a Shopify mainstay for some time, you may be looking to differentiate yourself from the growing crowd of online retailers. One way to do that is via high-quality, unique Shopify product descriptions.
Benefits of Quality, Compelling Shopify Product Descriptions
Compelling product descriptions entice readers to move from consideration or early decision stages through to the final purchase. They help convince visitors that your product is the one they’re looking for.
Just as important, quality descriptions help improve the SEO of your product pages. That makes it more likely they show up in Google searches, which is where the bulk of people start when they’re looking to make an online purchase.
By improving your Shopify store’s product descriptions, you can drive increased sales. According to Guillem Hernandez, a key account manager with Crisp Studio, simply making positive changes to product descriptions has helped his clients increase conversions by up to 10% or more.
Calloway Cook, President of Illuminate Labs, says his team has seen similar results. “Taking actions such as improving product description copy and creating an interlinking strategy resulted in a 10% month-over-month increase in traffic without any additional blog content added,” says Cook. He attributes the growth solely to the improvements in product page copy.
How Do You Write Compelling Shopify Product Descriptions?
If a 10% increase in conversion rates or traffic sounds like something you want to get in line for, here’s a quick crash course on how you can create compelling Shopify product descriptions that also improve your SEO.
1. Be Concise
“Copywriting for product pages has to be concise,” says Cook. “Consumers don’t want to read huge blocks of text. The shorter you can distill the important information that separates your products from competitors, the better.”
But what’s the right content length for a perfect product description? As with all content, the answer is: It depends.
The more complex your product — typically meaning it has more features and benefits — the longer your copy might be. You might also need longer copy for certain luxury items, because you may be making a case for lifestyle benefits for them.
Ultimately, your Shopify description must be long enough to convey the important features and benefits to the reader in a concise, scannable way. If that’s 50 words, great. If it’s 500, also great, but remember to break it up with subheadings and bulleted lists to make it easier to read.
Also note that your target word count will depend on your SEO competition. Use a tool like MarketMuse, Inked, or SEMrush to determine the average word counts for the pages that are currently ranked in the top 10 results of Google for your target keyword. If your competition averages 500 words for example, you probably want to be inline with that.
2. Don’t Leave Out Important Details
“As per my observation, around 50% of the shoppers are learned enough and have already done enough research to know the specs they need for themselves. So, saying ‘This battery is awesome and lasts for the longest time’ doesn’t serve the purpose,” says Hernandez. “I would rather replace it with something like ‘This battery lasts for 60 hours’ to incite more impression.”
He also notes that around 20% of conversions fail because the product information is missing or unclear.
Include all relevant information in your product descriptions by starting with the Voice of the Customer (VOC). Ask yourself: Who are your customers, and what do they need and want? How familiar are they with these products? How do your products provide solutions to the customer’s challenges? The answers to these questions help you determine the most important factors for your Shopify product descriptions.
3. Highlight the Value Proposition
“A potential customer is looking for a product that satisfies his requirements. That’s why an ideal product description should focus on HOW your product is solving your audience’s needs. This is what a potential buyer is interested in,” says Hernandez.
“We find it most effective to use simple language and short sentences with descriptive language that recreates the experience of using the product in your customer’s mind,” says Jessica Rose, CEO of Copper H20. “The copy should make the customer excited about the product without over-promising.”
In short, your product description should never just be a description. You don’t need to spend the words to explain that this is a round widget with a tapered top that’s painted in a dual tone of red and black with three stripes. Pictures really are worth a thousand words, so some of that explanation is made obsolete if you include good product pictures (and you should be doing this!). Plus, a lot of basic spec information is included in your spec list; if you include that information again in a narrative format, there has to be a reason.
Focus on feature-benefit copy. Mention a feature and then explain why it’s beneficial or how the customer might use it. In the example of the round widget, you might say, “A tapered top makes this widget easy to install into your existing system, and the three black stripes provide a guide for how far the widget should be inserted for each use type.” Suddenly the color and shape of the widget aren’t just description — they’re compelling reasons someone might buy this widget instead of others.
4. Use Your Brand Voice
Even if you’re reselling products from manufacturers, your product descriptions should be in your brand voice. In fact, it’s even more important in that case, because your brand is what sets you apart from other resellers. Whether it’s funny, friendly, professional or some combination of various traits, make sure your voice shines through without diminishing the information provided in the copy.
5. Create Unique Content
Many people simply copy product descriptions from the manufacturer’s page or use the same copy on multiple pages. But this isn’t the best way to create strong optimization and performance in search results.
“We have to be careful to avoid duplicate content red flags from Google when we have the same product shared across our three sites,” says Brian Lim, the CEO and founder of iHeartRaves.
Take the time and effort to create unique copy for all your products and pages to help improve SEO. This tactic also lets you test your copy to find what works best for your audience.
6. Use the Right Keywords
“Adding in keywords to help with SEO is critical to being found in search,” says Lim.
Conduct keyword research for various products and groups of products. Then, try to work one primary keyword and at least one long-tail or secondary keyword into each product description. For best results, try to get your primary keyword into the first sentence of the description. But don’t sacrifice clarity for the sake of keywords; you can also include it in the first paragraph.
On top of that, make sure that your product images are keyword optimized. Both the file name and the alt text of each image should contain targeted keywords. It’s important that your alt text reads naturally though as it’s primarily used by visually impaired people who rely on screen readers to dictate the text of sites to them.
If you have a lot of products to write copy for doing keyword research can be a tall task. In those cases, consider using keyword formulae. Our ebook, “The Complete Guide to Creating eCommerce Contnent at Scale” goes over this in detail.
7. Tweak Product Descriptions Regularly
“Every site is different,” says Hernandez, “and every product requires its own approach. The best way to figure out is to do A/B testing on the product pages and gather the results to understand what works better for each store type.”
But it’s not just about what works best for each product page today. SEO and online shopping trends are constantly changing, so your product descriptions can’t be forever stagnant. “We suggest continuously revising product copy based on data to see what works best,” says Rose.
Leveraging Technology to Make Content Management Easier
One of the biggest challenges in creating content for an entire store is scaling. Most stores have large numbers of products, and doing the work to craft compelling product copy for all of them is a tall order.
Each product likely needs:
- Keyword research
- Writing
- Editing
- SEO optimizations
- Publishing
Your store might even need more than these steps.
Every step takes time, and the more you can leverage technology to save you time allows you to get more done and be more competitive with your store.
At Crowd Content, we’ve built a Shopify app that helps with a great deal of this process. Once installed, the app lets you connect your Shopify catalog to your Crowd Content account so you can order custom written product descriptions for any number of your products with just a few clicks. With many skilled product copywriters, you can get content back in a matter of days, have it edited, and then even publish it back to your store with just a few clicks.
To get setup, all you need to do is create your Crowd Content account.
Then, visit Shopify’s App Store to install the app in your store.
You’ll be prompted to connect your store to your Crowd Content account.
Then, you can login to your Crowd Content account and visit the Order Product Descriptions page.
You’ll see an option to do a Shopify Import. This brings up a list of all your products, and you simply check the ones you want copy written for. Then, you can provide instructions for how the writers should tackle your project.
Within a few days you’ll start getting copy back. Once that happens, you’ll be asked if you want to publish the completed content on your store. Confirm, and the content will be posted instantly.
This can save you a lot of time in terms of writing, editing, and publishing which will let you spend more time on other areas of your business and scale up quicker.
Scaling Shopify Product Descriptions Without Losing Quality
These seven tips are just the beginning of creating and maintaining high-quality product descriptions in your Shopify store. And if you have a lot of unique items, you might be balking at how much work you’re looking at.
But it’s work well worth doing. And you don’t have to do it all yourself!
“We have found it’s worth the investment and have hired professional copywriters,” says Lim. If you’re ready to hire professional copywriters who know how to spin compelling, concise Shopify product descriptions that convert, you can find thousands of freelance writers via Crowd Content. And if you’re not sure where to start and want help managing the entire process — from keyword research to building writing teams to editing for publish-ready content — find out more about our Enterprise content solutions.
ALSO – Using eCommerce Influencer Marketing to Drive your Brand Forward
