Your product descriptions are critical to your ability to sell products online. Good product descriptions will tell your prospects what they are getting and get them to buy, yet a bad one will drive them away. But how do you know what makes a good product description? What do you even put?
The good news is that creating an amazing description is easy to do. That catch is that it’s not just writing whatever you want. Do a little research to make an effective one.
So, let’s jump in and cover how to create descriptions for each product.
Your Audience
The first step that you need is a defined audience. Likely you already have a basic idea of the audience that your business serves. This audience is the perfect start for your product description audience.
Each product you have will have a unique audience. For example, my wife’s business creates handmade soaps. Some fragrances are very floral, and others have a strong musk. As a guy buying soap, I would not pick up floral soap unless it was for my wife. So, the audience for floral soaps will probably be women buying for themselves or friends. The musk scents are probably more likely a male audience.
Define as many details as you possibly can. Defining your audience could be as simple as reviewing who has been purchasing the product in the past.
You might think it’s pointless to write out details about what they do or who they are. But when you know who they are, you can speak their language. A well-off businesswoman will have a different style and talk differently than a stay-at-home mom.
When you use the right words and language, you invite them into the description. You can paint a picture that they can imagine themselves using your product.
Features VS Benefits
Now that you have a defined audience, you need to determine what matters most about this product to that audience. The best way to do this is to think of all features and benefits you can and list them out. You won’t use them all, but rather pick the most important ones.
Start with a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns. On one side of the page, put features for the title, and on the other side, benefits. Make your list as complete as possible. They do not need to be even.
Remember that features are things like a 10oz jar or red color. A benefit is often more intangible. Feelings or what it means to the buyer are benefits. The “So What” method works great for doing this. Here is an example.
Candles come in a 10oz jar – Feature.
So what?
The candle burns longer.
So what?
I can enjoy the fragrance longer.
So what?
My romantic evening is more enjoyable for a longer time.
You see what I mean. Asking so what, I worked my way down to an emotional benefit. The enjoyment of the fragrance is emotional. You are more compelling when you do more than rattle features.
A good description will have a mix of both benefits and features. You should list the most important details while using benefits to tie emotions to them. People make purchases based on emotion and justify them with numbers and facts.
The example above would be: “I bought this candle because it was 10oz and a good deal.” And the underlying emotions: “I bought this candle for my romantic evening; it was a good price, and the size will help my evening last longer.”
Keywords
Now we have both an audience and some features and benefits, time to figure out what words the audience would use to search or find this product.
The easiest way to do this is to search for your products. Look at the results and the people also search section. Inside the top results will be keywords you can grab.
You can also use features and benefits to search for more keywords. Using the example above, the special evening, I could search for either items for a romantic evening or how to make a romantic evening better. In the top articles, I could read through and see how my product and descriptions could pull off the same terms.
Tools such as Keywords Everywhere (https://keywordseverywhere.com/) will give you additional suggestions for each search above.
Write down all the keywords you find and rank them by relevance. Pick the top 3-5 to focus on with one primary. We will sprinkle these keywords in our description naturally. Don’t stuff them in or list them. Make sentences that flow and work for your description.
Keywords can be misleading. Sometimes it is not about a single word but rather a phrase. An example is the keyword romantic or the keyphrase romantic evening. Both can work, but you might do better with a romantic evening because it is more specific. Romantic could mean just about anything. A romantic evening implies a date and things related.
Personality
There is only one of you or your business out there. No one else has your voice. And this is important.
You are not a computer. You will speak and write with your personality. As one person talks to another, we naturally add emotion and style to our conversations. A simple period here, a comma there, and even capitals or shorthand words (the LOLs of the world) add personality to your writing.
Your customers are not just buying a product but are buying an experience. And customers are drawn to your personality before they purchase. That is one of those benefits of being a small business. Your personality and emotions are in everything you do.
As you write your product descriptions, make them reflect your personality. Use the words you would if you were physically talking to the prospect. Pretend you have a customer next to you while you write the description and direct it to this customer. This customer should come from your ideal audience.
Break out of the box and make your products stand out by being you.
Make it unique
We already talked about adding your personality to the product. But a common mistake I see is people overusing the copy and paste functions to shortcut this process. Heck, I have even been guilty of this myself.
Take the time to create a clear description for each product. Sure, some of the text will be the same. Using my candle examples, if all the candles are 10oz, they will all have to say that. But you can put a spin on each one.
For example, product A could be a 10oz candle for a long romantic evening, and product B could be 10oz to keep you dreaming of the beach all day. Work on each product and its description. Making them unique is needed for a few reasons.
First, Google loves unique content. When every product is the same, Google will say: Ok, I only need to put one here and ignore the rest of these items. Or when they are different, Google could say: These items fit many search queries and should show many times. You can never go wrong with creating unique content for search.
Second, it gives your visitors unique text to read and invites them to want to read more. If all the descriptions are the same, they start filtering and might ignore changes or get bored and take off.
Remember never to write for the search engine. Always, always, always write to your audience. The search engine is a byproduct. Your audience comes first.
Add a short story
A driving force behind every person is a story. We have lived and breathed the story since the dawn of humanity.
Stories enable your visitors to draw themselves into the product. They can place themselves in the story and picture themselves using the product. It creates a strong connection and encourages them to make the purchase.
A story can be a great tool to help someone purchase. But the story must be relevant and factual. Making up a story will not help you sell. People can sense a lie.
If you fail to keep it relevant, you will lose your prospect long before they jump on a purchase. No one wants to hear the story of how your great aunt twice removed once bought a candle from someone else, and it stunk, so she purchased yours.
Stories from actual customers work best. If you do not have anything relevant, skip the story rather than ramble on about something.
Provide a Meta Description
Search engines use your title and meta description as a starting point for your item ranking, in addition to using them in the search results. Your title will be hard to adjust to include many keywords because you need the product name. And even if you did, it would look spammy.
That is where the meta description comes in. And it is super important. Search engines will grab a random part of your page if you do not provide one. This random text does not look pretty and often will not rank well.
Provide a description that uses some of your keywords while giving the basics of your product. You only have about 160 characters here, so use them well.
As I mentioned above, do not ever write for a search engine. Write the meta description as a teaser for your audience. The meta description is the preview text you get in the search results, so make good use of it to invite the searcher to your site.
Make it unique and stand out from other listings you might rank around. Make it speak directly to the audience you defined above. You want them to click the link because they want to learn more about your product.
Conclusion
Following each section of this article will help you write a great product description. One that is keyword relevant and encourages the visitor to make a purchase.
There is no set length you need to have for a product description. Some products will need a longer one to explain the product. Others might only be a short paragraph or two.
A little effort on your descriptions will go a long way, so I encourage you to take some time on these. Make them the best you can and see more results from your efforts.
