Writing Shopify product description seems to be an easy task at first, but it turns out to be one of the more difficult parts to optimize for your Shopify store.
Writing a good piece of Shopify product description provides you more benefit than you think:
- First, it helps you improve your conversion rate
- Second, it helps you reach more audiences if your product description is optimized for SEO
But how to write SEO-optimized product descriptions for your Shopify store? Basically, to write a good product description, you need to write a product description that
- Is written specifically for the buyer, not the bot
- Target the right keywords (relevant, achievable)
- Has the perfect length
- Is not keyword-stuffed
In this article, we’ll also introduce to you some tips to do bulk edit Shopify product descriptions, and how to add tabs to the Shopify product descriptions. So let’s get into it!
Table of Contents
How to write a Shopify product description for the buyer:
Keyword stuffing, backlink spamming and all these other black-hat techniques used to work, they’re not now. Google now favours website that brings a good experience to the users. If you’re stuffing keywords all over the place in your Shopify product description, when visitors somehow visit your product page they’ll just bounce off right away.
And we all know that high bounce rates = low ranking. This is a lose-lose situation.
You should always write a product description for the buyer to read, not the bot. Ask yourself if this product description provides enough information to help them make a purchase decision?
Include feature in the product description
To do that, you’ll need to find the right balance between Benefits and Features. To make it easy to understand:
- Features describe what a product can do, what it looks like, or how it works without relating those things to the buyer. Features are great, but why should the buyer care?
Example:
Always read your product description again after finishing writing it. Ask yourself: “If I were the customers would I actually buy the product after reading this product description? It not, how am I going to improve it?”
Include benefit in the product description
Does it mean that you don’t need to include the features in your product description? No, but only state the most outstanding and important features of your product, and remember to make it short and comprehensive. Benefits describe how product features will work for the buyer. Benefits address exactly how your product will improve their lives. And that’s why showcasing benefits is important, a product can have all the features it wants. But if the customers don’t understand how it’s going to fit into their lives, it might as well not exist.
Let’s break this product description information down into benefits and features:
- Features: waterproof, soft fabric lining.
- Benefits: you can splash in puddles and tromp through slush, the product also blocks moisture from getting in and you’ll always feel warmth and comfort thanks to the soft fabric lining.
Not only does this product description provide enough information about its outstanding features, but it also helps the buyer to imagine how these features are going to benefit them.
When you stick to the benefits of your products in your descriptions, your persuasive power and SEO will be equally as effective. So remember, always include benefits to your Shopify product descriptions.
How to choose the right keywords to target in your Shopify product description:
In order to choose the right keywords to target in your Shopify product description, there are some key factors to keep in mind:
- Search volume and potential traffic volume: Search volume is a metric that shows how many people are searching for a particular query. When creating your content strategy, taking search volume into account is vital because it reflects the popularity of the query. Traffic volume = search volume x average click per search. A keyword can have a high search volume but low traffic volume because it has low CPS (click per search). For example, a keyword that’s formatted in a form of a question may have a low traffic volume as these types of keywords almost always have rich snippets at position 0 to help the visitors answer the question (so they won’t need to click to the link to find the answer).
- Keyword difficulty: Keyword Difficulty (also known as “SEO difficulty” or “keyword competition”) is the process of evaluating how difficult it is to rank in Google’s organic search results for a specific term. A keyword’s difficulty is based on a number of different factors, including domain authority, page authority, and content quality.
- Related keywords: Related keywords are variants, synonyms, or semantically related terms to the main keywords that you’re targeting and trying to rank for on the SERPs.
A keyword might have a very high search volume and traffic volume and also not the keyword that you should be targeting. Why? Because that keyword is competitive, all the big players are competing for the position on page 1. It’s best to stay away from these types of keywords especially if you’re only a small business because else you’re wasting effort.
Long tail keyword strategy
For small Shopify businesses, it’s a good practice to focus more on long-tail keywords with less search volume and traffic volume but lower keyword difficulty and higher conversion value.
Why focusing on long-tail keywords is a great SEO tactic. Long-tail keywords are keywords or keyphrases that are more specific – and usually longer – than more commonly used keywords. Long-tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific.
For example, if you sell sports shoe and choose it as your main keywords you’re more likely to face big competition from Nike, Adidas, Asics, New Balance,…
But you know what makes your product stand out, it’s sustainable and vegan friendly. Combine it all together and now you have your new keyword: Ethical And Vegan Sports Shoe. Using this keyword means that you’re targeting the most potential prospects and avoid having to face big players in the industry.
Remember when choosing keywords for your product descriptions, you should also keep an eye on the related keywords. These related keywords can give you a hint of what the visitors are looking for when searching for a specific keyword. You can use these hints to leverage the relevance of your product description. If your product description can answer the visitors’ question it’s more likely you’re going to be ranked higher.
Where and how often should you use keywords?
Now you’ve already have some keywords that you choose to optimize for, it’s time to place them in your product description. We already know that keyword-stuffing is something we should avoid, but how many keywords in a product description is enough?
We all know that a keyword should appear sparingly in your product description. Here’s the shortlist for how you want to distribute keywords across not only your product description but the product page as a whole:
- Once in the page’s URL
- Once in the product description title
- Once or twice in the body copy
- Once in the alt image tag
Kindly refer to how to add the alt tag to the product image in this article provided by Shopify.
To alter the product page URL, feel free to follow these steps:
Step 1: Go to your Shopify admin dashboard -> Product -> Click to the specific product you want to change URL
Step 2: Scroll down to the bottom of the page, choose “Edit website SEO”
Step 3: Edit the URL handle then click save
Note: tick the box “Create a URL redirect for…” to create a redirect to the new URL.
What’s the perfect length for the Shopify product description?
The perfect length for the Shopify description doesn’t exist. But you can decide the length of your product description based on buyer awareness.
- High buyer awareness means that your potential customers are already fully aware of both the product (the features) and why they need it (the benefits). They require far less convincing to complete the purchase. For these types of buyers, you just need a short and to the point product description, emphasizing the benefits of your product or what makes it unique rather than listing out the features of your product.
Example: Everybody knows what a t-shirt is and what it’s for. Most buyers have a high awareness level about this staple. We don’t need a novel-length description to explain it.
- Low buyer awareness means that the buyer has little to no understanding of the feature or benefits of your product. For these types of buyers, you will need to describe your product thoroughly to bring them to the level of awareness needed for a sale.
Example: Natural oils for skincare is products that need longer product descriptions in order to convert customers. They may reach your site after searching for ways to nurture their skin and might not be familiar with the product or the benefits it can bring to them.
If you’re interested in adding tabs to your product page, feel free to follow this article: Add tabs to Shopify product page: 10 minutes without apps
How to bulk edit Shopify product descriptions?
Step 1: Go to Shopify admin dashboard -> Orders -> Products -> Click Export -> Export Products
Step 2: The CSV will be sent to your email, open your email inbox and download the file to your computer
Step 3: Open the CSV file, change the content inside the value of each cell under the “Body (HTML)” column
Step 4: Import the file back into Shopify admin
Conclusion
There’s no denying that SEO for product descriptions is challenging.
The idea is to think about the information needs of the online buyer first and foremost. That’s the simple rule of thumb for writing effective product descriptions that get the job done. Choosing the right keywords can make all your effort worthwhile, so do your research carefully. Last but not least, let the buyer awareness drives the length of your product description.
If you’re facing problems writing product descriptions for your store, we can lend a hand. We’re offering a free SEO project so that you can experience our expertise and professionalism in working and communicating. We want to enhance your confidence and reliability before you decide to walk through a long Shopify SEO journey with us. The project includes a full SEO audit and one Shopify task of your choice. There are limited slots so you might want to sign-up early. Feel free to learn more about the free SEO project here.
