Do You Really Need a Unique Description for Each Product in Your Store?

E-commerce is nothing but rapidly developing online trading. It’s the process connected with making commercial transactions via the Internet, regardless of the tools or means you decide to use. Constantly, there are emerging new portals which provide services and products that are supposed to satisfy consumer expectations. Therefore, if you run an online business, you should ensure that it stands out from the competition on the market. Make sure that shopping on your website is convenient and that customers know what to expect from a given product. It’s extremely important to earn your customers’ trust which highly influences their decision making process.

For this purpose, you’ll need clear and comprehensive descriptions of products on your offer. They’ll provide all the necessary information needed to choose the one and only product the customer is looking for. So, does the uniqueness of product descriptions translate into sales? And are the descriptions provided by manufacturers enough?

In this article we’ll let the cat out of the bag and tell you whether unique product descriptions are essential to succeed in the e-commerce market. Keep reading!

Why are unique product descriptions so important?

As it’s been already said, e-commerce is extremely popular among customers. It can be observed from statistics that every year more and more people decide to shop online and the percentage of online shoppers is growing dynamically. In 2019, as many as 62% of Internet users decided to shop online. This is 6 percentage points more than in the previous year when this method of shopping was chosen by 56% of users.

What makes consumers so eager to take advantage of the opportunities offered by online shopping? The most frequently mentioned benefits include the possibility to buy at any time, no need to go to the store in person as well as unlimited time to choose the right product.

The conducted research shows that e-shops offer unlimited possibilities of choosing the right products which are tailored to our needs, moreover, they’re much more convenient than shopping in brick and mortar stores. It’s simply more comfortable and, as it often turns out, much cheaper way of shopping.

It’s worth being familiar with this data if you want to adapt to the realities of the e-commerce market. But before taking a closer look at product descriptions in an online store, you should find out which devices are the most frequently used by customers when they make a purchase. According to the research, laptops still remain the most popular medium and they’re preferred by 74% of Internet users. However, mobile devices are also becoming more and more popular, currently 61% of people shop with their use.

What can you deduce from this research? Well, thanks to it you can adapt your website to the current trends and make it even more attractive for potential customers. The possibility to conveniently make shopping on your website will help you draw customers’ attention and interest. So, what’s the role of product descriptions?

In e-commerce, the issue of writing product descriptions is rather controversial. Very often different people popularize contradictory opinions concerning descriptions, like for example the one that you should keep your texts as concise as possible so as not to bother the customer with unnecessary information. On the other end of the spectrum, some people claim that product descriptions need to be professional and unique and they should also enable customers to get a full picture of the product. Product descriptions are additionally a way of doing SEO for your website. So is it worth investing in the uniqueness of product descriptions after all?

The uniqueness of product descriptions can be understood in many ways. First of all, these are one-of-a-kind texts rich in terms of content. A unique description will give you information about the product that isn’t provided by the competition.

Now, it shouldn’t be surprising for you that content copied from many subpages or written by manufacturers won’t be considered unique by search engine robots. Therefore, when trying to create original texts you should take into account not only your own website but also all other services on the Internet.

Moreover, remember that you need to take care of the uniqueness of your content even after publishing it! Very often if you decide to make a copy of the published description, you’ll have to deal with internal duplicate content. Your competition can also get too inspired by your content and then your texts will automatically be considered plagiarism and their value will decrease drastically.

What is a unique product description from the customers’ point of view?

When writing a product description you need to remember that it’ll also be read by those who aren’t 100% sure whether they want to buy the product. Consumers who come across your products thanks to entering specific search phrases into the search bar, are often at different stages of the decision making process and shopping. Some people do an initial research to analyze shop offers, get acquainted with available products and check which of them will best suit their preferences. In such a situation, a unique product description will allow you to attract customers’ interest, earn their trust and ensure that they’ll remember you, so that during the next shopping they’ll go directly to your store.

As it turns out, content marketing activities in social media aren’t the only method of raising the profile of a brand or an online store. A proper product description also influences the customers’ interest! By creating a consistent online shop that is convenient to navigate, you ensure that users will be willing to buy there.

Product descriptions and their impact on SEO

Are you wondering whether each product needs a unique description? Let’s take a different approach. What’s the consequence of using manufacturers’ descriptions or copying texts from other websites? Below you’ll see a few examples showing how internal and external duplicate content affect SEO.

When speaking about SEO, you need to remember that it’s an area of marketing that is constantly changing! And all of this is caused by updates of Google algorithms. A unique and quality description is a real bargaining chip when it comes to Google rankings – it makes your website more attractive than the offer of the competition on the market.

Thanks to using long tail keywords in your product descriptions, it’s more likely that you’ll be displayed on higher positions in the search results. Doing a thorough analysis of the phrases that users search for and incorporating them in your texts gives you the possibility to promote these keywords in the search results.

Moreover, unique descriptions minimize the probability of duplicate content. Doesn’t sound dangerous? Well, you’ll probably change your mind when you find out what are the possible hazards for your store. We can distinguish internal and external duplicate content. Let’s start from discussing the latter one.

External duplicate content

External duplicate content refers simply to confusingly similar or identical content that can be found on different websites. It often occurs when there are two versions of the site and there are no redirects from one version to another.

Using manufacturers’ descriptions when trying to sell products is another very common mistake. It isn’t hard to imagine that many other shops practice the same activities and consequently one product description can be found on many subpages within one website and, additionally, customers can encounter it on different sites across the net. As you can guess, it looks neither attractive nor trustworthy.

Remember that copying texts both from manufacturers and from your own website is perceived by Google robots as plagiarism and in such a situation, a penalty may be imposed on your store. Another consequences of such actions include a decrease in traffic to the site and being displayed lower in the search results.

So, since we’re already talking about texts on your website, let’s move on to internal duplicate content.

Internal duplicate content

Internal duplicate content occurs when the same content can be found on different subpages of one website which creates the risk of keyword cannibalization. Consequently, you’ll need to deal with inconsistent search results and lack of matching, specific and desirable subpages. Fortunately, Google has its own way of dealing with such issues – the Panda algorithm vigilantly picks up every case of internal duplicate content and lowers the position of a website with such content.

If you intend to copy a description of a product which comes in various color variants, it’ll be better to create one subpage with all color versions of the product. If your offer includes the same product and each color version has a separate subpage, you need to know that search engine robots will index only one version and other variants won’t be displayed in the search results.

That’s why it’s so important to create unique descriptions for all products available in your online store – even if they differ only in color.

Product descriptions in e-commerce – what should they be like and which mistakes should you avoid?

Since you already know why your online store needs to have unique product descriptions, now it’s time to find out what they should look like and which mistakes can cost your business its life. An appropriate product description should be, above all, one-of-a-kind. Furthermore, reliability and trustworthiness are another very important features of product descriptions – the characteristics of the product outlined in the text should always correspond to reality. The description shouldn’t mislead the customer. A poorly written description may affect the shop’s negative rating.

Keep your product descriptions concise. However, it doesn’t mean that texts need to be short – they should include all the information that is necessary and valuable from the customers’ point of view. Product descriptions give you many SEO possibilities. A text with keywords is a key that ensures that the website is noticed by Google and that the search engine displays it on particular keyphrases. A description with a natural form of keywords can work wonders.

Another important rule when writing your product description is to adjust the language to the style of your online shop. You’ll need a different description for a luxurious clothing store and a different one for a store offering cosmetics for kids. Remember to outline to your customers the benefits of buying particular products. It’s closely related to Call to Action which helps users to make the final decision about the purchase.

The AIDA model, designed to trigger specific reactions of the customers, will be perfect for this purpose:

• Attention,
• Interest,
• Desire,
• Action.

Following the model will allow you to create a description that not only persuades the customer to make a purchase but also gives the writer a wide range of possibilities. It’s also worth making sure that your product descriptions aren’t used on various websites such as eBay or OLX. This may cause counterproductive results and due to external duplicate content, the value of your website can be reduced in favor of those sites.

To sum up

Due to the constant increase in the popularity of online shopping, it’s a good idea to adjust your product descriptions to the expectations and needs of potential customers. Apart from allowing you to earn users’ trust, unique texts describing products on your offer will make your site more popular in Google.

Unique descriptions of all products on the offer are necessary, moreover, they benefit the website in many ways, they can prevent internal and external duplicate content, which, on the other hand, could result in penalties, a decrease in traffic to the site and lower position of your website in the search results. Forget about using the texts published by manufacturers – create unique, quality content that will make you stand out from the crowd!