Your website has been designed, you have a shop and now you need to make your products 'shine'.

You need to put a bit of effort into writing your product descriptions, otherwise you’ll miss out on sales. Or even worse, customers will buy your product and return it – losing you even more time and money.

Great product descriptions do a number of things – they tell a story, they highlight your products key features and improve your ecommerce website design's SEO. 

Know Your Audience

Just like the content on your website, you should have a good idea of who your target audience is. Product descriptions for televisions will be very different to product descriptions for cashmere jumpers.

Think about your customer's location, age, gender and interests and tailor your style accordingly. If you’re writing a description for a television, you can be technical and unemotional, whereas if you’re writing about cashmere jumpers, your description may be warm and sincere.

Whether you’re writing in a humorous, earnest or strait-laced way, make sure that your descriptions are consistent and match the style and tone of your brand and website.

Focus on Your Benefits Not Your Features

Emphasise your products benefits not features.

“These razors have 4 blades!”

So what?

“These razors have 4 blades so your skin won’t get pulled!”

This sounds interesting, my razor is always catching and tugging my skin when I shave.

The product description is your chance to go into fine detail as to why your customer needs your product. Mindlessly listing features will send your customer to sleep, so highlight why every feature is so special.

If your customer has no idea why a particular feature matters, tell them why it is such a great future.

“This TV is built with Dolby Audio Processing – for cinema quality sound!”

“This luxurious sweater is hand stitched from 100% cashmere – which makes it so soft, you’ll hardly notice you’re wearing it.”

Whatever features you are emphasising, focus on the benefits that will really appeal to your customers.

Don’t Forget Your SEO

When writing your description, you’ve got nothing to lose in making it keyword rich. Just like the content on the rest of your website design, your descriptions should read well but to also contain the keywords you want to get found for.

Similar to your regular pages, include internal links in your product descriptions for easy navigation. You can also cross promote and upsell your existing products this way. If you operate a blog, link to this, to provide the visitor with even more valuable information.

Remember that there are a number of factors that influence how a page is ranked. If visitors see a one-line product description, they’ll bounce away pretty quickly, because what else are they supposed to do. Whereas if visitors are able to read lots of relevant and interesting information, they’ll dwell on your website a lot longer, and this will factor into Google’s algorithms in a positive way.

Make Your Images Stand Out

Writing about your product is just half the battle. If you’ve got some captivating product descriptions, it will all be for nothing if your media isn’t captivating too. Customers expect great images, and if yours aren’t up to standard, they’ll abandon your website never to return again.

Whether you’re selling tracksuits, trainers or toys, customers expect to see your item pictured perfectly from a number of different angles. Stand out even further by adding videos of your products being worn/used/eaten. Include as much information as you can. Many fashion website designs now include the model’s physical attributes so you can get an even better idea of what their products look like.

The product images are your chance to really reflect your company’s brand and capture your customers imagination, so think about what your brand represents. Bulbul are clearly going for some minimal aesthetic and their product images echo this. From Drop Bottle’s product images, you can see that their brand is about freshness and vitality.

Creating amazing product images is a topic in itself, and we’ll cover this in another blog entry.

Structure Your Description Accordingly

If you do have to get technical or want to tell a long story, be sure to break everything up into concise paragraphs.

Bullet points are great because web users love scanning text, as opposed to actual reading. Everything on the web is designed for speed and ease. If visitors can see the main features of your product at a glance, this adds to a positive customer experience and makes a sale more likely.

Google also dislikes duplicate content, so don’t be tempted to copy and paste one product description for all of your items. Each and every one of your products is unique and you want that to come across in the descriptions.

Conclusions

Don’t fall at the last hurdle. When visitors are at the product page, this means they like your website design and the nature of your brand. All you need to do is give them a bit more encouragement, and they’ll start making purchases. Hopefully this guide has given you a good idea how to do that.

Here at DotGO, we design affordable business website designs for companies in the UK. We have been designing websites for over 17 years so we know exactly how to increase your traffic, find customers and grow your revenue. Contact us today and find out how we can get your ecommerce store on the web.