How to Write Good Product Descriptions for Your Shopify Store

There are a few things you should know about and take into consideration when deciding how to name your products and write good descriptions. It's useful to know that there are about 24 million e-commerce stores on the web all trying to sell their products and compete for rankings.

Remember that product descriptions affect your store on many levels, from SEO and discovery on search engines, through your product's preview on social media or advertisement, to user experience and conversion rates.

Research

Research is essential to writing new product descriptions, so do your homework before starting to write.

Competitors:

1. Check what your competitors write about their products, the length of their product titles and descriptions, the use of keywords, images, etc.
2. Run keyword research - Use SEO research tools to check what keywords your competitors' products rank for.
3. Google your competitor and see if you find just their store's homepage or also product pages come up.
4. Google your competitor's products to see how their product pages look on search results.

Inspiration and best practices:

Look for a few successful stores that you can learn from, even if they don't sell the same category of products as you and are not a direct competitor. Check out the length of their product title and descriptions, the use of images, whether they show a long and comprehensive description by default, or do customers have to click 'See more' to expand and read the entire description.

Again, Google their brand name and products to learn what ranks well on search engines.

Writing Product Descriptions

When we talk about product descriptions, we actually refer to product names as well. Names and descriptions should work hand in hand.

You're going to want your product page to have an in-depth description of all the information about your product, but you should also remember that the product name is as important because that's the first thing that the customer sees.

Product Names

Product titles don't have too much effect on SEO, but an optimized product title bundled with great images and a thorough description will go along way towards increasing your SERP rankings and, therefore, organic traffic. A good product helps customers understand the product they're looking at, hence improving your store's user experience is.

Don't make your products' titles too short and also not too long. Your goal is to write descriptive product titles that contain information that is valuable for the customer.

Product Descriptions

Most people will want to find the most important stuff as quickly as possible when they're searching for a product or browsing through your store. They're not looking to read through long product descriptions. Nevertheless, when making a purchase decision, some customers want to dig deeper, learn more about the product they intend to buy, and perhaps even compare its features with competing products.

Therefore, a product description should be thorough and comprehensive while making the most important information stand out. A good way to make important info stand out is using bullet points or other design features to create a hierarchy.

To rank high on Google, include keywords that came up during research and think of other keywords customers may use when searching for similar products.

Eventually, make sure your description covers everything a customer could want to know about your product.

Optimization

A product description isn't something that you write once and forget about. Once in a while, you should check how your products perform on search engines, ads, and in terms of conversion rate in your store.

You should revisit your competitors and see whether they have made changes since the last time you checked.

After you collect all the data, go back to your product descriptions to add or remove keywords, add new information, or make any other edits to optimize performance.