What to do when writing unique product descriptions is impractical?
-
Hi Guys,
Obviously in an ideal world all product descriptions would be high quality and unique. But do you ever have a client who you know they'll be totally impractical for?
For example, one of my clients is a niche book store with 10,000s of products. There are only two members of staff. They currently C+P the blurb. I would love to recommend that they write unique copy for all their books, but considering the books have a low retail value and a fairly short shelf life, I doubt that unique descriptions would be worth the ROI.
My initial thoughts are:
- Identify the high priority books/best sellers and write new product descriptions for them
- Encourage more customers to leave on-page product reviews
Can anyone recommend any better solutions?
-
Thanks Miriam, they're a bit reluctant to hire a copywriter because of the relatively short shelf life of many of the books. I think it's a matter of prioritising and working through as many high priority descriptions as possible. Thanks for the advice!
-
Hi Alice,
I think you are on the right track, identifying top selling books for which it will be a priority to write unique copy. The key here will be setting up a manageable task list. Whether the owners can handle writing 5 new descriptions a week or 25, figure out what the golden number is that they can achieve without feeling overwhelmed. Progress on a project like this typically has to be modestly paced, because the inventory is so large. Can they, perhaps, hire a copywriter to help them with some, if not all, of the work?
-
Thanks Jakub! Two really great ideas
-
This two are good. I would try to find bloggers (followerwonk) writing about books, and ask them to leave a review about their favorite book at this store. It should be simple to get a nice scale.
Next step can be organize contest for best book review. Books as awards, and best reviews you can use as deafult to that product.
If some new ideas will come to my mind, i'll let you know!
btw: this is good topic for brainstorm.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Anyone Seen Sitelinks for Brand and Product Name?
Hi All, I could be wrong but it appears our site is getting sitelinks for brand name + product name. I understand that this is Google's choice and of course it would be great to have this for all our products. Is this random or an experiment by Google. Please see attached screenshot. All ideas welcome! Jim Aeg2Z
On-Page Optimization | | LucyBee0 -
Noindex or canonical tag for products which have no unique product description?
I have several ecommerce sites in the same niche and there are a high number of products shared among these sites. I understand that having unique product descriptions for each site may be ideal, but for several reasons this is not an option for the short term. Sales-wise it would be useful to continue products on several sites at the same time. Also it would not be a problem if only the product pages of our main store would show up in the google index. I thought about adding noindex xrobots tag to avoid that product pages are indexed in more than one store to avoid issues with duplicated or thin content or would you implement canonical tag here? What would you suggest?
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse0 -
Category Descriptions if Category Pages are Noindexed?
I have noindexed my category pages. Do I still need to write a description for my categories? I am using the plugin SEO Content Control to see what I can spiff up but I don't want to waste my time. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Head description tag, what now
Recently I heard Google virtually dropping the description tag for seo scoring? and it takes the data off the page, however one of my clients description is just pulling a url rather than any content from the page. is there some way thats ethical to suggest a description to google?
On-Page Optimization | | Shuffled0 -
E-commerce site product descriptions and duplicate content
Hi everyone. I'm developing an e-commerce site using Prestashop and concerned about the issue of duplicate content among product descriptions. My main concerns are: If there are 500 or more products and those product descriptions are obtained from a manufacturer or supplier's website hence running into external duplicate content issues. Internal duplicate content is also an issue, if there are multiple similar products and each product has the same description across several pages. What would be the best approach to eliminate the possibility of incurring a duplicate content penalty due to similar product descriptions? I've already considered the suggestion of noindex-ing the complete range of products to help protect from duplicate content penalties and having unique articles written in the site blog discussing products instead linking to certain products on the site. Another consideration I had was noindex-ing all product pages except pages for featured products in the store and rewriting descriptions for a set amount of those featured products regularly (this will still have the problem of internal duplicate content across pages if similar product descriptions are rewritten). The product range is intended to be very large so I'm really seeking an alternative solution from the insane task of rewriting many product descriptions. Any suggestions to make SEO work efficient are very much welcome and appreciated. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | valuepets0 -
Product links on homepage
Hi, I;m wondering if it really does aid SEO or even hinder it now to have lists of top selling products as links on the base of each page. This was recommended to us sometime ago by a consultant so we did it but is it outdated? I'm concerned it may penalise our pages now by creating too many links? opinions appreciated. wwww.gourmetdirect.com and scroll down to see what I mean
On-Page Optimization | | GourmetDirect0 -
Creating a product per size causing duplicate content problems?
I have an e-commerce site and in order to receive a listing for each size and color in Google Merchant, I've created a new product for each size and color. The problem is that since I did this, the canonical tags aren't correct and there isn't a way to change them manually with the platform I'm on. I feel like this is one of the main reasons I've been dropping in the rankings. Should I delete all duplicate products? The system will take care of canonical tags automatically when creating a new size/color within the system (how it's supposed to be created) but the canonical tags become messy when I duplicate a product and edit the size/color to create a "whole new product". Here is an example of what I'm referring to: http://www.carbonconnection.com/search.php?search_query=nalini+rigel&x=0&y=0 (this problem actually isn't mine, it's a friend's but for the sake of simplicity and gaining a second opinion to be sure before he redoes all of his products, I'm asking as though it were my issue)
On-Page Optimization | | EmdeS0 -
Link Product Thumb & Product Name with same anchor link?
We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name. So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link? We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy. It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0