What is the best tactic to fix thousands of product descriptions on an eCommerce site?
-
I've asked this to dozens of people already, but I still haven't found a satisfactory answer... perhaps someone here can help me:
I keep hearing how important it is to update product descriptions to avoid duplicate content, decrease thin content and improve conversion rates - but for any new eCommerce sites like ours, with thousands of listings going up at once, this is nearly impossible to control.
Outsourcing is clearly a bad idea from an SEO standpoint as well as a UX standpoint... But are there any other options? Should I let go of my other responsibilities and focuses as an in-house SEO manager and virtually stop, drop and roll out unique product descriptions? That would be a project that would take me at least a year to complete.
Do I just give up? Do two descriptions a day and hope for the best? What do you guys think? What have you recommended for others? I can't imagine our company is alone in this dilemma.
Thanks in advance!
Hanna
-
I would suggest prioritising the products and creating unique descriptions for the most important ones first.
Outsourcing them ... I would not generally say that's a bad idea as long as you ensure the work produced will be of high quality, meaning don't outsource them to India or something but maybe if the budget allows you could find a freelancer to help with the workload.
We have this issue too and some products from a previous mass upload still don't have good descriptions, but when it is a small update, we create them as required.
-
Hi.
Are you a reseller? If so, then yeah, there is no way. Especially if you get hundreds or more updates on products a month. If those products are all indeed yours, then I assume it's a large company, and then, yes, you probably should have a whole department working on that.
What I typically recommend in such cases is go by need in product rankings boost. Basically, if there is a product, which you know is not ranking good and it has not optimized description - go ahead and fix it. Sometimes it can be a set or even a category of products. And also, just as you said, do couple a day and hope for the best.
Hope it helps
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
-
Product descriptions, when do they become classed as duplicate content, how different do they have to be?
I look after 3 sites which have a lot of crossover on products. We have 1000s of products and I've made it a requirement that we give each it's on description on each of the sites. This sounds like the right thing to but it's very hard for our content writers to write three different versions descriptions, especially when we have variations on the products so potentially writing unique product descriptions for 4-5 very similar products on three separate sites. We've worked very hard to create unique content deep through the site on all categories, subcategories and tag combinations and along with the other SEO work we've done over the last couple of years is producing great results. My question is now far do we have to go? I'm busy writing some product descriptions for a 3rd party site for some of our products, the easy thing to do is just copy and paste but I want Google to see the descriptions as unique. Whilst all SEO advice will say 'write unique descriptions' from a practical point of view this isn't especially useful as there doesn't really seem to be much guidance on how different they need to be. I gather we can't just move around the paragraphs or jumble up sentences a bit but it is easier to work from a description and change it than it is to start from a blank slate (our products range form being very interesting and unique, to quite everyday so sometimes tough to create varied unique content for). Does anyone know of any guidance or evidence of just how clever the Google algorithm is and how close content has to be before it becomes classed as the same or similar? Thanks Pete
Content Development | | PeterLeatherland0 -
Loads of Blog Search Results showing up in SERPs - What's the best way to remove?
Our client has a good number of results showing up in SERPs that are search results pages produced by Blog posts. Unfortunately all these results have exactly the same Title tag and it has nothing to do with the blog content which means they are unlikely to help us much. We can’t create a 301 redirect because there is no page to redirect. There is no blog page we can re=canonical to either. The content on these pages is a short list of blog posts by each author. They are not true “Author” pages that would have a URL structure like this: your company.com/author/joeblow Our plan is to use GWMT's URL removal tool to request remove of these pages. (and then try to stop new results from being created) We are doing this to get low-value content out of the SERP. Is there a better way to remove these search results? Any drawback in removing them in GWMTs? Thanks.
Content Development | | RosemaryB1 -
Which is better for seo purposes? site/blog or site/community?
Hi Guys I was wondering if you could help on this one. We are in the process of setting up a wordpress blog for our website to aid our content marketing efforts, and was wondering what main url for this blog is going to be the best for seo purposes? So of the following 2 which one is going to be the better one? site.com/blog or site.com/community If anyone could get back to me on this I would appreciate it. Thanks David
Content Development | | DavidZA10 -
Blog and Website = 2 different URL's - Is it WORTH to merge content on to one site
Good day Mozzers! A friend of mine recently asked for my help in regards to online marketing. While getting familiar with his online presence, I realized that he has a blog hosted under a completely different URL Main Site = http://pardons.org/ (page rank 4)
Content Development | | vip4service
Blog = http://pardons.wordpress.com/ (page rank 3) What I am battling with is whether or not he should take all of the blog content he has, and merge it on to his main site. It has over 280+ blog posts spanning over a few years, so there is A LOT of content that could benefit his main site. However is it worth it, or should he continue to run everything as 2 different sites? Also, of you suggest moving the content over, what would be the best way to do it in your opinion? He currently has links on his blog TO his main site, so there is a little bit of link juice there, but with a average of 300 views a day, he only get about 10 clicks to his main site from the blog. Thanks a ton for your help!0 -
What is the Best Practice for External Links?
We are currently in the process of reviewing our site on a number of fronts, and part of that involves adding quality content to our product category pages where necessary. Our practice so far has been to add relevant content, and in this content externally link to a couple of relevant, related sites for that category (avoiding the use of keywords we are trying to rank for). Should we be doing this (externally linking)? And, if so, should these external links be NoFollow? So far, we have seen mixed results for our efforts.
Content Development | | Robdps0 -
Best Blog Post Format for SEO?
Wondering what the best way is to display blog posts, and organize a blog in general, for maximum SEO benefit. Displaying the entire blog post for the reader to scroll down right on the main page of the blog? With previous posts displayed farther down on the same page. Displaying a snippet/paragraph of the post with a link to continue reading - this way each blog post has it's own dedicated page? And the main blog page can display more topics. Any additional ideas or suggestions to think about would be great. Thank You!
Content Development | | NiallTom0 -
Best Place for Share Buttons
Does anyone know of any research on this? Or has anyone tested this out themselves?
Content Development | | JordanJudson0 -
What are the best reasons not to use Wordpress as a CMS?
I'm a big fan of Wordpress (.org) as a content management system. However, I recognize that Wordpress isn't necessarily the best CMS for all ocassions. For those of you who don't like Wordpress, I'm interested in understanding your strongest reasons against. So, why not Wordpress?
Content Development | | Gyi0