A practical checklist for product descriptions

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time product descriptions comes up.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The checklist

• Lead with the benefit, support with the specification
• Manufacturer copy is duplicate content
• Answer the question that stops the purchase
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

Lead with the benefit, support with the specification. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about product descriptions before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Answer the question that stops the purchase — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.