Getting started with product descriptions
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. A short on-ramp to product descriptions for teams who have not touched it before.
Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Why it matters
Lead with the benefit, support with the specification. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Manufacturer copy is duplicate content
- Change one thing and measure it
Answer the question that stops the purchase. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
In practice
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. 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.