How to get product descriptions right
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The short answer to product descriptions is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Why this earns attention
Lead with the benefit, support with the specification. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Manufacturer copy is duplicate content
- Answer the question that stops the purchase
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Answer the question that stops the purchase. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Making it stick
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
- Manufacturer copy is duplicate content — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.