What is a product description?

Your product descriptions are your virtual sales assistants. They guide your customer through their buying decisions, answers their questions, allows them to uncover your product fully. They provide a positive experience of your brand. Your product pages can give your customer the kind of intimate experience you’d expect when buying from an independent store where the owner is full of passion, detailed attention and expertise. Or they can be cold, anonymous and generic.  

Shopify, the market-leading e-commerce platform, defines product descriptions as ‘the marketing copy that explains what a product is and why it’s worth purchasing. The purpose of a product description is to supply customers with important information about the features and benefits of the product, so they’re compelled to buy.’  

Product descriptions are different from product manuals, reviews, and other content you may find in reach of the product page. They need to be informative, engaging, and captivating to encourage readers to take action. 

Well-optimized product descriptions mean more traffic from search  

Coupled with appealing imagery, quality product descriptions can be both the driving force behind sales and an essential contributor to your search engine visibility. Digital marketing guru, Neil Patel, notes that a poor or missing product description ‘virtually puts an end to the chances of the page being in the top ten of a search engine query, even in the case of low-frequency queries.’  

Optimizing your product descriptions correctly ensures better rankings on search engine results pages. They also allow you to achieve maximum return on your investment in content. If you’re not showing up in the search results, you’re missing out on new customers. You could also potentially be allowing resellers and multi-brand e-tailers to outrank you for search terms that you should own.  

As well as boosting your SEO, product descriptions (when written well) provide customers with all the information they need to inform their buying decision – and accuracy is critical here.  

Good product descriptions reduce return rates 

One of the biggest challenges e-commerce businesses worldwide face is dealing with product return rates. According to SaleCycle, 64.2% of returns happen due to inconsistencies between the product purchased and its description online.  

From general descriptions that have been copied and pasted across a whole collection to products with little to no description at all, we’ve all been mis-sold something at some point. By ensuring product descriptions are tailored accurately to the individual product and anticipating customer questions in the copy, you can significantly reduce return rates. 

Writing for your audience

Accuracy comes with knowing your audience. Ask yourself, who’s going to buy your products? Everyone? Unlikely. You need to pinpoint who exactly your customers are and identify the best way of communicating with them. Suppose you’re selling sunglasses to Generation Z, for example. In that case, the tone and content of your product descriptions are likely to be entirely different than if you’re selling tailored suits to Gen-X business people. 

To achieve any content marketing goal, you need to use personas to target specific buyer types with tailored content – this applies here too. Define your buyer personas to ensure effective and targeted delivery of your product descriptions. They will inform everything from the tone of voice you adopt to the topics you choose to write about to the formats and channels you use to share your content. Check out this great guide on creating buyer personas from the market-leading CRM, Hubspot.  

Identifying who your ideal customer is and the reasons that make them choose your brand over another allows you to talk directly to their needs. Then your product copy can act as your ‘virtual sales assistant’, maximizing sales and building brand loyalty.   

Transcreation – Translating for an international audience 

Knowing your audience allows you to connect with your consumer to make the sale. But what if you’re writing for an audience whose mother tongue is different from your own?  

It’s not enough just to translate the text literally. That can often result in the tone of voice and the meaning being lost. The end result won’t be as compelling or captivating and could be misunderstood or even culturally insensitive. To be more effective in your multilingual brand communications and marketing translation, you need to ensure that your message is getting across properly in your target language.  

This is where transcreation comes in.  

Transcreation describes the process of translating a message from one language to another while maintaining its intent, style, tone, and context. A successfully transcreated message evokes the same emotions and carries the same intent in the target language as in the source language. 

Think about using an experienced transcreator before tackling multilingual brand communications. Make sure your copy resonates with your target consumer so you can connect with them on an emotional level to reach your business objectives and, ultimately, make your sale. 

What is the perfect product description length?

With your audience in mind, it’s time to think about the logistics of your product descriptions. What is the perfect length? Readability is everything here. You don’t want it to be too long and risk boring your customers. However, you don’t want it to be too short, either. You could risk leaving out vital information – or the important keywords you need to enhance your page SEO.  

Think about user experience when approaching your product descriptions. Ensure your copy is scannable; perhaps use bullet points to give an overview of your product before diving into your more detailed product story. Even consider using subheadings to break up your copy into bite-sized, easily consumable chunks.  

Google’s guidelines for its (human) search evaluators state that pages should contain “a satisfying amount of high-quality main content”. By ‘satisfying’, Google means that page content should be long enough to give website visitors all the information they need to make an informed decision. No more, and no less. So in all, your product description should be as long as it needs to be.  

Optimizing for search 

SEO plays a significant role in growing your organic traffic, so it’s vital to optimize your product copy using the right keywords and metadata to help search engines understand your product pages.  

Optimizing any site page for SEO starts with keyword research. Research the right keywords by volume and difficulty and find related terms that you can use in the copy. Start with longtail keywords – these will have a higher buyer’s intent of purchase. They typically include brand, product category, collection and color mentions.  

SEO is complex and nuanced. Our advice? Invest in your product descriptions and hire an expert for the job.  

How can we help?

You’ve just spent thousands of hours perfecting your product you want to be sure it sells. Get your reader to take action with our professional English language copywriting services for marketing and e-commerce. 

From online campaigns to advertising slogans, from branded content to product descriptions, our team of professional copywriters create original copy for you directly in English or in your target language. 

From online campaigns to advertising slogans, from branded content to product descriptions, Maka Language Consulting offers a 360° multilingual ecommerce service including translation, transcreation and localization so you can open up your business to markets worldwide. 

Want to leverage your marketing message across the globe? Get in touch today.