Since NitroSell sites are designed to sell products, product descriptions are critical. Many of you have data feeds or product spreadsheets provided to you by the manufacturer of the goods you offer for sale. While taking this information and putting it in the extended description is a fairly easy way to get product descriptions on your site, it is not the best way to go. You end up with content that is duplicated on competitive sites across the web as many others will also take this “easy way” to populate product descriptions.
Search engines try to provide their searchers with the most relevant results possible for a given search term. When several sites have the same information on them, product descriptions in this case, the search engines try to determine who is the originator of the content or who might the searcher prefer to see. This tends to skew the results for these kinds of searches towards manufacturers, “big name” stores, or shopping consolidation sites such as amazon.com.
So what should you do? Google says in their Webmaster Tools Help Section:
- Consider creating original product descriptions and information with rich, descriptive content, rather than using manufacturer’s descriptions, which may appear on many sites across the web. Original content provides useful information to users, and can help your site’s visibility in our search results.
- Consider adding video product demos or other rich content, such as user reviews, to your site. The more unique and compelling your content, the more likely it is to perform well in our search results.
- Submit your product catalog to Google Product Search which is part of the Google Merchant Center. With the new changes in place, this should be done after the upgrades to the Google Feed come out in mid/late October.
- Use plenty of product images, with meaningful captions and Alt Text. Note: NitroSell recommends using the Item Description for Alt Text, which can be configured in Product Attribute Manager (PAM).
Original content is a great idea but may not be an option for retailers with large product offerings and limited resources. If you have the resources, follow Google’s advice and create useful, in-depth and descriptive original descriptions for all your items. If you don’t have the resources to do great descriptions for all your items then pick a meaningful subset of your items; i.e. a brand, theme, category or other manageable section of your inventory that it would make sense for you to specialize in. Work on those items to differentiate your site. Even if it is only a small percentage of your items, it can help your entire site.
For more helpful information on product content, see the NitroSell Best Practices Guide. For information on NitroSell’s SEO consulting services, please send an email to trafficbuilder@nitrosell.com.