Know your audience

Perhaps the most important element of a high-converting product description is that it is written with an understanding of who the ideal customer is for your offering. Before you begin to write, think about your core customer base and outline the ways your product fits into their lives.

• How do they communicate?
• Whom do they trust? Authority figures, a colleague?
• What are their main needs?
• How, and where, would they use your product?

Use the information you collect about your customers to frame your product descriptions from their point of view. Align the product copy with your overall brand voice in order to deepen the relationship you have with your audience and provide a consistent user experience.

Ensure your product details are accurate

To avoid returns, refunds, and potential negative reviews down the road, ensure the specifications you share are completely accurate.

When identifying which product details are most important for you to include in your descriptions, it's helpful to think deeply about the types of questions your customers might ask about your offering. Consider the information your customers would find most important to know before they decide whether to make a purchase.

Use your descriptions as a chance to answer your customers' questions before they even have to ask them, and you'll avoid delaying the time they take to choose you.

Create—and follow—a keyword strategy

Product descriptions are an important element of your on-site SEO efforts; they are, after all, written content that helps bring relevant organic traffic to your website.

Tools such as Keywords Everywhere or the Google Keyword Planner can aid in your discovery of which keywords might be most relevant to your offerings, and you can use them to guide your overall keyword strategy for your site.

Your keyword strategy serves as your game plan for how you want to target your desired keywords or phrases: for example, through product descriptions, blog posts, other on-site content.

You will write descriptions that convert better if they are part of a keyword strategy—whether DIY or with the help of an SEO expert—that helps search engines identify that your product pages are relevant to what searchers are looking for.

Keep each product description unique, and intentional

Though it can be enticing to look at competitors' product descriptions, and your existing descriptions, for inspiration, try to allow each product description to speak specifically to each, unique item on the product page.

Creating completely tailored descriptions will help you bring in the most relevant traffic for each of your product pages, and help you avoid pitting your own pages against each other in search engine results.

Write descriptions with intention. Avoid overused/empty phrases. It's common business practice to use phrases like "great value," or "high quality" in descriptions, but buyers are so used to hearing them that they've become nearly ineffective. Instead, use your product descriptions as a chance to explain why your offering is a great value or of high quality. Doing so will give the words more meaning and help readers better understand what makes you different.

Address high-intent visitors

One of the most helpful SEO tips for product pages is to work in language that speaks to buyer intent.

In both product descriptions and metadata, use high-intent keywords that a searcher might use when they are deeper into the sales funnel—when they are more ready to purchase than someone who's merely looking for more information.

Focusing on language that converts high-intent customers, rather than anyone searching using broad terms related to your product, is a great way to strategically attract traffic to your product pages.

It's the difference between a search for "b2b lead generation" and a search for "lead generation workshops for b2b marketing teams."

Don't neglect your meta descriptions

Your meta description is the information about your website that populates the search result text if your page appears in a search results page. Though it doesn't affect your ranking, it serves as "teaser text" that can entice a searcher to click on your result over others.

To craft a compelling meta description, keep your focus on the following:

• What exactly your offering is
• How it would help make life easier
• Why someone should buy it from you

Meta descriptions can be difficult to write—a 155-character limit doesn't give you room for fluff—but they can also be incredibly valuable for claiming organic traffic that converts.

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Creativity and consistency are key to creating high-converting descriptions for your product pages. Though it takes time and effort to learn how to best sell your audience on your products, optimizing your product descriptions and metadata can help you to get more of the right kind of traffic to your site—and increase your conversion rate in the process.