However, if you’re actually trying to SELL something, or to drive traffic through search engines, or both, it’s incredibly beneficial to take a look at beefing up the content on your site’s product pages.

But HOW do you add more content?

Manufacturer’s Description

Most e-commerce sites start with the manufacturer’s description. There’s nothing wrong with using this, in most cases, but you don’t want it to be the only content on the page. The truth of the matter is that many of your competitors will have the same product and the same copy on their pages, too. So if you include the manufacturer’s description, take one of two approaches:

1. Label it as such: Include a section of your product page specifically for the “manufacturer’s description” and label it with that phrase so that customers know what they are reading. Include your own description as well, and keep them separate, so that people can easily see what you wrote versus what the manufacturer wrote. See the following screenshot from Amazon (UK) who clearly distinguishes between the two descriptions.
   
   

   Manufacturer's Description on Amazon

2. Rewrite it: If you don’t want to label it as such, make sure to do a thorough job rewriting the text so that it doesn’t appear to search engines to be the same content as found on other sites.

Your Own Description

Much better than canned text is a hand-written and thoughtful description of the product you’re selling, along with a convincing argument for its purchase. This is the time to list not only the features of the product, but to detail how it can be used and what its benefits are. Most of the time, the manufacturer’s description doesn’t do a good job of selling, so here’s your chance to really woo your customers.

Something to note about implementation: if you’re going to include separate descriptions for your own copy and the manufacturer’s, it’s a good idea to store them separately in your database. The reason I suggest this is for when (or if) you start an affiliate program and need to provide a product feed to your affiliates. You can give them the manufacturer’s description in the feed, instead of your custom product copy, so that the content you worked so hard to complete doesn’t get spread across the internet. You can also use the same approach when you list your product on marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay, and comparison shopping engines like Nextag or Shopzilla.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are considered the holy grail of user-generated content on an e-commerce site. Why?

• Customer reviews are inevitably unique, because people don’t typically submit the same review to multiple sites.
• They give other customers a sense of third-party endorsements – which is why it’s good to include even negative reviews from customers.
• If reviews are provided regularly, search engines see this as fresh content and are likely to give the page a boost in rankings, to crawl the site more often, or both.

Zappos.com is a company that really puts customer reviews to work for them. In addition to displaying the reviews on the product page, they have enough volume to also show recent reviews on higher-level brand pages. Here’s a snippet from their Reef Sandals page:

Customer Reviews on Zappos.com

Employee Reviews

The downside of customer reviews is that they are hard to generate, especially for a site that is still working to build traffic and sales. You don’t want to write a fake customer review, because it’s not ethical, and they can often be easy to spot. So if you’re not getting them yet, ask your employees to contribute a review, publish it on the website, and note that it’s an employee review. With their permission, you might even list the employees’ names or qualifications with the review. (For example, if you’re selling textbooks, list their major or degree subject.)

Although it won’t be seen as an unbiased opinion, like customer reviews often are, an employee review still provides unique and fresh content for your pages. It also gets a person’s voice onto the site, and if a customer feels a connection with a person, they are more likely to make a purchase.

Q&A

At this point we start to get into some of the lesser-used strategies, one of which is a question-and-answer section. Although not applicable to all products, a Q&A section can be developed based on customer inquiries that come into your call center or email. Chances are, if one person took the time to contact you to ask a question, there are ten others who wondered the same thing but didn’t bother to ask (or buy).

A Q&A format is nice because it starts to put words into the customer’s voice. People who read the questions can often relate, thinking “I wondered that myself” or “Good question”, which creates a more personal experience. It also has the added benefit of reducing customer inquiries, because they are more able to find answers to their questions up front, rather than relying on one-to-one communication.

If possible, think in advance what some common questions might be, and provide answers to them as soon as you list a new product.

Product Documentation

If you sell a product that comes with documentation, include the contents of that documentation on your website, after getting permission from your vendors. PDF documents are scanned and indexed in search engines, and there’s a good chance that this kind of content can bring in visitors. Granted, they may already own the product in question and are looking for support, but they may be interested in buying accessories, related items, or additional quantities of the item as gifts.

Restaurant Equipment Solutions, a site that sells restaurant supplies, does a great job of providing digital copies of documentation for their products. Here’s a screenshot where I’ve labeled the different documents that can be viewed for one of their refrigerators:

Product Documentation

Ingredients or Specifications

Many products lend themselves to having descriptions that include their ingredients on specifications. Ingredients and even nutritional details can be specified for food, vitamins and supplements, and health and beauty supplies. Specifications are extremely useful for many products, but especially for electronics and computers, which need to interface or interact with other equipment.

Other Content Specific to Books

If you sell books, there’s even more information you can include on your product pages or in separate documents. An excerpt is a great way to let customers get a feel for the contents of a book online. Editorial reviews give opinions by professional critics, and help better detail what a book contains. The information from the book jacket gives an overview on the book, and information on other titles in the same series or by the same author. And the “about the author” section provides customers with information about the author’s education and background. All of this information is worthy of consideration for adding to your website.

1. Post a recipe that ties into your site’s theme. If you sell children’s products, make something kid-friendly. If you sell purses, do a couture-purse inspired cake design. Include pictures!
2. Announce an upcoming sale. Even offer a preview exclusively for blog readers, where they can see which products are included at what sale prices via a special link that’s only included in the blog. (Note: This tip also works well in email marketing…think RueLaLa.)
3. Introduce a new product line that you’ve just added. What makes it stand apart, what are the benefits, and which products are the expected best-sellers?
4. Support a cause! Identify a popular movement, and make sure it’s one that you believe in. Then describe how you help, whether it’s with financial contributions, or efforts like recycling and reusing packing supplies to support a greener planet. Ask your readers to pitch in.
5. Introduce a staff member, your entire web or CSR team, or even make it a series and showcase one employee every week.
6. Write about the pick-and-ship process, what happens after the order is placed.  Our friends at MyCubanStore.com place a video of the process on their invoice page; go purchase a guayabera and see for yourself.
7. Share your celebrations! Show photos of your recent store events, company picnic, or holiday party. This can be a great way to humanize your store.
8. Talk about your website itself, instead of your company and its business. It’s a great way to get the some visibility and link love from the tech community. PlumberSurplus.com has made their entire blog about this!
9. Demonstrate a product with a video. Show its uses, how it works, or the process of assembling the product, such as how Zappos demonstrates their knife sharpener.
10. Roll out the red carpet! See if you can find any way to include Hollywood. Internet surfers love celebrities; take a look at any recent list of “most popular search terms” if you don’t believe me. Has one of your products been worn by Suri or carried by Angelina? Brag about it, even if they didn’t buy it from you. Just don’t lie and claim they did,
11. Make a list (and check it twice). Much like this one, blog posts that are bulleted or numbered lists are easy to scan and popular with readers. Make a list of your best selling products (and why), or your top tips for surviving the holidays, or 5 ways to choose the perfect Christmas gift…you get the idea.
12. Think travel! During the holidays or summer you find a lot of people traveling. So pick a place you’ve been to recently, show pictures, and describe the location and some fun activities. Incorporate your products wherever possible – apparel for the locale, luggage for the trip, toys and books for the free time, or a digital camera for the memories you’ll make.
13. Launch a contest. Create or find a great prize and give people one entry per day throughout the contest. Once they enter the first time, email them daily (with their permission) and remind them to come back, and after they enter show them some stuff to buy.
14. Give a quick office tour so your customers can visualize what it’s like to work there. And if you break new ground, show the process of creating your new workspace, from demolition to the finished result. Everyone loves a great “flip” video!
15. Showcase products around a particular theme, such as A Girl Needs Pink at 1928 Jewelry.
16. Write generically for SHOPPERS. What challenges do all shoppers face? Think of topics like comparing prices, avoiding shipping hassles during the holidays, handling returns, shipping internationally…some topics are universal no matter what products you sell.
17. Answer a question your customer service team received by phone or email on your blog for others to read. Keep the caller/emailer anonymous, though it might be a nice touch to use the first name only (if you get permission first, that is).
18. Share your corporate values, ideals, or culture. If this is all you talk about, it’s boring. But sprinkling it in with more people-oriented content lets your readers know what you stand for.
19. Focus a post on parents or the family as a whole. Offer ideas for together time or family fitness. It’s ok to work your products in, but you don’t have to – this is a great value proposition on its own. And parents make up a large portion of online shoppers, so lots of readers will find it relevant to their lives.
20. Go back to the early days of your company and tell its history. Did it start out in your garage? Do you have a picture of packages stacked up in your driveway? A video of you removing a batch of your famous pretzels from the oven in your kitchen? Share your grass-roots beginnings.
21. Incorporate the arts. Feature works from a local artist or write a review of the currently-running show at the community theater. Position your company as a patron of the arts.
22. Run a poll. There are several plug-ins for major blog platforms, as well as third-party polls, and it’s a good way to encourage participation from your readers. Publish the results as you go along so there’s something of interest to see along the way.
23. Offer up a great craft or DIY tip, like Free People’s homemade terrarium ornament idea.
24. Offer a free download – a desktop wallpaper image or a printable coloring page for kids are a couple of popular ideas.
25. Offer a coupon, of course! It’s great to reward your blog readers with a tangible benefit – real savings off the products in your store.
26. Do you attend trade shows or other industry events? Include a diary of your travel and activities along with photos.
27. Happy New Year! These are easy to do and schedule for a future date: just wish your customers a pleasant day for every major holiday of the year. Short and sweet is fine; customers don’t expect you to be blogging that day anyway.
28. Identify what your customers care about, and blog on those topics. Patagonia discusses wildlife and the environment, while Etnies has videos from extreme sports events as well as competition results.
29. Online retailers want to make money; shoppers want to save money (even while spending it). Offer tips on how to save money by shopping online. Some ideas are to purchase multiple products from the same retailer to save on shipping costs, to sign up for the newsletter to receive coupons and discount codes, or to provide bulk discounts to groups that purchase together (clubs, schools, mommy groups, etc).
30. Make a stupidly funny video. Or maybe not so funny? You decide.

For an updated and more in-depth look at product descriptions, go to Adding More Content to Product Descriptions.

There’s no doubt that, on the web, a thousand words is worth quite a bit more than a picture! At least, that maxim holds true when one things of search engine optimization. While shoppers love images, search engines love words. The problem is that writing good product copy is time-consuming, and, for some of us, downright difficult.

Many of us sell products that aren’t unique to our website. The products you sell – toys, kitchen supplies, home decor, etc. – may also be carried by a number of other retailers. Often, the manufacturers of these products offer canned product descriptions for use on the web. Although the quality of the writing of these descriptions may range from poor to excellent, keep in mind that even the most well-written descriptions, if used by other sites, may have less value to the search engines than copywriting that is both unique and compelling.

Remember that the best product descriptions have the following values:

1. They are unique to your website
2. They are keyword-dense for SEO purposes, but above all, read well for human visitors
3. They are long enough to convey the information needed to make a purchase decision
4. They are simple enough for people to understand without thinking too hard

One of the resources we love is 73 Ways to Describe a Widget. This ebook helps jump-start your brain when you need to figure out how to describe what you’re selling. For example:

• What occasion is the item appropriate for?
• How will the buyer feel when using your product?
• How long has this item been selling?

Another website that has a lot of useful information about copywriting is Marketing Words. In fact, that’s how I found out about the 73 widgets ebook. There’s also a nice article at Vitamin.

However, it helps to also keep it simple. Don’t forget the basics: color, size, weight, texture, materials, skills required to use the product, advantages, and uses. Remember that it’s the words on your site that attract the search engines and also convince users to make a purchase.