If you use your website to sell anything, it’s important to have high-quality, descriptive text to go alongside images of the products. Although they say a picture tells a thousand words, you still need to complement images with written copy so that readers can fully understand what an item does. Plus, of course, search engines rely mainly on text to direct people to pages.
Coming up with inventive content for what is often a dry and repetitive part of a website can be challenging though, so here are four tips to consider:
1. Keep it ‘evergreen’
Remember that with most products, you hope to be selling them for years to come, so ideally you don’t want to be constantly having to change the text. For that reason, avoid describing a woolly jumper as “great for this wintry time of year”, as this will look peculiar in a few months’ time.
Consider carefully whether you want to mention that a product comes in four different colours, or five sizes. Will this always be the case, or are these options likely to become more or fewer, leaving your copy out of date? Also, try to future-proof your content against any possible web design changes by avoiding suggestions like “click the blue shopping cart icon below”.
If you have an offer on at the moment and want to highlight this in your copy, make sure you keep a list of all product pages you’re adding this detail to, and perhaps set yourself a reminder to remove it when the offer ends.
2. Use bullet points
Product pages should generally be short and snappy, so consider ways to stay concise and draw immediate attention to important points.
Bullet points achieve this well. Pick out four or five features of the product and list them, perhaps going on to explain them in more detail in the copy.
3. Be consistent
It’s surprising how often companies can be inconsistent even in their own branding. If you have a product or service of your own, once you’ve settled on a name for it, remember that there’s more to that name than saying it out loud. You have to decide what it looks like too.
For example, let’s imagine you’ve created an anti-bacterial detergent called ‘GermBlitz’. If that’s then referred to throughout the product page as ‘Germ Blitz’, ‘Germblitz’, ‘Germ blitz’ and so on, it suggests not only a lack of attention to detail, but little pride in your own brand and products.
4. End with a call to action
Once you’ve described the product, it’s then over to the reader and, hopefully, soon-to-be customer. That’s why it’s wise to end the product page with something that urges them to make a purchase, such as:
“Buy now and we’ll have this excellent [product name] with you in no time.”
“Contact us today to find out more about what [product name] can do for you.”
“Why not go ahead and order your very own [product name]?”
The challenge
What makes product pages difficult is that they are naturally pretty samey. Nonetheless, you need to keep each one fresh and unique, avoiding the duplicate content issues that Google and other search engines look upon unfavourably.
At Engage Web, one step we take when we write large batches of product pages is to distribute them across several of our writers. Not only does this spread the workload, but it also ensures a variety of approaches to the writing task, yet all adhering to the same brief and edited in-house to ensure consistency.
If you need product pages for your website, or are from a web design or internet market agency that’s struggling to find the time to produce the required text, why not outsource the job to Engage Web and take the strain off yourself and your workforce?
- How to find a circular reference on Excel - May 23, 2024
- Five life skills learned from internet marketing - January 3, 2024
- How artificial intelligence can (and can’t) help you write content - September 29, 2023
