Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
-
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site.
A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate.
So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
-
Writing very generous product descriptions can answer questions for the buyer. They can facilitate the buying decision or prevent purchase of items that are poor fits for the shopper - and thereby reduce returns.
-
Hi Bee159,
With Ecommerce, it is all about the user experience. Detail the products so the consumer knows exactly what they are buying. Even the simplest of products can benefit from a detailed description. I do not know how many times I am shopping for a product and there are many brands of the same item. What it is going to set it apart? A good description.
So its not word count... it is more like "Words Have Meaning" give value to your descriptions and more people will choose your products over the competitors.
-
I don't think that total word count is TOO much of an issue for e-commerce, however, it is key to have enough detail as possible in the description. We have products that we can't really go too much into detail as there isn't much to say, we can only write enough to ensure the pages are unique and descriptive enough to explain to the customer exactly what the product is, but often the word count is between 100-150. A key part of ranking for e-commerce is ensuring headers, page length, meta descriptions etc all up to par and make sure the page is as user-friendly and easy to navigate as possible.
We like to refer to this as a checklist when checking our product pages are as good as they can be.
https://magento.com/blog/best-practices/seo-best-practices-ecommerce-product-pages
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How long should my website content be (max and min number of words)?
I saw a web site which has been number 1 on Google for a long time, and the home page has 5700 words, but the results show it is not spam, so what would be the recommended word number for a home page?
On-Page Optimization | | Majapopa0 -
Best Tool for Retrieving Multiple URL Word Counts in Bulk?
I am doing some content analysis with over 200 URLs to go through! Does anybody know of, or can recommend any bulk on-page word count checkers which would help with the heavy lifting? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1230 -
On Site Question: Duplicate H2...
Hi All A few on-site audit tools pull information on duplicate H2 tags on pages. This implies it's a bad thing and should be fixed - is that the case? On one of my sites the tag-line is in H2 in the header, so appears on every page... Just wondering if this is something worth fixing. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | GTAMP0 -
Does hover over content index well
i notice increasing cases of portfolio style boxes on site designs (especially wordpress templates) where you have an image and text appears after hover over (sorry for my basic terminology). does this text which appears after hover over have much search engine value or as it doesnt immediately appear on pageload does it carry slightly less weight like tabbed content? any advice appreciated thanks neil
On-Page Optimization | | neilhenderson0 -
Duplicate content penalty
when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content. I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site. My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects. I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
Duplicate Content for Men's and Women's Version of Site
So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage. The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages. While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page? Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary? My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely? Hope this makes sense, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Howdy, do curse words on your content article hurt SEO in any way or form?
howdy, do curse words on your content article hurt SEO in any way or form? and if so is there a "list" of registered curse keywords that should be avoided?
On-Page Optimization | | david3050