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.
Product content length & links within product description
-
Hello,
I have questions regarding content length and links within descriptions. With our ecommerce site, we have thousands of products, each with a unique description. In the product description, I have links to the parent category and grandparent category (if it has one) in the main product text which is generally about 175 words. Then I have a last paragraph that's about 75 words that includes links to our main homepage and our main product catalogue page.
Is the content length long enough? I used to use text that was 500 words, and shortening it I still rank when launching new products, so I don't think an increase in text length will have any additional benefit. I do see conflicting information when I do searches, with some people recommending a minimum of 300 words and some saying to try and go a 1000 for category pages.
In regards to the links, I noticed a competitor has stopped following this format, so I'm unsure if I should keep going too. Is it too many links to have each of the products link back to the main catalogue and homepage? Is it good to have links with anchor text to the categories a product is in? There are breadcrumbs on the page with these links already. There are already have heaps of links on our pages (footer, and a right sidebar with image links to relevant categories), so my pages do get flagged for too many links.
Thanks!
-
A short product description on my sites is about 100 words and a unique photo with a generous caption - so about 150 words total.
Most products get a much longer description of at least 300 to 500 words and at least one unique photo. The short description described above is often upgraded after we receive a few questions about a product or after we get more experience using the product ourselves (we have experience using almost every product that we sell). When the descriptions are improved, the rankings often go up and the page starts pulling in traffic for long tail keywords. These are the two benefits that we see from improving product descriptions.
Better selling products and those that receive lots of questions can have even longer descriptions of 500 to 1000 words and more photos. Best selling products also usually have separate articles that explain how to select the product, how to use them, how to maintain/repair and more. We always have links to these articles within product descriptions. Our product pages and article pages often rank #1 and #2 in the SERPs. We also have lots of #1, #2, #3 positions as a result of our article pages.
These really long descriptions usually have the essential info in the first one or two paragraphs. Information after that has subheading to make it easy for shoppers to scan and skip/read parts of the description that they want.
If we have a product that gets a few returns we often add information about the product that caused people to return it. We would rather kill a few sales than incur costly returns.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Too much internal linking?
Hi everyone, Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number. On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug? I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170. kAeYlTM
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez0 -
Page Title Length
Hi Gurus, I understand that it is a good practice is to use 50-60 characters for the a page title length. Google appends my brand name to the end of each title (15 characters including spaces) it index. Do I need to count what google adds as part of the maximum recommended length? i.e.
On-Page Optimization | | SunnyMay
is the maximum 50-60 characters + the 15 characters brand name Google adds to the end of the title or 50-60 including the addition? Many thanks!
Lev0 -
How do you make product pages unique when there are thousands of products?
When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each? Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail? Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing... Notes: Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page. There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.
On-Page Optimization | | Ria_3 -
When writing content for a website what is the optimal copy length?
My site is currently in the mist of a redesign and I’d like us to compile some recommendations on the length of copy for a page to rank well but can't seem to find any up to date articles on this.Does anyone have any suggestions, comments, or feedback?Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | PorshaAndrea0 -
Should I watermark my product images
I am in the process of creating new images for my products to use on my website. Are there any advantages or disadvantages of watermarking each image? Is there an SEO impact good or bad? I am aware that filename and Alt tags are important, but am unsure if google dislikes watermarked images.
On-Page Optimization | | BipSum1 -
How often should I update category and product content to keep it fresh?
I want to keep our site up to date and fresh with content. How often should I update categories and products pages with content? What angel should I take with categories (new products/services etc.) Thanks Craig
On-Page Optimization | | Towelsrus0 -
How many outbound links is too many outbound links?
As a part of our SEO strategy, we have been focusing on writing several high quality articles with unique content. In these articles we regularly link to other websites when they are high quality, authoritative sites. Typically, the articles are 500 words or more and have 3-5 outbound links, but in some cases there are as many as 7 or 8 outbound links. Before we get too carried away with outbound links, I wanted to get some opinions on how many outbound links we should be trying to include and more information on how the outbound links work. Do they pass our website's authority on to the other website? Could our current linking strategy cause future SEO problems? Finally, do you have any suggestions for guidelines we should be using? Thank you for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | airnwater0 -
ECommerce Product Meta Descriptions vs. Product Descriptions
Wondering if using on-page product descriptions as the individual product meta descriptions is a best practice for an eCommerce site? Instead of writing two product descriptions (one regular and one meta), I am thinking if the product copy is SEO rich, we'd be good to use just the one for both purposes. Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? Seems that many companies follow this practice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | kennyrowe1