Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. On-Page Optimization
    4. Product Descriptions (SEO)

    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 Descriptions (SEO)

    On-Page Optimization
    4
    4
    3221
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • mattl99
      mattl99 last edited by

      So I would like a few opinions. How long should a product description be? Enough to get the point across? 100 words? 800 words? Over detailed? Any advice would be appreciated.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • EGOL
        EGOL last edited by

        Hello mattl99!

        You are really fortunate.  You got two 10x responses from Roman and Bob.

        I'll add just a little...  about.... Your visitors and your niche...

        If you are selling very simple and common items that everybody uses and knows about then you don't need to write a huge description - just explain the specs.  But, if you are writing about things that involve effort, knowledge and creativity of your visitors to purchase, then you need a lot more than specs.  Items for do-it-yourself projects, items for craft/hobby projects, or the tools, parts and accessories needed for complex goods.  These require a lot more effort and the visitors both need and expect your expertise to help them decide, purchase, use and enjoy.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • BobGW
          BobGW last edited by

          It completely depends on your niche, your goals, your competition, the amount of time you have, and the expertise level of the person writing the description.

          Your Niche and Competition:

          Google the top 5-10 product descriptions from a high traffic, important keyword in your industry. For best results, track at least 10 keywords. Each keyword can be different, so you may have to be careful there. Look at the top 5-10 results for a product-related term. Are they long descriptions? Are they short. Are there none? What's the content of them? What features and topics do they have? How's the UX and mobile? I could go on and on.

          Your Goals:

          Are you looking to do a 10X product description or just throw a little something together. I always recommend re-writing the manufacturer's information in your own words at the very least. See Rands Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die for more

          This brings in the writer's Experience Level

          Are you a beginner or an expert in the niche? You may not be able to write 10X content if you know nothing. Try rewriting the manufacturer's info for starters. You will learn a lot. Never copy and paste from another website into your own!

          Which ends with time and scalability

          Do you have all the time in the world or 5 minutes per description. Most medium difficulty level niches require a store with lots of content and at least 200 products just to get started, but it can vary widely and it really depends. Try balancing between not spending enough time and spending all day on one 10X product. Try making your top 10 hitters (by profit) 10X. or make your top 30 or 50 10X. 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your products. Sometimes it's more extreme.

          I hope I have helped.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Roman-Delcarmen
            Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

            According to Statista, the average CTR for paid search in e-commerce is a mere 2.69% ( _Average clickthrough rate (CTR) in Google AdWords - USA  between August 2017 and January 2018 ) _That’s the equivalent of being eternally ranked immediately below position five.

            In my opinion SEO for products, descriptions bring up a host of difficult questions

            • Which keywords should you target?
            • What’s the perfect description length?
            • Should you write for engines or people?
            • Where and how often should you use keywords?

            Getting the answers right is essential. Here’s how I do it

            • Write for Buyers, Not Bots
            • Major on Benefits (Include Features)
            • Target the Right SEO Product Keywords
            • Let Buyer “Awareness” Drive Your PDP Length
            • Create Unique SEO Product Descriptions for Each PDP

            When writing your descriptions, always ask yourself:

            **Does this help the online buyer? Does it inform them, enlighten them, and, ultimately, help them make a purchase decision? **If you start from square one using this approach, you’re already on the ideal path to writing amazing product descriptions for SEO.

            1. Write for Buyers, Not Bots

            The number one rule for good SEO any time, anywhere, is to write for people first … not the search engine web crawlers.Here’s why: what’s good for your audience is good for search engines, because their main concern is usability.

            The whole point of search is to help users find exactly what they’re looking for. If your product descriptions align with this goal, you’re going to please Google and rank well.

            2. Major on Benefits (Include Features)

            You cannot write an informative, accurate description of a product unless you understand that product inside-out. Vague knowledge of a product will lead to an equally vague description, one that is unhelpful for your online buyers as well as the search engines.

            3. Target the Right SEO Product Keywords

            Your job of correctly optimizing SEO for product descriptions must include using the right keywords. This will help search engines understand your pages, which will help internet searchers find what you’re selling.

            So, how do you find the right keywords, and how do you use them strategically?

            It’s all about narrowing down to the right phrase, and it all starts with a solid keyword tool. SEMrush is a great option, as is KWFinder or Moz Keyword Explorer. These tools let you research specific keywords and give you valuable data about factors like:

            • Search volume (how many people are searching for a given keyword)
            • Keyword difficulty (how hard it will be to rank for a given keyword)
            • Related terms you can potentially use in your content (e.g., longtail keywords)

            4. Let Buyer “Awareness” Drive Your PDP Length

            Your process of optimizing SEO for product descriptions also needs to include writing at the right length for good search engine results. Unfortunately, there is no set length that works for every product. Instead, best practices demand that you base the length of your descriptions on what your audience needs.

            5. Create Unique SEO Product Descriptions for Each PDP

            Another must for good SEO is to avoid duplicate content at all costs.
            In general, creating similar descriptions for all the products in your online store can cause problems for search engines trying to index your pages.

            ** IN SUMMARY**

            SEO for Product Takes Work … But It’s Worth It
            There’s no doubt about it: SEO for product descriptions can be tricky.

            The key is to think of the online buyer’s information needs first and foremost. Then, follow the best practices to make sure your product description SEO skills will net the attention of search engines.

            That’s the simple rule of thumb for writing winning product descriptions that do their job without a hitch.

            Hopes this info will help you
            Regards

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • PostAlmostAnything

              Are Wildcard Subdomain Hurting my SEO?

              I have some sites with a lot of categories (category, sub-category, sub-subcategory) and locations (country, state/territory, city). To avoid listing pages really deep in my hierarchy I used wildcard subdomains for the locations, but lately I have been told that might be hurting my overall SEO efforts. I have a lot of URLs like https://city-state-country.example.com on one side of the domain and example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory on the other. In the middle you see stuff like city-state-country.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. Would I be better off moving the locations to the right side of the domain name? Then you might find stuff like example.com/country/state/city/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. I think I could do the new rewrite rules fairly easily since every country slug is just two characters long.

              On-Page Optimization | | PostAlmostAnything
              0
            • abisti2

              How unique should a meta description be?

              I'm working on a large website (circa 25k pages) that presently just replicates each page title as a meta description. I'm thinking of doing a 'find and replace' in the database so I change: to where the preceeding and following text would be the same in each case eg Is this unique enough? Obviously the individual keyword would make it technically unique each time....and manually changing them would take the rest of my life 🙂

              On-Page Optimization | | abisti2
              1
            • ATP

              Getting the Titles and Headings Right on Product Pages. Userbility vs SEO

              Hey Mozzers, I am optimising a chaotic section of the site including many similar products. Writing unique content etc. The titles and urls were all over the place so my first job was to tidy them up so I could make some sense of the situation, especially as sometimes they didn't even match! I should point out were on Magento, so product name = Both the Heading and Title of the page, the meta title can be set separately. When i refer to title I mean both <title>and <h1></strong><br /><br />Before they existed as such<br />URL:  domain.com/200-x-0-5-g-rs-232-balance.html<br />TItle:   PC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br /><br />This format was (Product Code, Capacities, Resolutions, Accuracy, Product Title)<br /><br />The issue was all 60 products in a page followed this format. Navigating through the page was a nightmare and was just a jumble of numbers and highly confusing even to me who learnt what they all mean, especially when you had 8 products from the same range you got presented with<br /><br />APC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1235 500 x 1g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1236 1000 x 2g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1238 5000 x 10g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1239 10000 x 15g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1210 20000 x 25g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1211 50000 x 50g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance</p> <p>I changed them to something more user friendly.<br /><br />URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />This has seen the following benefits<br />- URL is now clear and means something to the user<br />- Product titles are easy to navigate and the page is more pleasing to the eye<br />- The jumble of numbers in the title are now all labelled and shown below each product listing in bullet point so the user can see the basic spec of a product without having to decipher any titles<br /><br />Upon reflection I has a couple of concerns I was hoping you could discuss, I am wondering if I have made the titles too simple.<br />1) I have no product code in the title<br />We have our own products manufactured and sell existing brands with their own product codes. Some of these can be lengthy. Adding them makes them hard to the eye and the page looked cramped.<br /><br />The codes are listed beneath each product title on category pages and on a list on the actual product page, but no where in the titles. <br /><br />2)None of our products have a brand listed in the title<br />None of the products on the site had brand names in anything but the images when i started and as such it snuck under my radar. But should i pre-fix all titles with a brand name?<br /><br />Should </p> <p>URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance</p> <p>become</p> <p>URL: domain.com/BRAND1-200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: BRAND1 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />My instinct tells me to change things to include brands as its useful to the customer and should have an SEO benefit, but to leave out product codes as they are accessible to the customer where they are now and dont make things messy and unreadable.<br /><br />As always, thanks for the input!</p></title>

              On-Page Optimization | | ATP
              0
            • RonnieT

              Each page with a different meta description?

              each page on my website represents a different department, can I program the header to show a different meta description on each page or should there only be 1 meta description tag per domain?

              On-Page Optimization | | RonnieT
              0
            • marketing_zoovy.com

              Using Escaped Fragments with SEO

              Our e-commerce platform is in the process of changing to what we call app based stores (essentially running in a browser as single page web-app)  With these new stores they are being built in HTML 5 and using escaped fragments.
              Currently merchants are usually running 2 stores until we launch to app site at 100%.  My questions are really concerning the app stores which right now show on a subdomain but will essentially take over the primary domain.   Here is an example:
              app.tikimater.com and app.sportsworld.com Since I am not a developer, I'm really having a hard time understanding the escaped fragments. I'm using this but https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started I'm not sure what my actual urls should look like and what the canonical should be set to. Right now they have been removed but previously they had  http:app.tikimaster.com#!v=1  Also, and how I should be setting up my meta information for Google so 1) pages are indexed timely 2) pages are indexed with the correct information.  I am still setting the meta titles and descriptions but in some instances Google uses other info. With the new platform we are moving away from on page content (written paragraphs) but category pages would have related products embedded.  Should I still be pushing to have some type of intro text, since it would solely be for SEO and not the shoppers experience. All product pages have content (product description etc) Thank you for any advice

              On-Page Optimization | | marketing_zoovy.com
              0
            • ATMOSMarketing56

              SEO for Online Auto Parts Store

              I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this: The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content) They then choose their model of car and then the engine And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue. Anyone have any ideas?

              On-Page Optimization | | ATMOSMarketing56
              0
            • cmp101

              Does css float affect SEO?

              It is generally believed that the closer the content is to the top of the page, the better it is for SEO.  If that's incorrect, please let me know. I have a 2 column site where the left menu is navigation and right side is content.  Obviously, the left menu appears in the code before the content does, but I can flip them around via css float.  If I do that, the content will appear on the left visually, even though in the code it still comes after the left side navigation. Do either positions affect seo?

              On-Page Optimization | | cmp101
              0
            • BradBorst

              Is an Overflow SEO friendly

              Is an "overflow" (scrollbar) seo and Google friendly?  I only ask because it hides part of the visible text.

              On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.