How to Use AI to Write SEO Product Descriptions Faster That Rank (Even if You’re Not an SEO Guru)
eCommerce content teams (even smaller teams and one-person marketing departments) are met with expectations to crank out thousands of SEO-optimized product descriptions that rank.
This is especially hard if they’re not SEO gurus (aka, their expertise is more toward content than SEO).
The problem (for them) becomes even shit*er, considering:
- If they don’t optimize product descriptions, they don’t capitalize on primary digital real estate (which also means missed opportunities to get sales and get noticed by leads).
- Google’s new updates (such as SGE) are already impacting their product listings and keeping the competition fierce by only showing a few products. (The same goes for alternate search engines like Bing.)
However, there’s still hope on the horizon, and we’ve found a solution to manage this problem: Optimizing product descriptions with SEO best practices to get noticed — and doing it at scale — because if you don’t, it can impact your bottom line and overall company revenue.
Now, all that sounds good in theory but could be difficult to implement, right? Right?
Wrong!
In this instance, AI can become your best friend and help you produce SEO-friendly product descriptions in mere seconds. It can consider your style guide requirements, follow SEO best practices, enrich your content, and even track your results.
On that note, find out how Describely can help you with eCommerce product SEO!
What is an SEO-optimized product description?
Here’s what an SEO-optimized product description means to us — for starters, it’s the kind of content that’s not stuffed with keywords. Nor is it the kind of content that’s wordy, simply to meet a quota of word count set by an SEO influencer 😉
Rather, it’s the kind of content that’s actually written for humans, with a little sprinkle of focused keywords and links.
Aside from having the right amount of keywords/links, these descriptions are also:
- Filled with search-intent value (i.e., they answer customer questions like which types of events/seasons the product can be used, what size the model is wearing, and help customers visualize how the product would fit into their lives).
- Structured and formatted extremely nicely with break-up texts, easy language, and varying sentence lengths, so it’s easier for the readers to digest. (Customer experience (CX) executives are big fans of this practice, or so says Jess, our CX guru).
- Have structured data, such as product features, user reviews, pricing, etc., to get noticed by the search engines.
- Accurate, unique (based on your style guide requirements), focus on benefits over features, and are free of major grammatical errors and inconsistencies.
Standout SEO description examples
To drive the point home, here are examples of some of the best SEO product descriptions.
1. Staples
Staples is a great case of SEO-done-right because it writes its product descriptions in a clear, jargon-free way and includes all the important information customers might inquire about.
For reference, here’s a description of ergonomic chairs from their website:
The end result? When you try to buy a chair online, Staples is one of the first results that shows up.
2. Home Depot
If you’re looking for a brand that perpetually focuses on product benefits over product features and keeps a customer-centric approach in their product descriptions, Home Depot might just be the brand for you.
(It also helps that they try to integrate target keywords throughout the copy — in this instance, words like “faux plants,” “fake plants,” and “fiddle leaf” take center stage.)
They also add tons of structured data to their product listings so that helps them stand out, too.
3. Target AU
Target Australia, one of our customers, keeps its product descriptions sharp by focusing on the customer experience first. They craft copy in their signature tone (friendly yet professional) to make the copy engaging and strive to answer all potential customer questions.
Plus, they include a popular “Often Bought Together” section that shoppers really appreciate.
For reference, here’s what their product descriptions look like:
And if you were to look up the same target keyword online, Target would be one of the first brands to pop up in the organic listings with this result:
SEO for eCommerce products: Automated vs. Manual?
Since AI is still semi-new to the content game, many people often wonder about the long and short-term benefits of using AI over (human) contractors to write their descriptions and vice versa. Well, let’s give some thought to it based on the following factors:
- Cost Savings: AI has an easy win here considering you can pay it next to nothing to create product content, but contractors often charge a minimum of $20 hourly. (Now multiply this amount by the number of products in your catalog and the approximate time needed to develop descriptions for them.)
- Efficiency in Content Production: AI can develop product descriptions in bulk in a matter of seconds, whereas it’ll take contractors at least 15 minutes for each description.
- Scalability: AI again has a win here, as you can use solutions like Describely to connect with your eCommerce storefronts, create and edit product content in seconds, localize your content, access analytics, and generate unlimited descriptions (which is helpful if you don’t like something or if you’re updating the same products for different events and campaigns).
- Quality of Content: This one’s a 50-50, as human creativity wins here, but AI will ensure you meet your style guide requirements, never have any errors or inconsistencies in your content, etc.
Truth be told, here’s our stance on this whole humans vs. AI debate: They both have their unique benefits.
It’s just that we believe humans should oversee how AI generates descriptions, fact-check the product claims it’s making, and give the content a final go-ahead before it’s published on your site — aka, be on top of all the tasks that come after AI has already generated the descriptions.
Automating SEO for product pages with AI
Just to recap, here are all the benefits you get by using AI to create SEO-friendly product descriptions:
- Quicker turnaround times
- High return on investment
- Scalability according to business requirements
- Unlimited revisions
- Error-free copy
- Lower costs
- Consistency in responses
- Localization and personalization
How to write SEO product descriptions in Describely?
Let’s get onto the meatier bits and find how an AI tool like Describely can help you with SEO-optimized product descriptions.
[Side Note: If you’re short on time, check out this video by Jess (our CX specialist) — it’ll quickly walk you through the current SEO offerings at Describely!]
P.S. Alternatively, if you’re ready to get started, grab a free trial of Describely!
1. Ask Describely to do keyword research for you
You can ask Describely to do keyword research for you based on certain phrases or keywords you provide it with.
To do this, go to your product catalog, select the product you want to do keyword research for, and under “SEO Tools,” write down your search query (in the instance below, we typed out “Art 101 Scratch Color Set” as the query, and it came back with the following keyword recommendations).
If you’re in a time crunch, you can even do this task in bulk by selecting all the products from your catalog you wish to do keyword research for, and then clicking on “Create Content” and selecting “Keywords” from the list of options.
2. Add (or remove) selected keywords from your descriptions
Suppose say you’ve done your own keyword research and you’d like to use the keywords from your own list; there’s an option to do that, too.
Here’s how the process goes: Go to “SEO Tools” on Describely (this option will be under the product catalog), write down the necessary keywords from your list (feel free to include the keywords shared by Describely too), and then click on “Generate SEO Optimized Product Description.”
Alternatively, if you wish to restrict or remove any keywords from your descriptions (for example, if you cannot mention any competitor names or reference to any unsubstantiated claims, you can ask Describely to consider the restricted keywords, too.
All you’ll need to do is go to the Describely menu and select “Restricted Keywords” — this option will be under “Brand and Content.” (Describely also has an in-built Amazon restricted keyword list, if you might need to use it.)
3. Develop metadata in seconds
We all know producing metadata is a product page SEO best practice, so you’ll be happy to know Describely keeps all guidelines in mind before curating meta descriptions, keywords, and titles (e.g., you’ll find key product benefits included in the descriptions, the character limit being within 160 characters, etc.).
To create meta descriptions, go to SEO Tools in Describely, and click on “Generate Description.”
3. Make descriptions intent-focused with its AI ruleset
Oftentimes, you might want to revamp your product descriptions based on a holiday event, a campaign you’re running, or simply because you’ve updated your brand style guide.
For this, you’ll need to make your descriptions intent-focused (for example, if you’re planning on updating your descriptions because Christmas is around the corner, you might need to add details about how your product could become the perfect gift for Christmas and who you could gift it to).
Describely helps you do exactly that by allowing you to create campaign-centric content rules, where you can specify how to make the descriptions more intent-focused. For reference, here’s what our Christmas Content Rules look like.
To create your own content rules, go to “Content Rules” under “Brand and Content.” You can further select this ruleset when you’re updating a catalog (the option to do this will be under your AI product editor).
4. Add instructions for word count, format, structure, and output language
Adding onto the good news, you’ll be happy to know you can customize almost everything about your product descriptions with the help of your content ruleset.
For reference, you can customize:
- How long or short you want your descriptions to be (in terms of word count)
- Which details you want to include in your descriptions (e.g., CTA, value prop, key features, etc.)
- What kind of tone you want (on that note, you can also customize your own tone)
- Which output language you wish to produce the product descriptions in (e.g., English, Spanish, Arabic, German, etc.)
- What character limits you want your titles and meta descriptions to be (you can also set additional instructions for your meta descriptions)
- How would you like to structure your product descriptions
(Btw, you can also add more rules for restricted keywords, title instructions, bullet point setup, etc.)
5. Use AI to verify your claims
When you’re nearing campaign deadlines, it’s difficult to read through every description (especially if you have thousands of products in your catalog) to ensure there’s accuracy.
However, maintaining accuracy is important — after all, if you don’t, it can lead to some misunderstandings amongst prospects or get you into legal troubles later down the line!
To fast track this process, you can select your products in bulk (or individually) and click on “Audit Copy.” This will open a new window where you can select “Provide a list of claims made in the content for human approval” amongst the listed options.
What this will do is it’ll come back with a list of product claims you made in your copy, and you get to accept or reject them — as easy as that — no need to read through thousands of descriptions!
For reference, here’s what the process could look like:
Pro Tip: Ask Describely to regenerate product descriptions based on verified or unverified product claims, so you don’t have to go through the grueling process of creating descriptions from scratch again.
6. Ask it to edit and proofread content for you
Next up, before you give your product descriptions to your editor, ask Describely to remove the surface-level errors, so your editor can focus on the meatier stuff like structure, content, and format.
You can do this by selecting your products in bulk (or otherwise), going on Audit Copy, and clicking “Check for misspellings and grammatical errors in the content” from the listed options.
Once Describely runs an audit, it’ll come back with a list of errors (and suggestions to improve the errors). All you’ll need to do is accept or ignore these suggestions.
For reference, here’s what this feature looks like in action:
7. Adapt the descriptions it produces to your style guide
It’s also important your descriptions match the instructions set in your style guide — i.e., the tone, voice, brand personality, grammar, etc., should all be on-point.
For example, Dollar Shave Club remains true to its brand principles and manages to incorporate humor even in its product descriptions.
To do the same, you can set instructions on how you’d like to frame your brand tone and write your content (we covered this in points #3 and #4).
But here’s the kicker: You can also use Describely to cross-verify if the instructions you set are actually being followed (aka, do your product descriptions actually keep up with your style guide?).
[Side Note: This feature is mostly helpful when you’re reviewing descriptions written by a bench of contractors, or if you’re reviewing descriptions from different timelines — i.e., your style guide may have changed in the past X years and your older products might need to be updated with the current rules.]
To make this happen, use the same route as before: Select products > Click on “Audit Copy.” But this time, select “Audit against Content Rules” and select the ruleset you want to cross-reference it with.
Describely will come back with failed content validations (aka, attributes in your descriptions that did not match your style guide), and you can choose to either “Fix Failure” or “Ignore.”
Once you ask it to fix failures, you can further regenerate new descriptions that match the style guide requirements set in Describely.
8. Enrich your content with factual information
For any product description to be successful, it needs to have enough (factual) information so that customers can visualize themselves using it.
However, sometimes suppliers and manufacturers send sparse product details, but that doesn’t mean we cannot enrich the descriptions ourselves (and especially in bulk, so there’s maximum efficiency).
To do this in Describely, select all the product listings you wish to enrich, click on “Enrich Data,” and decide which fields you’d like to see in the search (along with that, you can also add manufacturer details and product attributes to narrow down the hunt).
Describely crawls the web (along with the specified domain) to bring back the necessary information.
9. Track the progress of your product pages SEO
Last but not least, once you’ve gone through the trouble of creating, reviewing, and publishing your product descriptions, you can use Describely to see how they’re performing.
Since Describely has integrated with GSC (Google Search Console), you can now keep track of clicks, impressions, CTR, etc.
To find all these details, simply go to “Analytics” and sign into your GSC account. From there, you can either check the performance of your listing directly by going to their product pages on Describely or by going to Analytics again.
Next steps for creating SEO-friendly product descriptions
Although Describely is not an SEO tool, it’s a product information management & AI software created specifically for eComm companies, which means it’s been trained with the focus of integrating SEO for product descriptions and has millions of SEO-friendly product descriptions in its training dataset.
Most importantly, it’s cost-efficient, saves you time, and is highly scalable, making it the perfect partner for you, especially in a high-stakes environment when you have to work on multiple eComm campaigns and have strict deadlines.
Ready to experience how Describely can help you create content that sells more and ranks higher? Book a call with our team today!
FAQs
1. How long should a product description be for SEO?
There’s no hard and fast rule about this. Take as many words as you require to get the product information across (without adding fluff). But on that note, try to stick between 100-400 words.
2. What are some product description SEO best practices?
Some SEO best practices include integrating necessary keywords and links (but not overstuffing them), writing in an accessible structure and format, and adding structured data.
3. What is eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO refers to when an online store or marketplace optimizes its website based on SEO best practices to improve rankings and get more visitors to their site.
4. How much do SEO product description writing services cost?
Charges of AI technologies (like Describely) begin at $28/month for SEO product description writing, whereas copywriters typically charge higher, with UpWork reporting an average fee of $30/hour.
5. How to write product descriptions for SEO?
To write an SEO-friendly product description, weave in keywords naturally, focus on what makes the product great, keep it short but compelling, and make sure it’s easy to read and search-friendly.