It’s curious, in many ways, that product descriptions seem to be a ‘blind spot’ for a large proportion of ecommerce businesses. By ‘blind spot’, we’re referring to the fact that so few such product descriptions seem to be unique, despite it being widely recognised how much harm content duplicated from elsewhere can do to a site’s search engine rankings.
After all, when multiple pages have the same content, competition is created between those pages that damages the chances of any of them ranking in the search engine results.
However, we’re normally used to talking about duplicate content as content that repeats itself across a single site. Many of us aren’t so accustomed to discussing the problem of syndicated product descriptions also producing duplicate content across the web as a whole – or more specifically, giving your site the same on-page content as its ecommerce rivals.
So, what has led to this unfortunate situation, and what can be done about it?
The role of the major brands and manufacturers
Let’s imagine that your brand is one of the world’s biggest, such as Adidas. It’s likely that you won’t feel you have much to lose from resellers using your product content, given that your own site is likely to have almost unparalleled link authority and contextual relevance for your products.
In any case, of course Google is almost certainly going to rank you higher for online searches of your products, than the thousands of retailers stocking them. Yours is the megabrand, after all.
Retailers can reap major rewards from composing their own content
Now, if you’re a relatively small ecommerce business using syndicated content from these megabrands for their products, you might initially imagine it to be too big a risk, or otherwise problematic, to have unique content created for your product descriptions.
What if, for instance, you accidentally misrepresent a product in a description that you write, and find yourself receiving a heightened number of customer support queries, complaints and returns as a result? Plus, it can be very costly in terms of time and money to keep on creating such unique descriptions for all of the products that you are likely to be continually adding to your site.
However, given that the highest-ranking ecommerce businesses are consistently those with unique product descriptions – not merely reworded, but actually with innovative and fresh angles compared to whatever basic information the brand has already provided – it makes sense to look seriously at creating such content for your own site.
Your unique product descriptions might go into greater detail about the historical context of each product than the standard syndicated copy does, or they may clearly and plainly outline the benefits of certain technology that the given product uses. Blocks of text may also be converted into bullet points for easier reading.
You don’t need to look far for help with your brand’s online presence
Are you interested in investigating further with us how our team here at Piranha Designs can assist you in realising the maximum potential from your site’s ecommerce web design and SEO marketing? If so, we’re available on the other end of the phone; simply get in touch with us at our Gibraltar, London or Edinburgh offices today for more information.
