E-commerce Tips: Don’t Reuse Manufacturer Descriptions
If you own an e-commerce site with a great deal of available merchandise, you may be wondering how to gain more views and purchases through your online store. When creating a website, one of the ways many retailers choose to cut corners is by duplicating the descriptions written by the manufacturer. Unfortunately, what they may not realize is that this practice is incredibly damaging to their incoming traffic.
Why Does Reusing Product Descriptions Reduce Your Page Views?
Search engines are incredibly smart, and they are able to easily fish out duplicate content. They search specifically for repetition, and they know when the writer has not posted the content. In order to penalize sites for duplicating someone else’s work, search engines tend to give lower priority to recycled content, prioritizing the products from the original site substantially higher. Not only does this apply to the manufacturer’s main website, but search engines are able to sift through social media and find duplicates as well.
When preparing your website for search engine optimization, or SEO, it is important that all content listed on your page is original. Not only does this apply to your homepage, FAQs, and about us sections, but it also pertains to each of the content pages featuring your products.
Are There Other Reasons to Provide Original Descriptions?
Of course! One of the largest problems when copying someone else’s content is potential plagiarism. Similar to properly citing other works for your high school reports, a great deal of online material has been copyright registered and requires citation to be listed as well. While not every website or manufacturer has gone through the necessary steps to copyright their content, it is a good idea to veer on the safe side and avoid potential lawsuits down the road. In addition, copying the work of another writer and representing it as your own is unethical, and just plain uncool.
How Can Your Website Stand Out From the Crowd?
In order to stand out not only to search engines, but also with your consumers, it is important to offer them new, original content. While copying pre-written descriptions may seem easier at first, you are not taking advantage of the full potential to give your customers fresh information.
What if writing isn’t your thing? Luckily, there are SEO experts and content writers available to help you optimize your site by providing unique descriptions for all of your products. In addition to making sure that your items are efficiently described, bringing writers on board to help can also add personality and style to your descriptions. Calling in the professionals can be especially helpful if you have quite a few products listed on your site, or if you seem to be having a hard time putting what you would like to say into words.
Once you have added quality written content to your product pages, why stop there? Another great way to increase traffic and provide new information to your customers is by posting quality photos and videos of your merchandise in action. You can also encourage user comments and feedback on product pages to further extend the originality and information about your items.
Adding quality content to your website is never a bad idea. Raise the awareness and appeal of your products by creating your own custom information that you can provide to your customers.
