Why You Shouldn’t Copy Manufacturers Product Descriptions on Your E-Commerce Site

(Today’s guest post is brought to you courtesy of Steven Boggs)

Ecommerce entrepreneurs have to deal with all kinds of issues when it comes to building their website into an online success. There are matters of administration, customer services, keeping the shopping cart and sales software running smoothly and occasionally having to return money to unhappy customers. If these aren’t enough, there is also the responsibility of creating effective product description content that will improve sales and create a valuable SEO presence for the site in question.

Since so much work is sometimes needed to run an ecommerce site, it might be tempting to forgo writing your own product description content and simply pasting whatever the product manufacturers descriptions are right to your sales pages. This is a bad idea and should be avoided at all costs; the small amount of extra work you save time on can cost you big from an SEO point of view and damaging your site’s optimization can directly hit your pocketbook through a reduced online visibility. We’re going t explain exactly why you shouldn’t copy others product descriptions for your own sales pages and how to improve your SEO by creating your own.

strong>Why You Should Avoid Copied Product Descriptions
For one thing, copied content looks boring. It doesn’t at all distinguish your own website from those of your competitors. When people go online to search for a product they want to buy, they’re also looking for a bit or a lot of information on what that product is all about. If they see that you have the same copy-n-paste description that a dozen other ecommerce websites are sharing between each other, they simply won’t notice you; your website won’t stick out at all.

On the other hand, if your product descriptions are unique, have been crafted by you or a writer you’ve hired and have distinct, new and more honest information about your products qualities, you’ll be the buyers’ first click choice and quite likely their go-to-site from then on. They will trust you for your honestly and unique descriptions.

Just as importantly, you should really avoid copied content because it then becomes “duplicate content,” and might even be “triplicate content” if you’re not the only one who’s doing the same. From an SEO point of view, this is a very bad idea since Google and other major search engines all prefer rich, original content for their rankings and will actually punish sites that simply copy from others. Higher ranking through good SEO is a vital aspect of your online self-promotion and everything on your site should be geared towards maximizing that; this means keeping the valuable descriptive keywords that come with manufacturer descriptions but making the rest of the text your own and even more descriptive. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t Take Cues from the Competition
You may see other, successful ecommerce sites using manufacturer copied descriptions and still keeping their visibility but don’t be fooled by this. There can be all sorts of reasons for why they are still maintaining search rank or high sales: they may have good optimization in other aspects of their website design, they may be spending a fortune on online marketing and barely keeping afloat, or they may have simply not been caught and punished by Google yet. Regardless of which it is, they will eventually suffer in some way from having their products described through rehashed boiler plate text; you can only do your own website a favor by moving away from the same and sticking to your own unique style and presence.

Author Bio
Steven Boggs writes for EnMast a site that offers lots of great resources for small business owners.

Netvantage Marketing

Netvantage Marketing is a search engine marketing company founded in 2008. We assist businesses in a variety of industries with search engine optimization and paid search management.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *