The Importance of Length and Keywords in Product Titles and Descriptions

Among novice online merchants, it is widely believed that having placed hundreds or even thousands of listings on some eCommerce platforms like eBay, they will have a huge stream of organic traffic coming to them. However, as it turns out, this is rather far from reality.

In this article, we will show you how to optimize your product titles and product descriptions.

Step 1: Proper product title

The title should contain as much information about the product as possible: the brand, the model, the color etc. The more accurate the product title is, the more people will see your listing. Whatever search query the buyer performs, your product title will match with what they are looking for, i.e. it will be relevant to them.

In addition, we suggest you steer clear of descriptive adjectives like “beautiful”, “amazing”, “revolutionary” etc. as they provide little to no value to the user and don’t help with ranking. However, if an adjective provides a buyer with some additional information about the product (e.g. “authentic”), then you can use it.

Step 2: Informative product description

You should briefly (in 1–2 sentences) let the buyer know whether that is the product they are looking for, while also pointing out the important features of the product.

Importantly, you should never simply add a description from the product manufacturer, since Google frowns upon using duplicate content.

The thing is that you should always make unique content. Otherwise, Google will give your website a much lower ranking and present you with a penalty.

Furthermore, make sure you incorporate some relevant keywords in your descriptions. We recommend you stick to 2–3 keywords for each product. Nonetheless, you should not create a description that is only made up of keywords, but you should make it useful for the buyer instead. You don’t want to simply drive traffic to your listing, but to actually make a sale, which is only possible if you provide a good user experience.

How do I make sure my product titles & descriptions are correct?

Let me introduce you to our Actonlytics tool, our actionable task list.

Actonlytics gathers your data from different eCommerce platforms, running checks on your product, store and buyer data. After analyzing the data it will generate for you a list of actions you can take to improve your store’s performance.

Here is how it works:

• You sign up for free & connect your first shop, it’s ok you will later be able to connect more shops;
• Actonlytics will import your data and run different checks on it.
• Based on the checks, it will create an opportunities list with the top business opportunities you should take to improve your store.

We provide 2 checks that address this exact issue. A product description length check and a title length check.

The product description check will analyze the number of characters in the product description, if it’s shorter than 140 characters it an action will automatically be created.

Similarly, a check will run on all the product titles exported for your products and check the length of the title and create an action if it’s too short.

In conclusion, optimizing your product description & your product titles is vital in order for your listing to show up in the relevant search results and thus drive traffic to your online store. To get a free check for your product description and titles sign up to Actonlytics at: www.actonlytics.com.