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Persuasive, informational, and original product descriptions can help your ecommerce business increase conversions and sales. But writing unique content that engages and informs shoppers isn’t always easy. Within 80 to 100 words you must briefly describe the selling points and benefits of each of your products and include SEO keywords that will attract your target market audience.

Companies that go the easier route and copy their competitor’s product descriptions often do poorly because of Google’s Farmer algorithm, an update to the search engine that heavily penalizes retailers that copy product descriptions from competitors, or that use the exact copies of descriptions suggested by suppliers.

Regardless of search engine penalizations, it is always a good idea to write attractive, fresh product descriptions that catch shoppers’  interest, relieve concerns, and communicate the value of buying a product from your company.

Following are some useful suggestions about how to write exceptional, genuine product descriptions for your ecommerce website.

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“The cow jumped over the moon.”

Subject. Verb. Predicate.

For most native English speakers, most of us don’t even blink an eye when writing a note to a friend, writing a blog post or submitting a proposal. However, you would be surprised at the number of run-on sentences, poor spelling and other grammatical errors that I continue to come across on the Internet.

Poor grammar style can (and often is) viewed as more than just a silly mistake. In a business world that is becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet for conveying ideas, information, products and services, grammar errors such as leaving letters off of words, mistaking “their” for “there” and other faux pas can put a serious dent in your credibility and may wind up costing you valuable business. This is almost certain on webpages where there is a combination of several grammatical errors combined with poor SEO design.

Learning English All Over Again

Most of us who have been using the Internet for some time now can almost immediately tell the difference between someone who is a native speaker of English and is just making silly grammar mistakes versus a non-native English speaker who used some sort of translation software to turn their native language into English.

As a word to the wise, if you are a non-native English speaker and/or if you are a native speaker of English who is perhaps not as strong in the area of writing, it is always advised to have several eyes look over your work. CEOs, higher tier executives and others who are in powerful positions never fail to have someone look over their shoulder before giving a speech, creating a campaign or throwing together a marketing strategy.

Don’t be that guy that everyone secretly points their finger at and whispers about how they can’t type a sentence to save their life. Instead, use your resources, take out a few books and/or enlist the help of a professional for the short term to help you brush up on your English writing skills. Communication on the Internet is vital to the success of so many businesses; and the last thing you want is for your company’s message to get lost due to a few missing apostrophes, commas, periods or misinterpreted homonyms.

In the United States, there doesn’t seem to be many restrictions to building a website besides having a few bucks to pay for a domain name. That’s pretty much it! It seems like anyone can slap up a website in a matter of hours and profess to be some sort of an “expert” on something. But what does your website look like- and more importantly, what is your website saying about you to other people?

I’m not going to name names here, but lately, it’s as if there are an increasing number of crappy websites out there. Websites in which there are typos in every other paragraph, websites where the font choice could have been better or the color scheme a little more soothing on the eyes, etc…It makes you wonder, “What were they thinking?!” as you hastily reach for your mouse to click off the screen.

Quality, Quality, Quality!

I think that there are many of us out there who are so overly obsessed with people coming to our sites that we feel as if we MUST publish or post something every single day of the week.  In the meantime, consider the following: Would you rather visit a website in which there are five “space-filler-type” posts for each day of the work week or a site that produces one well-thought out, researched post per week? Which one would keep you coming back for more? Which one of these will help to build your reputation as well as your credibility?

Quality will almost always win out over quantity. However, because many of us are concerned about the search engine optimization (SEO) aspect, this often gets pushed aside. Instead, we want to make sure that we have at least X amount of words per page and of the X amount of words, X percentage has to be comprised of a certain keyword, etc. Just to play devil’s advocate here for a minute, if you marketed your website and networked, AND you wrote killer content, would you really need to be as focused on your website making the first page of Google OR would people already know where and how to find you? Hmm…