I wonder what you all think is an appropriate content length for products and descriptions.
Most of our products and collections are brief — usually around 100-200 words. A lot of general SEO literature I read suggests content length of 600-1000 words, but that seems excessive for a product page, where the purpose of your copy is to get people to click that button.
OTOH, we want our copy to do well in search, and really brief pages are at a disadvantage in this department.
So what do you all think? What is an appropriate length for products and collections?
Thank you for reaching out and sharing that information with me!
Product descriptions are so important for many reasons, so you want to make sure they are the best they can be. We have a great video on how to write product descriptions that sell that I recommend watching as it has a ton of really great examples and pointers. It’s essential to have keywords and a detailed description, but you don’t want too many words. Depending on your product, I recommend staying in the 150-300 word range. Another way to improve your SEO would be to use a third-party app that helps you create content-rich advanced product descriptions.
Please let me know if you have any further questions, and I would be happy to help! I would love to learn more about your business. What type of products do you sell?
You’ve hit it with the keyword “general”, an important factor is context and experience of the products.
Do the products really need a thousand words to be described? Do they even need 100?
On the other side of this, for example, technology products tend to need thousands of words, which arguably includes things like technical specifications, compatibility info, etc. Arguably in the sense that they may not need to exist in product.description but could be in metafields,etc.
What can end up mattering no matter the total word count is the blurb: the beginning text that ends up in channels, sections, product-cards, your own internal search results, above the fold, etc and of course the meta description itself. That is somewhere around/under 160 characters ,not words.
Same thing for the description of collections though the tendency for most industries is for extremely short paragraphs with no duplicate descriptions pulled from products content.
Most of our product descriptions are in the 300 word range, and that feels about right. They’re certainly say all the essential things about our products. I didn’t write them, but I am optimizing the existing descriptions for relevant keywords.
We’re also able to add additional info like ingredients via metafields. So I think we’re on the right track.
Right, we’re adding extra info in metafields. That’s why I bridled at this “general” SEO advice. I knew it would be crazy to write 1000 word product descriptions.
We also hold our meta descriptions to 160 chars. I’m trimming the existing ones as I come across them.