How to Avoid Over-Optimising Product Descriptions for SEO

How Does Over-Optimisation Harm Your SEO Strategy?

• Google penalties, resulting in a drop in ranking or complete site removal. Recovery is a difficult, time consuming, and long process
• Loss of user trust, resulting in visitors leaving quickly, a drop in engagement, and suffering conversions
• Brand reputation damage, harming long-term credibility and authority
• Poor user experience, leading to an increased bounce rate and low user engagement

Common Over-Optimisation Mistakes

Most online stores that over-optimise their product descriptions do so without realising it. The most common over-optimisation mistakes include:

• Optimising with unrelated keywords – this misleads users and search engines, increasing bounce rates
• Over internal links – limits SEO efforts by primarily linking to home pages or category pages, rather than distributing links across all your content
• Keyword stuffing – excessive use of keywords or links is outdated and manipulative, cluttering the page and resulting in poor user experience 
• Low quality content – product descriptions lacking originality and substance negatively impacts your SEO efforts
• Manipulative backlinking – acquiring backlinks through exchanges and paid placements can result in an unnatural link profile
• Duplicate content – when it comes to product descriptions, copying content across multiple pages for the same product, maybe with different colours or variations, can dilute your SEO value, making it harder for search engines to identify the most relevant version

How to Avoid Product Description Over-Optimisation

Now that you know the most common over-optimisation mistakes when creating product descriptions, you need to ensure you know how to avoid them. The Genie Crawl team have put some best practices in place that you can implement today:

Improve User Experience

When you improve user experience, you reduce your bounce rate. This is how users interact with your website, impacting search visibility. Some effective tips include:

• Improve site speed by compressing product images, minimising scripts, and enabling caching
• Ensure your site is mobile-optimised, adapting to all screen sizes and orientations
• Ensure you have a clean link profile, fixing broken links, while monitoring crawl errors

Keyword Research

Conduct comprehensive keyword research, ensuring your product descriptions align with user intent. User intent falls into four categories that you need to cater to:

1. Informational – users are looking for information about a product 
2. Navigational – users are looking for a specific website or page
3. Commercial – users are researching products before making a decision 
4. Transactional – users are ready to make a purchases

Optimise Meta Tags

Ensure your meta tags are optimised for each product page, incorporating your targeted keywords. Best practices include:

• Title tags – 60 characters – search engines sometimes cut off long titles
• Optimise for mobile – create concise and well-structured title tags and meta descriptions improving readability on mobile devices
• Place primary keywords at the beginning of your meta tags
• Meta descriptions – 160 characters – compelling, concise, using keyword 

Create Engaging Product Descriptions

Successful SEO strategies focus on creating high quality, user-focused content. This means creating informative and in-depth product descriptions that provide value to your audience. We recommend the following:

• Paragraphs and sentences should be concise, broken into short and digestible sections to improve readability
• Headings should be clear using H2 and H3 tags to create logical flow
• Add visuals such as images, charts, and diagrams to improve user experience 

Regularly Track Performance

SEO success is more than applying the right optimisations, it requires regular monitoring, ensuring your product descriptions are performing well. In order to determine the success of your descriptions, you need to track important key metrics, including:

• Click Through Rates (CTRs) – this shows your titles and meta descriptions are attracting your audience 
• Bounce rates – shows how relevant your product descriptions are
• Time on page – shows whether users are engaging with your product descriptions

Conclusions

User behaviour and search engines are constantly evolving, in order to stay ahead of the latest trends and updates, you need to create product descriptions that offer real value, rather than using outdated and manipulative tactics. It's easy to over-optimise your content accidentally, but over-optimisation can result in your site being penalised. To avoid over-optimisation of your product descriptions, contact Genie Crawl today.