Best Practice: Texts for Online Shops

Clicks Online Business
3rd Nov 2017
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Are you wondering why you can't rank better in in search engines even though you already have search engine optimised product texts? No wonder, because the competition is getting bigger and bigger and the best places in the search engines are limited. In the following article, we will explain what is really important for creating compelling texts for online shops.

Those who create and write texts for online shops today have to master more than just being word wizards. Rather, it is about knowing exactly what the (potential) customer wants and what you can offer them with your text and content. In the following article, we explain what is really important for texts for online shops.

Product texts and content from yesterday

The demands for high-quality content in online shops has increased with the advent of search engines being able to recognise good content. Until a few years ago, it was quite common to insert keyword combinations into the text without paying attention to its meaning. 

More often than not, such or similar product texts were found in online shops: "Buy mattress online you can buy it from us a low prices" or "We offer you mattress cold foam at a low price for immediate sale".  

Sounds awful doesn’t it?

Keywords were just thrown randomly into texts just to get recognised in search engines but thankfully all that has changed. Industry leader Google improved its search algorithm, where it has the ability to read context, grammar and text contour, which is why we are now spared from such horrible examples of poor writing.

Which requirements must product texts meet today?

Texts for online shops today essentially have to fulfil four functions. In this way, they are supposed to provide as much traffic as possible via search engines and turn interested parties into customers. In addition, the content of the text must be unique and allow meaningful internal links – this can be a lot of work for a copywrite because they have to take the following points into account:

1. Optimisation for search engines

2. Increase conversion rate

3. Create unique content

4. Enable internal links

Many shop owners and authors are now quite proficient at optimising texts with the help of keywords without undermining the meaning of a text.

However, this alone is no longer enough. For a good product text, it is also important to know what the potential customer actually wants. What at first sounds rather banal is not so easy and means that you have to put yourself in the customer's shoes.

At the beginning of a product text is the research: What does your customer want?

Instead of jumping straight onto Google's keyword planner, you should first look at the product that you wish to describe. The more explanatory a product is, the more informative the text should be - and vice versa. A simple product such as “pencil” can certainly be described in several hundred words. However, the effect of persuading a customer to buy in this way is not likely to be very strong.

If, on the other hand, a product requiring explanation, such as a mattress, the possibilities for describing it are almost unlimited. For this very reason, one should ask oneself what details are important and how best to include them into the text. The service consists of filtering information for the customer and clarifying what questions they may have about the product.

Using the right tools for keyword research

Over the course of time, a large number of tools have been established to help with keyword research. Not long ago, WDF*IDF analyses were also very popular. The WDF*IDF formula can be used to understand which semantic terms are defined around a keyword, and then integrate them into the text. Often, however, a large number of semantically related terms already arise when describing products, which is why we recommend using other tools at this point for reasons of time.

Tools that provide potential questions from interested parties are particularly helpful. Tools such as "wrel" or "answerthepublic" impressively illustrate what questions users may have about specific products.


The search bar of answerthepublic, sample search term "buy mattress".

The result is very extensive, the tool "answerthepublic" plays out more than 30 questions about the search term "buy mattress". Now, however, it is a matter of extracting the most important questions. Not all of them are directly relevant. For example, the question "which mattress to buy ikea" will hardly appear on your product page unless you are working directly for IKEA.


Result of answerthepublic, for the search term "Buy Matress”

The keyword sets can also be downloaded as csv. files from "answerthepublic". This makes them easy to copy and paste into Google's keyword planner.

For illustrative purposes, some of the questions from "answerthepublic" have been dispensed with. However, the examples already show the high relevance of some keyword sets, which might not have been mentioned in the writing of the text. Now these can be incorporated into the product text, which means that a prospective customer is highly likely to receive all the answers to his or her questions.

Focus on the benefit of the product

Even if tools can help with the planning of texts, it always depends on how full a product text is composed and to what extent it stimulates the purchase. Only a few online shops dedicate themselves to the actual use of their products. But it is precisely this one who turns interested parties into buyers. Therefore, product texts should always contain the utility value of the respective product in the continuous text.

Conclusion: Always see things from the buyer's point of view

In addition to optimisation for search engines, product texts today have to be more than superficial descriptions. They must encourage people to buy and contain all relevant information that prospective customers ask for. This makes it all the more important to put oneself in the position of the buyer before creating product pages and to look at the product with a different perspective. Only then is it possible to assert oneself into the competition, achieve good rankings and increase the conversion rate of the respective products.

About the author

Herbert Buchhorn is the CEO of Clicks Online Business (offices in Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, and Munich) and an expert in search engine optimisation (SEO). Since 2007, his online marketing agency has been successfully working for companies from a wide variety of industries throughout Germany and internationally. He regularly publishes specialist articles on the subject of SEO & e-commerce in various online and print magazines, is an acknowledged speaker at conferences and regularly holds seminars and workshops on the subject of online marketing.

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