Product description SEO: the 200 words most stores waste

Most product descriptions on Shopify stores are one of two things: the manufacturer's copy pasted verbatim, or three lines written in a hurry at 11pm during a product upload. Both cost you money, and for different reasons.

The pasted copy is a duplicate-content problem. Every other store selling the same item has the identical text, so there is no reason for a search engine to prefer your page over theirs. The three-line version has the opposite problem: nothing to index, and nothing that answers the question standing between a shopper and the buy button.

Two jobs, not one

A product description has to convince a person and inform a crawler, and those needs overlap more than SEO advice usually admits. The thing a shopper wants to know (does this fit my situation) is the same thing that makes the page rank for a specific query, because specific queries are how people express specific situations.

"Waterproof" is a feature. "Fine for a rainy commute, not for swimming" is an answer, and it is the kind of sentence that gets you found by someone typing a real question.

A structure that works

Not a template to follow slavishly, but the four things that tend to be missing:

1. The one-line what-it-is. Someone landing from search does not know what they are looking at. Say it plainly before you sell.
2. Who it is and is not for. Naming who should not buy something is the most persuasive thing you can do, and it filters out the returns.
3. The specifics. Dimensions, materials, care, compatibility, what is in the box. This is the part that gets found, because it is what people search.
4. The objection. Every product has one recurring hesitation. Answer it on the page instead of in a support ticket.

That is usually 150 to 300 words. Longer is fine when the product genuinely needs it (anything technical, anything with sizing) and padding is worse than being brief.

On keywords

Use the phrase a customer would use, in the first sentence, once. Then stop thinking about it. Product pages rank on specificity and on being genuinely about the thing; a target phrase repeated six times reads as spam to a reader and does nothing for the ranking it was aimed at.

The bigger win is covering the long tail by accident. Write the real details and you will rank for questions you never thought to target, because someone somewhere searched for exactly the spec you happened to list.

What to do with supplier copy

Keep the spec table; it is factual and nobody expects originality in a spec. Rewrite the prose. If you sell 400 SKUs and rewriting all of them is not realistic, start with the twenty that get the most traffic and the twenty with the highest return rate, which are rarely the same twenty.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a product description be?

Long enough to answer the real questions, usually 150 to 300 words. A simple product needs less; anything with sizing, compatibility or a care routine needs more.

Does duplicate supplier copy actually hurt rankings?

It rarely triggers a penalty, but it removes any reason to rank you above the twenty other stores with the same text. The damage is being invisible, not being punished.

Where should keywords go?

The product title, the first sentence, and the page title tag. That is enough. Density targets are a solved-and-abandoned idea.

Should I write descriptions for products I only sell a few of?

Only if they are the kind of thing people search for by name. A long-tail product with a specific query behind it can be worth more effort than a bestseller competing with everyone.

Can I use the same description for variants?

Yes, and you generally should; variants are not separate pages in Shopify's default setup, so there is nothing to differentiate.

The test

Read your description and ask whether it says anything a competitor selling the identical product could not also say. If it does not, it is not doing either of its jobs.