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Question For Dave (Store Coach)

by Joe Stewart
4 replies
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Hi Dave,

How's that for being direct? lol

I thought about sending you a PM but thought that others might get value from the question as well, so I decided to open a new thread.

My question is this, how much text would you consider to be "enough" for best SEO results?

I realize that the content I write for each page should at least be mostly unique. There are some products that have specifications that must be written verbatim and really shouldn't be altered, but they can still have unique content written around them.

My guess is that with sites such as these most people already have a pretty good idea of what they're looking for, but some things are going to be more technical. Example, a T-Shirt vs a personal computer. I'd think that higher ticket items might require more content as well.

Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this? I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

Joe
#coach #dave #question #store
  • Profile picture of the author sween
    Originally Posted by Joe Stewart View Post

    Hi Dave,

    How's that for being direct? lol

    I thought about sending you a PM but thought that others might get value from the question as well, so I decided to open a new thread.

    My question is this, how much text would you consider to be "enough" for best SEO results?

    I realize that the content I write for each page should at least be mostly unique. There are some products that have specifications that must be written verbatim and really shouldn't be altered, but they can still have unique content written around them.

    My guess is that with sites such as these most people already have a pretty good idea of what they're looking for, but some things are going to be more technical. Example, a T-Shirt vs a personal computer. I'd think that higher ticket items might require more content as well.

    Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this? I'd really appreciate it.

    Thanks in advance.

    Joe
    Excellent question. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this as well.
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Originally Posted by Joe Stewart View Post

    Hi Dave,

    How's that for being direct? lol

    I thought about sending you a PM but thought that others might get value from the question as well, so I decided to open a new thread.

    My question is this, how much text would you consider to be "enough" for best SEO results?

    I realize that the content I write for each page should at least be mostly unique. There are some products that have specifications that must be written verbatim and really shouldn't be altered, but they can still have unique content written around them.

    My guess is that with sites such as these most people already have a pretty good idea of what they're looking for, but some things are going to be more technical. Example, a T-Shirt vs a personal computer. I'd think that higher ticket items might require more content as well.

    Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this? I'd really appreciate it.

    Thanks in advance.

    Joe
    Hi Joe, sorry for the delayed reply. I haven't been posting the past several days because I've been so swamped and I only found out about this thread because of a Google Alert I have set up! You should've at least sent me a PM to point me at the thread!

    Funny you ask this specific question because it was the main topic of discussion during our weekly webinar last night! I spent over 40 minutes talking about on-page optimization & specifically product page textual content DO's and DONT's.

    In my opinion, and based on what I've seen Google doing recently, each page you want to get indexed needs at least 300-400 words of unique textual content within the body area (not counting anything from the outer template). Anything less seems to not get indexed by the Googlebot as easily.

    Obviously, this is a lot easier to do for a website with 50 or 60 products, but this becomes far more challenging when you have hundreds or even thousands of products in your store. The advice I give to our students that are in that position is to create a product description HTML "template" that contains a generic unique description for that specific product line. Then, use the concatenate function within your spreadsheet program to pull pieces of data from other cells in that product's row to make each description partially unique from all others.

    With this technique, a good percentage of all products using that template will not be unique from product-to-product in your store, but based on what I'm seeing in Google, mainly duplicated content internally on a website is far less of a big deal than mainly duplicated content from an external website (i.e. the manufacturer's product descriptions).

    I hope this is clear and helps and feel free to let me know if you need clarification on anything!
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    • Profile picture of the author ScooterDaMan
      I realize it may seem impossible to some people to come up with 300-400 words about many products but it's really not that hard if you put yourself in a potential customer's shoes and try to answer every possible question anyone might have about a product. I wrote a post about this - the general gist of which was to answer the 5 W's on every product page. I'd link to the article but I never can be sure what you are allowed to link to here and what you can't. Far too many forums prohibit you from linking to something of your own - even if it is helpful content written with no real commercial intent.
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