TOTD #2: Searchable Descriptions

For anyone that's read my Crash Course post in the forums it may seem like this post is basically repeating the same old stuff. I think however that this truly is a huge part of your shop's success and having effective keyworded descriptions is really the key to getting you your early sales, it is not A key, it is THE key. Effective descriptions do two things, one major thing and one minor thing, the major thing is that they give the search engines something to find when a searcher is looking for something. The minor thing is that it gives a potential customer something to read about your product when they are considering buying.

You doubtlessly spend a good amount of time coming up with a design for your shop, you may have agonized over it, I wouldn't be surprised if you even thought about it in a lot of detail, brainstorming, tweaking, refining before you actually sat down to create it. Even a shop with mostly text designs should be clever and being clever takes brain power so even those text based design shops probably labored over their designs before they actually put them together. Afterall, a good design is one that's been effectively planned and put together rather than just created off the seat of your pants. That doesn't mean you can't come up with good "seat of your pants" type designs, it's just more likely that the better ones will be the ones you plan out more. While I wouldn't suggest that you agonize over your descriptions for your products I would suggest you take some time and think about your strategy before you put them on your product. It's funny really when you consider this; you spend a lot of time, perhaps even days or weeks on one design, if it's an elaborate one, then when you finish it you are almost in a rush to get it in your shop. You upload it, slap it on some products, title and describe it and then it goes live. The problem with that is this. You may have a great design but if you don't take the time to write an effective description then no one will get to your shop to see it. The search engines NEED to know about your design so take some time to give the search engine the best possible description you can because a better description will give you more potential customers which is definitely a good thing.

So...

I was reading a post today where Michigal (a fellow shopkeeper) was advising Honie (another fellow shopkeeper) to rewrite her descriptions for some zodiac products she had in her shop. So let's analyze what Michigal already identified as the problem, ineffective descriptions!

Honie has a raglan for virgos here here in her shop. Her description for this raglan (at the time of my post)

"Virgoans are pure and kind hearted people.Go for this raglan if you're one of the millions of virgoans in the world."

Michigal pointed out in the forums that "virgoans" may not be the best term to use for this description as it's unlikely to be searched and probably not even a word. Don't waste your description space. Keep in mind your description is almost useless if you aren't using keywords in your description that a customer may use in Google, Yahoo!, MSN or any other search engine. So use the keywords that your potential customer would use. THINK LIKE YOU WERE THE CUSTOMER and you were on the Google search page and you wanted your item, how would YOU search for it. In this case the word "virgo" is definitely our most important word but we also need to put in other words like "astrology" and "zodiac" another important thing to put in is probably "apparel" or "shirt" or even "gift". You need to remember that your potential customer is probably not going to JUST search for "virgo" you have to consider the whole search. They will probably type in "virgo shirt" or "virgo apparel" or something like that, so get the PRODUCT name in there too. Putting in "raglan" may not be necessary. Afterall, raglan is an apparel design but is probably known by that name mostly to people in the clothing business or by CP shopkeepers. You can keep it in, but it's not as critical as "shirt" or "apparel" would be.

Now let's break down Honie's description and see what keywords she's got that people might search for.

BEFORE:
"Virgoans are pure and kind hearted people.Go for this raglan if you're one of the millions of virgoans in the world."

EEEK! Zero. Unless someone comes along and searches for "virogans" which is highly unlikely, she's not going to get search engine traffic based on that description. Fortunately her title takes a bit of the stress off, but not a lot. She does at least have "Virgo" in the title. Let's rewrite this description!

AFTER:
"Are you an astrology buff? Looking for some groovy zodiac apparel for your virgo? Why not pick up this virgo shirt as a gift for that kind hearted soul. Birthday between September 1 and 23."

Okay, now we've got something to work with. It's not Shakespeare but it gets us in the keyword game at least. Now instead of having nothing for the search engines we have "astrology", "zodiac", "apparel", "virgo", "shirt", "gift", "birthday", "september"

So we have those people searching for "september birthday gift" covered, as well as "virgo apparel" or "zodiac shirts" or whatever other combination you can think of of those words. Go to town! Make up your descriptions thinking of more than just one word, think of combinations of words and you'll be on top of the game. Put as many relevant keywords in your descriptions and you'll be off to a good start. Rewrite your descriptions when you need to, remember, a good description is worth as much as your good design in actuality, because without a good description, you won't get anybody to see that good design of yours.

Apply the same theory to the titles of your items and you'll be in good shape!

Good luck!
Andy