One In A Million - The Case for Unique Product Descriptions in Ecommerce SEO
It’s difficult to stand out in today’s world. Ask any teenager. Even those who make a lifestyle out of trying to be different end up all being alike. Even in Hollywood plots are recycled, rehashed, retold, and recreated.
The Internet is the King of Duplication. Not only is it more difficult to stand out because you are being compared to a much larger crowd, but much of the Internet is driven by syndication, retweets, and stolen content. Even as I write this, it’s based off a post on Search Engine Round Table about Making Unique Content From Google, which itself was a commentary on a reply by JohnMu at Google Webmaster Help.
Ironic as it may be, there’s a difference between this writing and total content duplication. As anyone who knows anything about search engine optimization knows, the search engines don’t like duplicate content. Giving the same story a different spin, adding your own opinion, retelling it in a new way, these are all well and good. Hey, “Avatar” was a smash hit, and we had already seen the same story told to us, except with better lead actors in Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, and Mel Gibson.
With so many people preaching, yelling, and screaming about the essential need for unique content in ranking well, why are there so many legitimate websites knowingly syndicating content? Then they wonder why they can’t rank well for some things!
I’m talking about e-commerce websites. How many times do we need to see the same description for the same utility cart repeated and repeated again? According to Google, apparently somewhere around 17,000 is enough for right now. Is it any wonder that small ecommerce websites don’t rank well in the search results against giants like Amazon, Walmart, and in this case Home Depot?
Creating unique product descriptions can be one of the easiest methods that small e-commerce websites can put up a fight. This doesn’t have to be the job of the SEO. Maybe the client has the man power to go through their catalog themselves to author this content. If not, perhaps outsourcing it to a content creation company is enough. Sure, with thousands of products this is no easy task.
However, according to this latest statement from a Googler, it might only take 1 or 2 sentences to make the content unique. If I were trying to make a living selling products online, I would find the time and manpower necessary to make my content stand out against the thousands or millions of duplications. That might be all that is needed to bump up those products for some important long tail searches.