Over the years, we have had the privilege of visiting, evaluating and even using many, many different types of e-commerce websites, as I am sure you have as well.
Here’s a little insider information for you: e-commerce websites have a terrible failure rate.
Every year perhaps THOUSANDS of them start up, but very, very few ever succeed at rising to the top of their niche, to become a real powerhouse (or even to a level where they produce enough income where they become profitable to operate).
Why such a high failure rate? Obviously, many of these sites fail because the site owners don’t really put much of an effort into marketing their business properly – they think it is as simple as putting up their site and then the traffic (and $$$$) will just roll in. Ain’t going to happen.
Maybe you might be surprised to find out that one of the main reasons e-commerce websites fail is because of content – the content of the pages on their site – especially pages that contain product descriptions.
How Duplicate Content Affects The Perceived Value/Importance of Your e-Commerce Website
One of the things we know about search engines and how they rank sites (because they have told us) is that they try to evaluate, in general terms, how valuable your site is: Are you offering site visitors a superior “user experience?”
With particular reference to e-commerce websites, this means that you should have an easy-to-use navigation experience and it should be easy for a site visitor to actually make a transaction on your e-comm site. They should not “get lost” in the checkout process and it should be intuitively obvious where to go to do various tasks (such as save credit card information on file, view past orders, communicate with support staff about an order or product questions, etc.).
But another critical element has to do with CONTENT.
And with e-commerce websites, this especially means product description content.
Unfortunately, some e-comm “solutions” are not really helpful solutions at all. Typically, when setting these sites up, product description wording will be pulled from another source, such as Amazon product descriptions. This saves you time and the admittedly tedious chore of writing your own product descriptions.
But what about others also setting up an e-comm site who are offering those same products?
What if their turnkey installation does the same thing (pulling the product descriptions from the same source)? That’s right, you guessed it: all of these sites will be seen – by site visitors and especially by search engines – as having duplicate content along with all the other sites offering the same product with the same description.
If your e-comm site product descriptions are just the same descriptions as found on hundreds, or even thousands, of other sites, then in the eyes of the search engines there is nothing special about all these sites, no unique value.
And the search engines will NEVER rank such a site highly. Why should they, if you think about it?
How to Identify – And Fix – The Problem of e-Commerce Duplicate Product Descriptions
Does your e-commerce website suffer from this problem? Most likely it does.
You can do some testing of a few pages: Simply copy about 30 words of text and paste that text into Google and see if there are other sites that have that exact wording (or very closely worded text) along with yours.
If so, then you have a problem with duplicate content — and if you see sites with the same wording ranking above your site in the SERP’s, you have a major issue on your hands, because when sites outrank you, that means that the search engines value them more than your site, or consider those pages more relevant to the search being performed.
If you need a more comprehensive solution, to carefully examine hundreds or thousands of pages for duplicate content, you can use one of the many tools out there, like SEMRush and Siteliner. You can even submit website information to Copyscape to get detailed information on exactly what wording is duplicated. They will analyze your site and help you to pinpoint the webpages with duplicate product descriptions (or any other duplicate content, for that matter).
I Know My Site Has a Dupe Content Problem – I Know What Needs Fixed – But How to Fix It?
It’s easy — just rewrite your product descriptions so that you have 100% unique wording.
Well, it’s really not so easy… Who has the time to rewrite product descriptions? And it can get pretty tedious to sit in front of your computer, for hours at a time, rewriting description after description.
Why, you’d need your own personal army of writers to get this done in any sort of reasonable timeframe.
This is where a content service can come in to play – especially one that makes use, exclusively, of ALL U.S. based writers. And that would be us!
Think the cost is prohibitive? Here’s what we recommend – start with your most visible pages, the most important pages where you are trying to get traffic – and get those product descriptions rewritten to make them unique. Make whatever content orders that you can, when you can, in line with your available budget.
Over a course of weeks and months, you can totally change your page content offerings on a lot of pages. At Articlez.com, all of our content writing must pass a Copyscape check (to make sure it is 100% unique wording) as well as a human review, so you are guaranteed that our writing will eliminate the duplicate content issue. Later on, you can work on the pages of less importance.
And as you replace your e-commerce website’s duplicate content product descriptions, eventually the search engines will notice and can reward you with higher rankings – which can translate into more traffic and sales.
Here’s the important takeaway: If you own an e-commerce website and you have duplicate content issues (especially with product descriptions, which are the “heart” of your website) then you need to get those rewritten before you can ever hope to rank well.
Don’t put this off any longer — let us do some kick-ass writing to take your webpage content to a new level – not to mention your rankings!
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