The ultimate guide to handmade product shop descriptions

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There is not much point in having the most beautiful handmade products if nobody finds your online shop. So today, I want us to focus on how to improve your product descriptions, so that your website is found by search engines.

For those of you automatically thinking, but ‘I write my descriptions for my customer, not for some google bot’, I’d say, if the search engine doesn’t find you, there won’t be many people reading your product description…

Getting your keywords and product description right is absolutely crucial, so here is how:

Research your keyword

Go back to previous module about titles, where you find how to effectively research your keywords.

Pick a string of 3-4 words that’s different to any other product you have (and different to the same product on other websites – if that’s your case). Don’t just copy and paste listings directly from other sites, because Google doesn’t like duplication. Tweak the copy and title to keep the content unique.

Use it as your product title, which will create your product url and meta tags. If this doesn’t happen automatically, make sure that your product url is the same string of keywords. Some website providers will have default settings, which might shorten your url or use a string of numbers instead. Make sure that you always change that, either in your shop options or within individual products.

Use the same keyword 2-3 times in product description. Weave it naturally to your description. If it helps write your description first and then see where you can add your keywords naturally.

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how your product is being found by search engines

Remember, Google is a bot and can’t mindread (or see your pictures), so if you want to be found, you need to have relevant words in your titles and descriptions. That’s what the search engines bots scan and look for.

Google’s job is to provide the best result for a particular search. It uses different criteria for doing that, not just the info it finds on the page, but where that page is (ie the authority of the domain) and the social shares, mentions and links that page has. So the more good quality links you have  pointing to your page, the more will Google like you.

Having a blog, being featured on other people’s blogs or being talked about on social media, this all helps to improve your ranking. Make your product (blog or website) is as shareable as possible – for example, if the photos are really good bloggers will be more likely to feature it and other people will be more likely to share it.

Another thing that might be worth noting is that individual product pages might not always rank as high as they used to. In its mission to return the most relevant results, Google is more likely to show a shop that has lots of items that meet a particular search than a single product page.

For example, if you have a collection of food styled jewellery in your online shop, that collection (or your entire shop or website) is likely to rank higher than a single piece of food styled jewellery in another shop or website (unless that has a lot more shares etc). So if you want Google to spot you, it’s worth thinking about your shop as a whole, and creating a collection of products with a running theme rather than just making lots of random items.

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What should a good product description include

In total about 250 words

Yes that’s quite a lot, but from what you have learned so far, do you recon that any search engine is going to detect your product if you have one sentence description? Keep the one-liners for jokes!

Include 3-4 times your product title

This needs to be naturally weaved in your text and at least one time it needs to be in your product summary. Don’t over do it, though. If it doesn’t look and feel right adding the main keyword in 3 or 4 times, use perhaps one or two words from the string of keywords.

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Product Summary

Summary of your product should be the first thing any potential customer sees. You have few seconds to convince any website visitor that your product is what they are looking for. They might not have the time to read the whole description and they might not even want to.

You only need to write a short summary of your product. One paragraph of around 160-170 characters is enough to summarise your product and point out the benefits to your potential customer.

The summary has another really important functionality. It creates your ‘meta description‘ for your product. This is created automatically by the website code. When people search for your product on google, this is what’s displayed under the search. Depending on your website provider or shop selling platform, you might also have an option to add your own meta descriptions to your SEO panel. This overrides the summary on page.  See below for more details.

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Unique content

This is absolutely crucial. Never ever use the same description that you used elsewhere.

If you have several shops on different websites, you can still have the same products in each shop, they just need to be called slightly differently (for your url and meta tags) and your descriptions need to be different.

How different is different? If you just swap words around or cut out a paragraph, that’s not enough. You need to start completely from beginning. 

Take it as a personal challenge – each website is likely to have a different audience, so one way of making your descriptions different is to write it in different tone aiming at different audience. Don’t worry about ‘duplicating’ the factual description of the product (such as measurements or ingredients). That’s perfectly fine.

In case you missed the ‘Why’ in the previous modules – if you have a duplicated content across several websites, google automatically assumes that it’s spam and not important and pushes all results for all pages lower in the search results.

If you want to have more exposure on several different websites, the only way to do this is to create a unique content for all of them. You might have been okay few years back, but now Google is really stomping down on this.

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Interesting description

Write clear, but interesting description of your product and how it can be used in your customer’s home. Paint the picture, get your potential customer to visualise what they can do with your product, how it’s going to help them, make them warm or solve a birthday gift problem.

People will often buy into what the product represents rather than the product itself. Let’s be honest, none of our handmade products are essential, people don’t need them for day to day survival. So we need to find another angle to make our handmade products indispensable.

Things like: Present so special that it can’t be found anywhere else. Traditional craft or product with modern twist. New innovative design. Your amazing story as an artist.

Don’t be disheartened if you find this difficult. It is…

There are people out there whose entire job is just to craft perfect e-commerce product descriptions. Just imagine you are talking to a very good friend and you are describing your favourite product to her/him.

What would you say first? How would it make them feel if they had your product? Are there eyes lighten up? Are they tilting their heads to listen more intently? Perfect! You got it!

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Practical information

Include the boring, but important stuff such as measurements, size, weight (if relevant) or colour. Once people are ‘sold’ and they know they want your product, they will also check the practical details. Is it going to fit into my dinning room? How quickly will it arrive?

Specialist Products (food or anything that is regulated) should have a list of ingredients, allergens, suitability for different types of people/ages, mention that product complies with certain legal requirement if it does (and it should…)

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How to update your product descriptions (Strategically!)

Existing products that sell

Don’t change the product title, even if it’s not quite right or too long (this would change the url and it would basically create a new listing – you want to keep the continuity on existing products)

Add the exact description of your products (or the most important part of the title if it’s too long) as a keyword into your product description.

Add product summary (or your meta description) – see below what happens if you don’t

Add the same words into your keywords list and add more to optimise the search within website

Make sure you use the maximum amount of categories, tags and gift finder categories (depending on your website or shop selling platform)

Review your description – if it was originally cut & pasted – rewrite it completely. Don’t just change words within the existing descriptions, because if it was cut & pasted from elsewhere it caries extra code (that you can’t see, but search engines can) which is often confusing and adds extra clutter (into the website code) that you don’t need. It also makes the search more difficult for the search engines, because they need to hunt down the right piece of information in between all the code.

Top up your product description to about 250 words

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Existing products that never sold

This depends – you might decide to follow the instructions above and optimise the product first and see whether that might help to bring the product up a bit.

You need to consider if you have any links going to that products (either on your website, social media or anywhere else). If you change your url (= your title) the previous product link is going to disappear.  You probably don’t want that if you have scheduled tweets coming out or links on other peoples’ websites (unless you remember to change all of these and contact people with the new link).

Google likes old trusty pages, so even if your product has never sold, but it has been on the website for considerable time (6 months or more) it might be worth just optimising the product description, adding summary and keywords.

Or if you’ve only just listed the product and it’s fairly new, you might choose to research your keywords properly and change your products gradually.

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New Products

  • Research your keywords
  • Use unique description
  • Add summary
  • Optimise your product page (follow the summary on the top of this page)

If you are selling on a large marketplace website, you might be thinking ‘There are too many shops selling the same product, I can never be found!

The good news is that every shop, every product is competing just with themselves! Most website traffic (people to you & me…) doesn’t come to home page first and then choses where they want to go next, they land on a page or product that’s the closest to whatever they searched for.

I often find that the main website home page gets only 18% of all traffic. It’s still the most traffic that a single page had, but the rest of the website traffic is usually divided between all the different pages. If you check your own website analytics I’m sure you’ll find similar numbers.

After the home page, the biggest website traffic comes to our blog. Why? Probably because people want to read about the product and get inspired before they buy.

But going back to your own shop – you are only competing with the search engines, not anyone else! Get your keywords right, get your descriptions right and get your on-line marketing up and running and you have much better chance of getting that important sale.

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What is meta description?

Meta description is created automatically from your product page first 160-170 characters. It’s displayed automatically when people search for your product (see picture below).

Meta Description is crucial for traffic conversion. Is your description tantalising enough for people to click through and actually go to your shop page? Does it give them the answer they are looking for?

A good meta description (in our case product summary) should include your product title and any other relevant keywords that you think might help to convert the traffic.

When people search for ‘personalised gifts’ and you happen to have that in your summary, those words get highlighted in bold. This sends a direct message to the potential customer: ‘My search is matched by this result – it is what I’m looking for’

And that’s how you get a click!

And a sale!

P.S The example below shows summary description (and product description) that could easily be improved. Have a close look at how it is displayed in google search. It looks a bit clumsy and on it’s own doesn’t make much sense to a potential customer who is just looking for a personalised gift. You can control how this snippet of information is displayed, if you stick to 160-170 characters and have your summary as a separate paragraph (first one of course!)

Depending on your website platform, you might be able to override the automatic summary, that’s displayed by search engines by adding your summary to ‘Meta Description’ to your SEO panel (or Meta Info panel in your product).

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Advanced tip:

If your website platform allows you to use your Meta Description separately, it might be worth using it in more strategic way. You can amend the Meta Description as often as you want, so if you are running a special deal or promotion you could add this to your Meta Description without changing the actual product description.

For instance, you have a product that could be easily bought as a gift for Mother’s Day, Valentines Day or as a present for a grandmother. Now, you can have that in your product description, but it sounds rather long winded.

Plus if it’s autumn and a potential customer views this product, he or she will be slightly puzzled why you are suggesting he (let’s decide it’s HE) should not buy it now and wait until Mother’s Day. 

But if you change your Meta Description depending on the season, your potential customer will not only click through when they are searching for a Mother’s Day gift, but also buy, because you are not trying to tell them it’s also good for Xmas.

And just to clarify

Meta Descriptions (if added to your website separately) are not directly used by search engines to find you. It’s the content on the page that does that. But once displayed on search result page, it’s the Meta Description that convinces (or not!) people to click. That’s why it’s as important to get it right as on page keyword optimization.

Originally written on 9 August 2015 and last updated on 9 June 2025