How do you make product pages unique when there are thousands of products?

[Ria_]

When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each?

Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail?

Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing...

Notes:

• Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page.
• There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.

[EGOL]

take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each?

If your website is already up and running this is a way to prioritize which pages to do first.

Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing...

We have thousands of product pages.  All of our product pages have at least 100 words of unique content and at least one photo that we have taken at our office.  Most product pages have a few hundred words of unique content.

When a new product arrives, I take one to my office and write a page about it.  A lot of what we sell is unique tools suited for a specific industry and I write what this tool is used for, how it is used, how to select it.  If you are selling something, you should be able to explain it easily to people.  That is what we believe.

Our better selling products have 500 to 1000 words of unique content plus multiple photos.  As we receive email questions from potential customers we often add them to the product description.  We intentionally write information about characteristics of products that have resulted in a return.  We believe that it is better to kill a few sales than accept a return, especially if the return comes back in less than brand new condition.

Our best selling products usually have the same description described above PLUS one or two separate article pages about how to select the product, how to use, how to maintain, how to repair.  If the tool us used for a specific type of work we often have articles about that type of work.  As an example, if we sell kitchen knives we might have articles about how to slice vegetables, hot to slice meat.

Our retail websites have more pages of content about the products that we sell and the activities that they are used in than they have product pages.  These article pages pull in more traffic than product pages and we make money from ads that are displayed on those pages.  About 1/3 of our sales arrive at our site through a content page, about 1/3 arrive on a product pages and 1/3 are people who directly navigate to the website.

Content is the strategy for producing all of our income.  Our retail sites have large content libraries and our information sites have small stores.  All pages display ads, even product pages, but ads from our direct competitors are usually blocked.

We are very careful about the products that we sell.  We only sell products that we know enough about to write substantive content.  We only sell products that will be around for a while.  We can't justify writing content for temporary products.  If we have a new product that we are uncertain about we write a short description, then after we have sold a number of them we get right to work on substantive content,  that usually increases the sales because the rankings go up and more long tail traffic arrives.

None of this was built overnight.  It has taken years.  It has been built a few products at a time, a few pages each time we add new products.  We are a small three person company with 1.5 people working to service sales and 1.5 working on content.  We work on content every day, every day, every day.  Content is the focus, sales occur as they occur.

[Ria_]

This is an amazing answer (if there was an option to mark it as such, I would have). Thank you.

You, sir/madam, are a machine and I'm not surprised this has taken you years. Unfortunately, I don't work in-house for this particular ecommerce site so I only have a few hours a month to work on this. The site's been around for a few years, the physical department store itself over a century, and I've only been working on it for over a year. There's over 10,000 product pages split across hundreds of categories and there are hundreds of separate landing pages based on brand, range, designer, sets, etc (I've been culling a lot of these...).

The vast majority of products contain duplicate descriptions across the whole brand range, so I've mainly been getting rid of those to strengthen the category page so that there's not dozens to hundreds of duplicate paragraphs shared with the category page. But the product pages look so bare with what's left of the description.

I think I'll take a leaf from your book though and go through the most popular categories, aiming for 100 words per product. With smaller ecommerce sites, this would seem obvious to me, but I just wasn't sure whether time could be better spent elsewhere with a larger site.

[Jioewbvu]

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[Njnbiure45r4]

you can try any page editor plugin if you are using WordPress CMS.  It's easy to use them to make the product design. You can see here some samples of product design.