How do I manage my organic SEO efforts with multiple product descriptions/specifications???

[robmarr789]

Good Evening MOZ community

I am currently working on a website my company has just launched. I am in charge of the entire commercial side of the business from pricing to brand management including all elements of digital marketing.

First of all I should make it clear I am by no means an SEO expert. However I appreciate the importance of organic search and particularly on page optimization and no I need to build it into our site from the onset.

My problem lies in that our website stocks roughly 2000 individual products (Tools and Engineering products) and I am struggling to overcome the following;

1. I do not have the time or resource to re-write original product descriptions and specifications for 2000+ products

2. How can I create healthy on page SEO without having to do this? (we are not able to provide budget to outsource these efforts at the moment) Will copying manufacturer descriptions cripple our SEO

3. Many product specifications need to be displayed exactly as they would on the original manufacturer websites. How can I include exact copies of these without being penalized by google for duplicating content?

Essentially I realise the importance of on page SEO and want to build it into the site for the future but need to find a way of optimizing it with minimal time.

I understand much of this is a big ask but any hints or tips you may have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Rob

[TakeshiYoung]

If you can add additional content to your product pages that add value to them, that would be ideal. The most obvious is product reviews. By having reviews on your product, you can add tons of unique content to your pages and you can get your customers to do it for you! You can incentivize your customers to write reviews by offering discount coupons or similar.

Other things you can add are things like videos, ingredients, how tos, faqs, usage info, etc. Just overall more content to flesh out your product pages. If you can't tackle all 2,000 pages at once, start by identifying your highest revenue pages and the pages that are within striking distance in Google (positions 5-15) and see if you can bump those up with a little more content.

[robmarr789]

Thanks Takeshi,

Some useful insights there which we are looking to implement into our strategy. On the more technical side, is there a way of discounting copied information (specs etc) from our searchable content so that we are not penalized by Google for duplicating content?