How to Transform Your Catalog Copy to SEO Copy

When it comes to online catalog copy, it’s not in your best interest to simply copy and paste your print catalog onto your online catalog’s Web site. Print catalogers know that short, punchy descriptions of multiple products per page are what increase the ROI of catalog printing, but those short descriptions won’t help you with SEO copy on your online catalog site. Search engines like Google “crawl” Web sites to find relevant information and the sites that are most relevant to a search go to the top of the list. The top is where you need to be if you want to have a good click-thru rate.

You can use your print catalog copy on your Web site – you just have to tweak it a bit to make it SEO-friendly.

Two Markets, One SEO Strategy
You are trying to reach two markets with SEO strategy: those who are ready to make a purchase now and those who are still researching. You must develop a content strategy that satisfies both camps to drive targeted traffic to your Web site at each stage of the buying process.

Your Landing Page Copy
Instead of creating a new mini-site for each product, you can create a pay-per-click landing page for each product that is connected to the rest of your online catalog site. The copy you write for a landing page that is SEO-friendly and puts you at the top of the search results can also be used as a pay-per-click landing page. This gives you double the visibility on the search results list. So how do you create an effective landing page?
Follow these tips:

Focus your keywords for each product
Consumers and business buyers use search phrases to find your products and some search phrases are used more than others. The key to getting a good SEO ranking at the top of the search results list is to figure out what people are searching for most. You can use industry tools like WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com) to help you determine which keywords and search phrases are most popular for your specific product or your industry.

Then you include two to three keywords or search phrases in each page of your Web site and repeat each word or phrases two to three times. Choose words that are general and specific to your product.

Write longer product descriptions
In print catalogs you only have a little space to write a product description. For online catalogs, each product should have its own page which means you have room to go into detail about each product. Longer product descriptions work better with SEO than shorter descriptions. Try to make your product descriptions at least 200 words and sprinkle in two to three keywords repeated as much as possible (with a limit of three repeats each) to make your product page flow well and so that your keywords don’t stick out and disrupt the flow of the text.

Repeat your company’s benefits on each product page
Since each product page is acting like a separate landing page, you need to let customers know about your company’s benefits and other offerings to motivate people to click thru to the rest of your catalog. Include a short paragraph about what makes you different from your competitors and feature whatever kind of sale or deal (like free shipping) you have going on at the time on each page.

Create a distinctive title for each product page
If each page of your online catalog has the same title, e.g. “Our Catalog” instead of a distinctive title describing what’s on the page, your search results will suffer. The page title is what people click on from the search engine’s list, so the more specific you can be, the better. Include a keyword or search phrase in your page title and you’ll move up even higher on the list.