Cookie cutter, boilerplate, scraped, copied... whatever you call it, ecommerce content provided by manufacturers and suppliers has been regurgitated all over the Internet. Using this copied text means that your search engine rankings could be suffering, your conversion rate could certainly be improved, and your profits are ultimately suffering.
An ecommerce site, though, has huge content potential. Product and category pages, reviews and video reviews, direct and group comparisons, whitepapers, buying guides, and blogs are just some of the types of content that could be used to introduce niche and longtail keywords.
This content can attract highly targeted visitors, be optimised to convert, and can even help retain those visitors that have already made a purchase - keeping them coming back to make more and more purchases while sharing your website with others that have similar interests.
Do It For The Rankings
Google goes to great pains to extol the virtues of unique content. They give greater credence to those pages that have content that cannot be found elsewhere, whereas they bury sites with heavily copied content. There is a good chance that the manufacturer has already published the scraped content you are using, not to mention the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of websites that have also used it.
Rewriting the product descriptions and other content provided by the manufacturer not only means that you have unique content. The unique content you use will naturally include more niche and long-tail keywords, especially if you follow a sound content strategy.
Do It For Your Visitors
Manufacturer content offers the basic facts about products. Even a creative and imaginative description's value becomes diluted once it is posted all over the Internet. Leads lose interest in the content once they see that it is repeated on every competitor's site, which means a drop in conversion rates as well as lower search engine rankings.
Providing unique and informative ecommerce content, offering a variety of content types like buyers' guides and reviews, while also optimising the pages for best results, means that your website could bypass this content blindness and encourage more sales. You will be rewarded for your efforts by your visitors.
Do It For Yourself
Copied content, then, typically means less search engine traffic and a lower conversion rate than high quality and unique content. What's more, there is massive potential to publish virtual reams of content, all of which can be used to attract fresh visitors to your website.
Niche And Longtail Keyword Inclusion
Every page of unique content will include longtail keywords, and writing fresh content for individual products and categories gives you the opportunity to optimise for niche keywords too. Niche and longtail keywords naturally have less competition, and because you are using content that isn't already plastered on numerous other web pages, it means that there is less content competition online.
Increase Brand Awareness - YOUR Brand Awareness
If you are in the same sector, or the same market, as hundreds or thousands of other etailers, then it is your brand that is going to help you stand out. By using manufacturer content, you are not promoting your own brand but are only serving to help reinforce the manufacturer's brand in the mind of your potential leads.
Writing original content for your site means that you can instill your own voice, add your own CTAs, and generally promote your own brand. Incorporate some effective Calls To Action and you could have a site for your competitors to envy.
Authoritative Descriptions
The more you write, or the more unique content you include, the greater the chance of keeping visitors on your site. Include lead capture forms, such as a regular newsletter subscription page or a discount offer, and you could have the beginning of a highly powerful list of motivated hot leads that are ready to be nurtured and converted into customers at a later date.