A great product description serves a few different purposes.  First, a description rich in keywords gets your product discovered when a customer searches for those keywords.  Second, a quality product description will tell the buyer exactly what they’re buying, so there’s no surprises after the sale.  Keep reading for more details!

How to Write A Quality Product Description

Use Keywords in Your Product Description

Use Multiple Keywords

When you write your product description, include as many keywords as you can.  Here’s an example from my top selling product, titled “Physical Activity Cards”:

These physical activity task cards feature 40 different exercise moves to get students moving and stretching! These cards are fantastic for brain breaks, indoor recess, independent or group play. Use of these cards will encourage students as they learn self-control and following directions, as well as large motor skills such as balance and flexibility.

See how many keywords are in there?!

It’s important to use synonyms instead of repeating the same phrase or word over and over.  If I chose to write “physical activities” instead of “exercise moves” again in the first sentence, I’d miss out on anyone searching for “exercise.”  Try to switch it up and use different versions of words to include a bunch of different keywords.

But Don’t Keyword Stuff

Keep your description natural sounding.  Though you want to include multiple keywords, you don’t want to sound ridiculous.  Take a look at how I could have written my description:

These physical activity task cards feature 40 different physical activity moves to get students moving and stretching! These cards are fantastic for any type of physical activity like brain breaks, indoor recess, independent physical activities or group physical activities. Use of these physical activity cards will encourage students as they learn self-control and following directions, as well as physical activity skills such as balance and flexibility.

Whew!  Annoying, right?  Not only do real people not want to read descriptions like this, neither do search robots.  These types of sentences will actually hurt you in the search results.  When TpT started, more instances of a keyword could put your product higher in the search rank.  Now, TpT has realized that some buyers were “keyword stuffing” and changed the search algorithm.

So, keep it real, please!  Here’s the forum post from TpT’s admins that explains why keyword stuffing doesn’t work.

Long Tail Keywords

Something to keep in mind as you’re writing your descriptions are that keywords aren’t always one word.  Sometimes using a longer phrase or group of keywords can get you better results.  Someone searching on Pinterest for brain breaks might be looking for a video or game.  But if the buyer is looking for physical activity cards (more specific phrase), then chances are great that they’ll find my product.

For example, if you search TpT for “exercise cards,” my product is buried in the search results somewhere.

But when you search for “physical activity cards,” my product is the first in the search ranking.

Here’s a great article explaining why long tail keywords are important and how they work.  Try to keep these in mind as you title your product, too.  As you can see, naming my product “exercise cards” might affect it’s search rank.

Tell About Your Product

Be Specific

You need to tell your buyer exactly what they are buying.  If you don’t, sooner or later someone is going to call you out on it and leave you a bad review.  Here’s an example:

If I didn’t specify that this product included 31 different notebook pages, a buyer would think it included 70 different pages.  In reality, there’s 31 different pages, a black and white set, a color set, and some extra covers and “how to use” pages.  Be specific.

Also, be specific about what type of file your product is.  Usually this will show up under the subject, grade level, and resource type.  But if you upload a zip file, like I did with this notebook, the buyer won’t know what type of file they will be downloading unless you tell them.

Give Ideas for Using Your Product

A buyer might be interested in your product, but not see the real value in it until you tell them.  So tell them how they can use this product in their classroom, or what problem it will solve for them.  Here’s mine for my Preschool Science Notebook:

“This bundle is designed to be spread out over the course of the school year. Use one printable for each unit or topic that you teach. Each title below relates to one notebook page. Each page is included in both color and black and white versions.

Keep in mind that this notebook is designed with preschool and kindergarten in mind. Therefore, the simplicity of the pages are intentional. There are no flip-flaps or complicated cutting required – I have found these to be too difficult for my preschoolers to handle independently.

The majority of these notebook pages are simple squares and rectangles. If you are using a composition book or similar notebook, you will probably need to use a 2 page spread for most of these pages. If you are using construction paper, you may be able to fit them onto one page.

Most of the pages are simple sorting exercises. Some of the pages are puzzles or have text included that you may have to help your students to decipher which picture needs placed where.

You could very easily adapt these pages for science centers, as well. Simply cut and laminate the sorting cards and place next to baskets for sorting.”

Formatting

Text with lines between them are much easier to read than a long paragraph of text.  You’ll notice on any popular blog that there’s never more than 3 or so sentences in a paragraph.  Try to break up your product descriptions the same way, because it’s easier on the eyes and easier to scan.

Bold font is a great way to call attention to important details.  Most people just skim, so emphasize with bold text to make the important parts stand out.  Try to avoid italics, which are harder to read.

• To make a text bold, just add this code around it: Normal text <strong>text you want bold</strong> normal text.
• To make a text underlined, use this code: Normal text <u>text you want underlined</u> normal text.
• To make a text italic, use this code: Normal text <i>text you want italic</i> normal text.

Separate parts of your description with a series of ***** or ——-

Bullets and lists also make descriptions much easier to read.  I like to list the pages of my products so buyers can see exactly what topics are covered.

Use the code <li> to make a bullet before your item.

You can also use these symbols instead of a circle bullet:

&rarr; Rightwards arrow →

&hearts; Heart ♥

&diams; Diamond ♦

&#9733; Star ★

 

Advertise

Self-advertising is always a good idea because someone looking at one of your products might be interested in more!  Learn how to add a link to other products at the bottom of your description, and invite buyers to follow your store.

• Here’s how to make a link!  Use this code: <a href=”yourproducturl“>Your Product Title</a>.  Find your product URL by going to your product and copying the full www.teacherspayteachers.com code in your browser bar.  This will be different for every product.

So for my Preschool Science Notebook, here’s how I do a link: <a href=”https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Science-Interactive-Notebook-for-Preschool-and-Kindergarten-3025403″>Preschool and Kindergarten Science Interactive Notebook</a>.  It will show up like this in my description: Preschool and Kindergarten Science Interactive Notebook

Example from the bottom of my product description:

So what do you want to learn next? Or what questions do you have about creating resources for Tpt?  Comment below and let me know!