My Reasons For Keeping Bulk Text On Product Pages

So, DistilledODN did a study the other day on how effective it would be to remove SEO text that is below the fold (you have to scroll to see it) on your product pages.

Now, there was no definitive answer to this question and their recommendation was to test it for yourself and see.

Here’s a snippet and quote from Jon Muller (Google) below:

“Many e-commerce websites optimize their categories by adding a big chunk of text under the product listings. Nothing except an h1 heading above the fold. I don’t consider this good usability since users need to scroll all the way down to read this. Does Google treat this content the same as any other or would you for improving rankings recommend putting the category text above the fold?”

“From our point of view, that’s essentially keyword stuffing. So that’s something…which I would try to avoid”.

“I’d try to stick to really informative content and put that in place where you think that users will be able to see it. Especially if it is content that you want to provide for users. And more than that I would think about what you can do to make those pages rank well without having to put a giant paragraph of content below the page”.

“Fair enough,” I say.

However, from personal experience and following a flexible content marketing strategy. I only see 100% upside to having a bulk of RELEVANT AND USEFUL text below the fold on your pages.

Studying the heat map results on our product pages, I can see that a percentage of our customers do read this content.

Also – Our customer service teams have the ability to point customers in the right direction to answer a question or query and can also copy and paste this text into email answers to customers.

SEO WISE – I think having “relevant” and “useful” content on any page has to be encouraged, I think. The more relevant the content, the more useful it is in the search results.

Do your product pages have a lot of text content?

Is it right to have so much on a product page, or is it just overkill?

Let me know your thoughts. 👇

Summary