Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 15/05/2026

E-commerce businesses today have to juggle many balls at once. This means that the marketing teams need to optimise the product descriptions not just for search engines such as Google but also for AI-powered platforms.

Therefore, businesses, especially e-commerce businesses, now want to appear as citations and direct answers across everything from Google AI Overviews to Perplexity.

Google AI Overviews and the AI platforms

Whether it’s ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or, say, Perplexity, the systems need to cite an answer they have obtained from a product description. Therefore, these systems are simply pulling answers directly from pages on an e-commerce website.

However, here’s the problem: with any one product, there are often hundreds of suppliers. Therefore, this is what makes it so difficult for a business to be cited as an answer, because the product description and the page must be deemed as the best answer.

Are traditional/organic SEO ranking factors still important?

The short answer to that question is a resounding yes. We would say that one of the common mistakes that digital marketing agencies are making at the moment is thinking that GEO and AI optimisation are completely different from SEO. They are not worlds apart, as you might think; they are actually more closely aligned.

Here are the similarities between GEO and SEO

• Content marketing quality matters
• Having a strong backlink profile is important, with many backlinks and a high DA score.
• Helpful content is important
• Not having duplicated text is important
• Eliminate and seek to improve content-thin pages
• Consider Google EEAT and implement this on each page to improve GEO and SEO scores.

What are the main benefits of writing strong product descriptions?

Improve rankings

So many businesses copy and paste product descriptions, which leads to lower rankings. Each page should be unique; yes, rewriting and optimising product descriptions is massively time-consuming.

However, if your business is competing with, say, 10 other direct competitors on Google. Let’s say all of these competitors have copied and pasted the same product descriptions, then how does Google know which page is worth ranking higher?

However, if another business writes a well-written, unique, more helpful product description, and the dwell time is much higher, then this page will rank higher. Google’s inbuilt AI, called RankBrain, will detect that the dwell times are high and therefore rank that e-commerce page higher.

Higher CTR

If, for example, the meta description is well written, then the click-through rate will improve. Equally, if, say, Google AI Overviews extracts a paragraph and cites it as an answer at the top of the page, then, if this is well written and helpful, it will again mean more people will click the link to read more.

Well-written and unique answers

Quite simply put, if you put the time and effort into writing helpful, well-written content, then the AI-generated answers, also known as the LLMs, are more likely to cite that work.

Can you tell us how to improve the ranking of our products on Google?

Search intent and Google EEAT

This brings us back to our previous point: think for a moment about how many competitors are selling that same product. Perhaps a few, perhaps on the other hand thousands.

Therefore, Google looks at all the companies selling a quality Henry Hoover and then decides which page to rank at the top of Google’s organic results. Now, this is determined by link equity, also known as authority, and by content marketing quality.

It is therefore essential to have a well-optimised page. This means writing beefy, well-written product descriptions. Yet it’s also about making sure the page is unique and stands out as offering a really good answer.

Why is having unique content marketing so important?

Googlebot reads millions of pages every single day.

Googlebot then has to decide, well, where do you rank that page, 1st in the index or say 77th?

Therefore, it comes down to content quality, basically, how well-written the answer is.

Now, if that page is an identical copy of another page, or thousands of other product descriptions, well, why would Google place it on page one of the organic results? The answer is duplicated; it’s never going to rank high.

This is why duplication is an issue; it’s why the best e-commerce retailers write their own unique and helpful product descriptions.

Improving the on-page SEO

Improving the on-page SEO is crucial; however, this can’t be over-optimised. If your writing is helpful advice, then naturally, the on-page SEO should be improved at the same time.

Therefore, the following should occur:

Optimised title tags

The title tags should instantly convey what the page is about. For example, if you’re selling diamond wedding rings, the title tags should state that.

Meta descriptions

The meta description is a short title followed by a description of what the page is selling. It should include relevant keywords and be well-written to improve CTR.

Image alt text

Optimising alt text is especially important for e-commerce SEO. The reason is that shoppers often know the exact product they want, such as a pair of Nike trainers.

They are therefore often just shopping around on price point alone. Therefore, adding this in the alt text helps Google understand what the product is. For example, if Googlebot crawls and indexes the alt text “Nike Air Force 1”, then Google knows what the page is about.

Internal links to related products

Internal links, quite simply, help Google understand your business. For example, if the majority of internal links point to products that sell formal men’s shoes, then Google’s algorithms will understand that it is one of the main products the business sells.

Therefore, internal links with accurate anchor text help Google’s algorithms and Googlebot understand what the main products or services the business sells are.

Structured Information

If the page is a jumbled mess of text, it will confuse not only the shopper but also Google’s algorithms about what the page is about.
Therefore, it’s best to use H1-H6 tags, plus bold titles, to split the text up. Use an FAQ-style format to better structure the page.

The first paragraph is crucial.

At the top of the page, the first paragraph is often the first thing read by the shopper and Googlebot. Therefore, you need to provide a very clear product description that states the benefits of choosing that product or service. This is what Googlebot reads, and the keywords in the opening text are often used to work out and decipher what the page is about.

Mobile optimisation

You must consider mobile optimisation, for example, if the bounce rate is particularly high on mobile devices, you do have to ask why.

What are some of the common mistakes that e-commerce businesses make in regards to their SEO?

Internal and external duplication

We have to say that a massive problem is that businesses are simply time pressured, and copy and paste too many product descriptions directly from the manufacturer. This means that Googlebot will have read potentially thousands of pages which have exact same chunks of text.

Therefore, it’s better to write unique product descriptions. If you write product descriptions that really help the customer to workout whether that product for them, by answering some commonly asked questions this can improve the U.X.
When you improve the U.X you’re increasing the dwell time and reducing the bounce rate.

Keyword stuffing

We understand that businesses want to sell more products as quickly as they possibly can. This is why so many businesses fall into the trap of “keyword stuffing” simply mentioning the keywords they want to appear on page one of Google for, but writing the text in a totally unnatural way.

What do we mean by unnatural?

Well, that’s simple, if you sell say BMW car turbos, you might state this excessively within say the header title, the product description, the alt text and lets say the anchor text throughout the entire site. This leads to an over optimisation issue, which can then mean that the organic rankings drop.

What does “content thin pages” mean?

This is another real problem that e-commerce businesses face.

That is they may not have the time or the marketing budget to write a well written product description. The result is potentially hundreds of “content thin” pages, which are pages, which don’t offer much helpful or useful advice. The end result is the customer struggles to understand what the product features and benefits are. Then also Googlebot can also struggle to decipher what the page is about.

Content decay

Another important factor to consider, is that the blog posts on your website often act as a landing page to the product pages. That’s if you have used internal links, therefore a top agency will know that articles, such as blog posts, the information can become outdated over time.
Marketing companies refer to this as the “content decay” therefore, it’s important to check back say every 6 months to make sure the information is up to date.

Why exactly are product descriptions an important part of GEO and SEO?

Quite simply put, if a business wants more organic traffic, or more sales via GEO, then you need well written product descriptions. As this article has mentioned, the text should be unique. We would also highly recommend that you read about Google EEAT.

It is true that it’s massively time-intensive to write product descriptions for each product. However, if you want that product to have the best chance of appearing high in the organic SERP’s, then you need to write the product descriptions, including the meta titles and descriptions, so that they are completely unique to your business.

By better optimising the product descriptions, will they appear as GEO answers?

If you better optimise the product descriptions, they stand a much better chance of appearing in say the Google AI Overview answers.

This means that the product descriptions must be:

• Unique
• Have a high Google EEAT score
• Have good quality backlinks leading to them
• Be well written
• Have a low bounce rate
• Have a high dwell time

Should we also be aiming to improve the U.X for the page as well?

Most definitely, you should write well written product descriptions. However, this is where writing well written product descriptions can help your businesses marketing in multiple different ways.

For example, writing a well written product description can help improve your organic search engine optimisation. The reason being is, Google’s algorithm and Google’s Knowledge Graph can better understand the page. But also, it’s helpful to the customer if the product description is well written, the customer will spend longer on the page if the information is helpful.

This will help to improve dwell times and lower the e-commerce websites bounce rate.

 

Who is Ryan Walsh and why hire Walsh and Partners?

Walsh and Partner have leading SEO consultants who can help your e-commerce business to generate more sales.