Create scannable product descriptions

Massive walls of text have never been a good thing online.

Even websites with the express purpose of reading (e.g. The Atlantic, New Yorker) break up their text with paragraphs, images, visual aids, and videos. (And ads but we're not getting into that here)

Avoiding those walls of text on your product pages will be important for your conversion rates. If someone gets tired or bored reading your description, they'll bounce and go somewhere else.

Draft, then break-up

The best way to make your text scannable is to draft a whole bunch of text first.

Get everything out. All your ideas, the product specifications, sales copy, whatever you have. Don't worry about it making sense, writing too long or organizing it to start.

Then once it's all "on paper", rework the content to make it scannable.

Throw away things that don't fit, combine similar ideas, split paragraphs or even sentences apart.

Having a lot of raw material to work with will make it easier to find the good parts you want to keep.

Scannable Techniques

The first technique is to look at all your content at a high level. How long is each piece, visually? Forget the five sentences to a paragraph rule, think three to four lines. That's about 30-40 words per paragraph. You're writing digestible content, not a novel.

Another technique is to give the readers a break visually after each paragraph. That can be few empty lines, a short fancy line, an image, or anything else that gives space around the paragraph.

Make sure whatever you use to break up the text isn't too tall. You want to be able to see the next paragraph easily, otherwise the reader might think the writing is done.

A third technique that works very well is to use short paragraphs, like this one.

For things like product specifications, putting them into a table or list can break out the wall of text. This is especially useful if your variants vary by length or height as examples. One table can make it easy to compare them all in a readable way, instead of writing out 32" long vs 36" long vs 44" long. Not to mention, using tables can be great for SEO.

Whenever the subject changes, add a descriptive header. Even if there's only a paragraph or two of text under each, headers can help readers to easily skim until they find what they want.

Never finished

Remember you can always come back and add to product descriptions. They aren't printed permanently on the page. You can change them.

Adding more content to your best products should be a regular process you do. Each time you do it, see if there's anything you can do to make the new and old content more scannable. Even small things like adding a header or bolding a key sentence can boost readability over time.

By making your product descriptions scanable and broken-up, that's how you get the content search engines are looking for without boring the shit out of your readers.