Is boilerplate content ok for SEO

A Shopify merchant was asking:

In my product description, I have unique text as the title, and 1-2 sentences with keywords. But everything else is boilerplate language such as materials, dimensions, and shipping for all my products. That is almost always exactly the same.

Does the boilerplate language hurt my SEO? And is there a better way to do this?

Content that has been duplicated elsewhere on your store or on the Internet isn't as valuable as unique content. Meaning if every product has the same boilerplate text, that text won't hurt or help you at all with SEO.

Google's algorithm will decide which product URL owns that text and that URL gets credit for it. The rest of the pages don't get any credit at all. It's like the text doesn't exist on those pages.

There's no negative impact to it though. Like those 99 other pages won't drop in rankings if you add that boilerplate. They just don't get any positive benefits from the boilerplate text.

One tricky bit is this isn't limited to your domain.

If you have three stores, each with the same product description, then two of those will be considered duplicates and won't get any credit. We just don't know which one Google counts as the "owner" and which one Google will ignore.

This is why taking a vendor's published product description is a bad idea. You'll likely be considered the duplicate and the description won't count for anything. Doubly so for dropship products where there might be dozens of other stores using that description already.

Remember, not everything is about SEO.

Boilerplate language can be important for customers. If it describes your store policies or is a universal description of your product's materials, that will be valuable information customers will want to know. So don't worry about including boilerplate content. Consider it as filler that doesn't count towards your SEO.

Going back to the original question, it's clear their SEO isn't working as well as they'd like, hence their worry about the content. They are right to worry, not because of the boilerplate, but potentially from the rest of their content.

By their example, the only unique things on a product is the title, 1-2 sentences, and probably some images. That's nowhere near enough unique content for the page to rank.

It might even struggle to be indexed by Google.

They should try to add more unique content to the product page. Ideally every product page should have 200-300+ words of a product description though there is no hard and fast rule.

Adding more content might seem difficult but it's actually one of the most effective ways to improve your SEO on Shopify.