Product descriptions play a key role in the consumer journey on eCommerce websites, helping users choose the ideal products for their needs. They also play an important role in SEO, providing search engines like Google with the information they need to rank web pages in organic search.
Creating unique, eye-catching product descriptions can be a challenge, especially for companies that tend to sell the same products online, as this leads to the existence of a large volume of similar products in the online market place, providing so many different options to the consumers. For the translation of each product description into multiple languages, a hefty workload is often required, alongside a number of translation and SEO challenges to deal with.
The challenges of translating product descriptions
There are several challenges with translating product descriptions that companies often need to overcome when running a multilingual eCommerce website:
- Volume: Translating product descriptions multiplies the volume of work required to produce a full range of product pages.
- Duplicate content: Every product description should be unique to avoid issues with duplicate content. It should be both unique from descriptions on other websites where similar products are sold and also from other descriptions on the same business’ website.
- Similar products: producing unique product descriptions for every single item you sell is difficult when selling a lot of similar products.
- Search engines: Search engines can quickly detect duplicate content if a company just simply runs product descriptions through a machine translation tool.
- Keywords: Consumers in different language markets may use different keywords to find the same product (translating keywords often fails).
- Content delivery: a reliable content delivery system that directs site visitors to product pages in the right language is necessary for businesses selling products online.
The volume challenge is true for producing product descriptions, even only in one language. Once eCommerce businesses start translating product descriptions, they’ve got a serious project on their hands and the volume issue returns whenever there is a need to add new product ranges or update the content on existing pages.
To make this manageable, an effective translation process is needed, capable of producing multilingual product pages quickly.
How to translate product descriptions the right way
The first thing to avoid is relying on website builders that claim to include automated translation features that translate product pages for you. The translation technology these website builders use is not capable of delivering accurate translation or producing quality and powerful product descriptions that are optimised for search in multiple languages.
Using this type of quick translation solutions and tools is not good for search engines and conversion rates so we advise avoiding them for the translation of product descriptions for online shops.
Instead, working with a translation agency with proven expertise and the required tech for translating eCommerce websites, which includes product descriptions, is the key to the delivery of powerful product descriptions that help businesses stand out from their competition.
At translate plus, and depending on our clients’ request, we use a mix of automatic translation and human translation and review to help our customers translate product descriptions for their online shops. The automatic translation technology helps produce instant translations that serve as good working drafts and then our linguists review these to correct any issues or ‘robotic language’. This is to ensure the descriptions are appealing, make sense and are good for publishing.
If you need any help with translating product descriptions on your eCommerce website or managing any other aspects of your online store, submit your request by filling out the form on our contact page and one of our consultants will get back to you.