I got emailed a question about the content a supplier - dropshipper gives you, and how you should go about using it. I thought I had been hitting this subject hard lately with a few of my posts, but I feel it's a good time to talk about it once again. Here is the question that was emailed to me:
I heard it's not a good idea to copy exactly what the supplier says. why not? what should I write?
Whoever you heard this from is telling you the right information. You never want to copy any kind of text your supplier is giving you. This includes website content, product descriptions, or image descriptions. I have seen some suppliers provide even more kind of content, but my best suggestion to you, if you are looking to obtain high search engine rankings is to not use anything the supplier gives you word for word.
You will be using the same content that (who knows how many) other people are using, and when Google, or any other major search engine crawls the site, they could see it as duplicate content. If you have a site full of duplicate content, some of your pages can get de-indexed, or not indexed at all, and this gives you the in-ability to rank for them anymore. If you had them ranked, and they got de-indexed, then you have lost all rankings, and that could hurt sells.
My suggestion has always been to hire a professional copy-writer and provide them with the keywords that you are wanting to be ranked for, and give them the suppliers content, and have them work your keywords in, while re-wording the content and making it unique. Including your keywords and business name even will give you a better chance of not getting nailed with duplicate content issues. You can find free-lance writers on places like:
If you are not able to spend the money on a professional copy-writer, then you can always head to your local college and find some interns. You can find those in the English, or Journalism department. I have found these kind of workers some of the hardest working and eager to please folks on the planet. Oh yea, and they are cheap!
If you are making your product descriptions unique too, then you have a better chance of getting your deeper product pages ranked too. That can help your conversion rate, and the money you make on your site as well. Studies show, if you can get people into the deeper shopping cart pages of your website with less then 3 clicks, you have a higher chance of converting the browser into a buyer.
Even though making sure you have no duplicate content on your site makes the whole process longer, and more difficult it will be worth it in the long run. You will have more pages to rank, experience higher conversion rate and never have to worry about Google (or other major engines) nailing you with penalties that are hard to overcome.
If you are looking to get into selling products online, The Shipper is offering a free 7 day trial for full access to our catalog that gives you access to thousands of product suppliers and millions of products. Join Today!