The setup
The retailer sells kitchen appliances online in Saudi Arabia, in Arabic and English. Most product pages had about 80 words: a short paragraph from the manufacturer and a spec table. Their team's question was simple. Would longer pages rank and sell better, or would we be wasting writers' time?
We picked 80 products that were similar in price, traffic and stock levels. For 40 of them, our writers rewrote the pages to around 400 words in both languages. The other 40 stayed as they were. The test ran for 12 weeks.
What we added
We didn't pad the pages. Every addition answered a question customers had asked in reviews, on WhatsApp or to the call centre:
- Who the product suits, in one or two plain sentences
- What's in the box, and what costs extra
- How it compares with the next model up
- Delivery and installation details for Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam
- Short answers to the three questions people asked most
The results
The longer pages won, though not by as much as you'd think. Organic clicks to the 40 rewritten pages rose 23% over the 12 weeks, against 6% for the pages we left alone. The conversion rate from organic traffic went from 1.8% to 2.1%, while the other group stayed flat.
Most of the extra clicks came from longer, more specific searches, such as a model name plus "with installation", or a question about size. The pages started showing up for searches they had never matched before.
What didn't change
Rankings for the main product names barely moved. When people search an exact model number, Google already knew which page to show, and more words didn't change that. The gains were all in the long tail.
Was it worth it?
For this retailer, yes. Rewriting a page cost about SAR 150 including the translation review, and the extra revenue covered that within two months on most products. We're now rolling it out to their top 500 products, starting with the ones that get the most customer questions.
- Content
- E-commerce SEO
- Saudi Arabia
Mariam Al Zarooni
Mariam leads Arabic content at AdAscend and edits everything we publish in Arabic. She grew up in Sharjah and has written for Gulf brands in retail, health and government.
