57% of Small-Business Product Pages Have Fewer Than 300 Words

A shopper is choosing between two cast-iron skillets from two small online stores. One page has a photo, a price and a single line: "10-inch pre-seasoned skillet." The other explains the size, weight and handle, how to season and clean it, whether it works on induction, and what comes in the box. The second page answers the questions the shopper would otherwise have to email about, and it gives Google far more to match against searches.

Word count is not a goal in itself, but a very short page usually means missing information. Google needs text to understand what a product is and which searches it answers, and shoppers need it to decide whether to buy. A page with little more than the product name competes on the name alone.

Most small-business product pages are short. 56.7% have fewer than 300 words of visible text, and 24.5% have fewer than 150, even though those counts include the site's menu, footer and related products. The product description itself is only part of that total.

In September 2026 we sampled US small businesses from Google business listings, visited up to 20 pages on each business's website, and kept the product pages, pages that present a single item for sale. That gave 960 product pages on 193 small-business websites. For each page we counted the words of visible text and recorded other basic page elements.

The word count covers all visible text on the page: navigation, footer, related products and the product description itself, so the description alone is always shorter. The median is the middle page: half have more words, half fewer. A meta description is the short summary Google can show under a page's link in search results. The H1 is the page's main heading. A page counts as duplicate content when most of its text also appears on another page of the same site.

Once menus and footers are counted, 300 words leaves room for a short paragraph about the product at most. A quarter of pages, 24.5%, fall under 150 words in total, which usually means the page has a title, a price, a button and very little else.

At the other end, 13.1% of product pages carry more than 1,000 words. Those pages have room for full descriptions, specifications, care instructions and answers to common questions, and they show what a complete page can look like next to the thin majority.

The average small-business product page has 501 words, but that figure is pulled up by the minority of long pages. The median page has about 265 words, roughly half the average, and it is the better picture of what a typical small store publishes.

For a store owner, the median is also the benchmark to beat. If your product pages carry a few hundred words including the menu and footer, you are in line with most small stores, and a page that adds a real description, a specification table and answers to buyers' questions will stand out against them.

Short product pages often sit alongside other basic problems. 19.5% of small-business product pages share most of their text with another page on the same site, 22.4% have no meta description, and 8% have no main heading at all.

Duplicate text on product pages often comes from variant pages that repeat the same description, or from manufacturer copy used word for word. Both leave Google to choose between near-identical pages, so they are worth checking first when rewriting.

Short product pages tend to run through a whole store. On 53.4% of small-business online stores, the typical product page has fewer than 300 words, and the median store's typical product page has 284 words.

That points to how product copy is made. When descriptions are imported from a supplier, pasted in by hand or left as a single line in a template, the same short page repeats across every product. The fix is a process change, a standard for what every product page must include, as much as a page-by-page rewrite.

Write for the shopper, not a word count. A useful product page answers what the product is, who it is for, what it is made of, how it fits or works, how to care for it and what comes in the box. Put specifications in a table and answer the questions customers email you about.

Start with your best sellers and any pages that share text with other pages on your site. Replace manufacturer copy with your own, and give each variant page something of its own or point it to a main product page.

Then set a standard so every new product launches complete. Our seo copywriting services rewrite product pages at scale and build a template your team can follow for every new product.

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