A museum object record and an ecommerce product page look nothing alike on the surface. One has an accession number, a condition report, a provenance note. The other has a price, a size guide, a stock level. But structurally, they're doing the same job: taking something physical and specific, and describing it precisely enough that someone who has never seen it can understand exactly what it is.
I didn't learn this from an SEO course. I learned it from where I grew up.
Description as discipline
My grandad sold textiles for a living. My gran was a machinist in a coat factory. Precision about material, construction and origin wasn't abstract in my family — it was how you knew what you were looking at, and how you knew what something was worth. A coat wasn't just "a coat." It was a specific cloth, cut a specific way, made in a specific place, by people whose skill you could name.
Cataloguing works the same way. As a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters and a member of Icon, the conservation body, I've spent time around people whose entire discipline is refusing to be vague about an object — because vagueness is how provenance gets lost, how condition goes unnoticed, how something's value stops being legible to anyone but the person already holding it.
Search engines reward the same instinct
This is the part that surprises people: search engines are, in their own limited way, asking for the same discipline. A generic product description or a generic object label doesn't just fail to charm a human reader — it gives a search engine almost nothing to work with either. Specificity is not a stylistic preference online. It's the actual mechanism by which something becomes findable at all.
"Vintage coat" competes with millions of other vague listings. "1960s wool tweed swagger coat, Manchester manufacture" competes with almost nothing, because almost nobody bothers to be that precise — even when, as in a lot of heritage and textile organisations, the knowledge to be that precise is sitting right there already.
Where the two genuinely differ
The honest difference is intent. A product page wants a sale. A collection record wants accuracy for its own sake, regardless of what happens next. I think the second instinct actually produces better SEO outcomes than the first, precisely because it isn't trying to persuade — it's trying to be correct. Search engines, and increasingly people, tend to trust that.
That's really the whole argument for why I do this work the way I do it: not applying generic ecommerce SEO logic to heritage clients, but starting from the cataloguing instinct — accuracy, material, provenance, place — and building the search strategy around that, rather than the other way round.