Key Takeaways
- Ecommerce stores rely on online traffic to generate sales. One of the most effective ways to attract visitors is to create an eCommerce blog that consumers would find valuable.
- There are five key benefits of starting a blog: search engine optimization, establishing trust with customers, positions your business as an industry expert, improve customer engagement, and increases conversion rates among consumers.
- To create an effective eCommerce blog strategy, you must: understand who your target audience is, have well-researched keywords, clear blog sections, equip your blog with visuals, and have a clear call-to-action.
Ecommerce stores rely on traffic to attract customers and generate sales. While there are virtually many ways to generate traffic to your online store, creating an eCommerce blog remains one of the most effective strategies today.
Blogging allows you to share information about your company as a whole as well as news of new products or services. Producing informative content also gives you a chance to position yourself as an industry expert and your brand as a trusted resource.
If you’re planning on starting an eCommerce blog for your online store, you’re in the right place. Here, we’ll outline how your blog will help your business and discuss tips for an effective blogging strategy.
Let’s dig in.
Why a Blog Can Help Your eCommerce Business
Before we detail how you can implement a successful blogging strategy, let’s first highlight why it can be beneficial to your company. Here are five key benefits a blog can bring:
Reason #1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
E-Commerce businesses, being web-based, must aim for a high search engine ranking to attract audiences and drive traffic to their websites. Search engine optimization (SEO) allows them to achieve just that.
When consumers use search engines, such as Google, for shopping purchases – whether it’s for products, services, or just information – websites with higher SEO rankings will appear first. A webpage or site can’t go live on search engine results pages (SERPs) until it’s been “crawled” by search engine bots. Essentially these bots will analyze your company’s website to see if it’s properly optimized – meaning, does it meet its intended effect. If it’s a website for a small business lending company, does its content reflect that specialization? If it does, your site will begin to appear on SERPs, making it easier to discover.
The reason blogging is key is because it allows you to produce targeted content on a regular basis which boosts your optimization. When you blog, you’re adding more pages to your website, giving the search engine bots more content to crawl and index. Furthermore, the more content you add, the more often the bots will analyze your site. As more of your pages appear on SERPs, you’ll be giving your audience more entry points to discover your website which helps increase traffic and leads.
Reason #2. Establish Trust With Your Customers
In its most boiled down sense, starting a business is addressing a particular problem and providing a solution to it. If you’re a skincare brand, chances are that consumers are probably visiting your website because they are dealing with a skin-related issue that they are looking to solve. If you’re a company that sells bikes, consumers shopping on your site likely care about protecting the environment.
A blog is a great tool to address the issues, concerns, or questions your customers may have related to your product, as well as provide useful tips and advice that can make their lives easier. Not only does the added content help with SEO, which could drive new shoppers to your site, it also helps to build a sense of trust and reliability among your existing customers. If your audience enjoys the content you provide, chances are they’ll come back to your site for more.
Consumers are also putting an increasing value on transparency when it comes to the brands they shop. The more they know about a product from the sellers themselves, the better. A blog is a great way to communicate this info. Maybe your company has a unique story to tell, or you share behind-the-scenes insight into the process of how your products are made or sourced. This type of content also builds trust and may leave your customers feeling more confident about shopping your site.
Reason #3. Position Your Business as Industry Expert
Blogs are also a great way to demonstrate your expertise in your industry. For instance, if you’re running a digital marketing agency, you can write about tips to improve your business’s digital presence. If you run a fitness center, you can share at-home workouts, etc.
The more blog posts you write, the more information your audience gets from you. If they find this information useful, they’ll find even more value in your brand.
Reason #4. Engage with Your Customers
Adding a comment section on your blog creates a forum in which you can engage with your customers directly. It shows your audience that you prioritize their questions, and makes them feel like they’re part of a larger online community.
A comment section is also a great place to glean insight into the most common queries your customers have. Maybe this leads to the development of a new product or service. At the very least, it can help to steer your blogging efforts as you’ll see what areas are of most interest to your audience. Anytime you can receive direct feedback from your customers, it’s a plus.
Reason #5. Increase conversion rates
Not only will an informative blog increase traffic to your website, but it will also help increase your conversion rates. Make sure all your posts are shareable. You never know when a post will resonate with someone and they’ll want to send it to a friend or family member. This could result in new customers. And, since blog posts archive, they are discoverable long after they’ve initially posted.
The more people who come to read your blog, the more credibility you’ll be able to build for your brand – not to mention awareness. As you build trust around your growing audience, they’ll feel more confident in buying from you.
Essential Tips in Creating an Effective Blogging Strategy
Now that you’re up to speed with the advantages of having an eCommerce blog, you may be wondering how you can create a killer one. Here are some tips to follow:
- Have a clear sense of who your target audience will be
The very first thing to consider when starting a blog is to determine who your audience is. Create a description of who you want to reach. What is their lifestyle like? What do they value? Is it busy, working women who value quality and convenience? Or tech-savvy millennials with disposable income? The more you know who you’re speaking to, the better you’ll be able to speak to them.
While identifying an audience, creating a buyer’s persona can help. A buyer’s persona is a semifictional character with the voice, priorities, and needs of your target audience. It’s an effective strategy because it gives insight into what topics your audience might find interesting. Your buyer’s persona lets you inside the customer’s mind, giving you an idea of what their needs and preferences would be.
Since your competitors are trying to reach the same audience, check out their websites and see if they’re implementing blogging strategy. If so, see what they are writing. It’s important that you develop your own distinct voice – one that’s separate from theirs.
- Research your keywords
Proper keyword use is the foundation of a good blogging strategy. Without the right keywords, your blog won’t rank for anything in the search engine results (SERPs). Since one of the goals is to gain more visibility on the internet to attract customers to your eCommerce blog, having a well-researched set of keywords to use in your future blog posts is vital.
Free tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest can help you perform basic keyword research to start your blog. However, if you need a more robust SEO keyword researcher tool, the Ahref tool may be more suitable for you. All you have to do is input your topic idea, and the results will show the suggested high-ranking keywords, including the search volume for each keyword.
You can then structure your topics around the keyword or keyword phrases. Be careful with your keyword use, though. The search engine algorithms don’t like it when you stuff your content with keywords. In fact, they could even penalize you for it which hurts your chances of ranking higher on SERPs. As much as possible, use your keywords minimally and naturally throughout your blog.
- Divide your blog posts into sections
Big blocks of text can be off-putting, especially if the reader is looking for a specific piece of information and isn’t interested in reading the entire post. Break your posts down into subsections, using subheadings to clearly illustrate which information goes where. This makes it easier for readers to navigate as they can read the whole post if they’d like, or they can skim through and jump around to the areas that are of most interest to them.
Blogs are supposed to deliver focused and high-quality information within a short span of time. So, making it easily digestible is the goal. It also happens to be more visually appealing when the information is clearly organized.
- Add Visuals to your eCommerce blog
Visuals are beneficial when it comes to improving audience engagement. According to QuickSprout, a blog post with relevant images generates 94% more views than those without images. It’s also easier for the viewers to process visual content than text-based content.
Adding infographics to your eCommerce blog posts is a great way to grab your audience’s attention. Infographics are composed of charts or images with minimal text that allow readers to understand and consume a certain topic in lesser time.
Images, screenshots, and GIFs are also helpful to show how your product or service works. Only use visuals that are relevant to your topics and will resonate with your audience.
- Add a call to action
Before ending your blog post, be sure to add a compelling call-to-action that the reader can take. This could be subscribing to your company’s newsletter, following your brand on social media channels, setting up a consultation, or returning to the website for a sale. It’s a simple and effective way to generate leads and increase conversions in the long-run.
Your call-to-action should be distinguishable and stand out in your blog. It should prompt the customers to take a specific action. To get them to do that, you have to ask them first.
- Be consistent in publishing your blogs
It’s important to be consistent in your blog publishing schedule. If you’ve been providing informative and valuable content to your audience on a regular basis, there’s a good chance they’ve grown reliant upon your blog as a resource. The last thing you want to do is build an audience and then leave them hanging with long gaps of time where you aren’t publishing any posts.
Creating a publishing schedule is a great way to manage this. Set a weekly goal – maybe it’s three posts per week – and pick the days in which you’ll post. You should also create a backlog of topics and post ideas so that you aren’t scrambling to think of them the day before a post is due. Always stay a few steps ahead.
Start Blogging Now!
An eCommerce blog not only increases your website traffic but also allows you to provide valuable information that your audience seeks. If your audience likes what they read, chances are, they’ll share it with their friends, and their friends will share it with others.
All that being said, your blog will only yield positive results if you do it right. Keep the tips mentioned above in mind when blogging to achieve better results. Before you know it, your blog will be converting people into loyal customers.
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