For many effective content marketing systems, blogging is at the center of public-facing operations. Easy to package, understand, and share, blogging is proven to be extremely effective across the board when it comes to generating interest. However, in the world of e-commerce, blogging is even more high-stakes, especially for SEO purposes. So, as different content marketing practices evolve, here’s what experts suggest you need to do to make sure that your work evolves with them.
Is E-Commerce Blogging Dead?
One common point reiterated by experts is that blogging for e-commerce is far from dead, and that failure to adapt may be the reason for plummeting SEO rankings. William Chin, Web Consultant for Bumblebeelinen.com, explains that the reason e-commerce blogging is still useful that “blogging for e-commerce is an easy way to rank your website for long tail keywords that product pages simply cannot rank for.”
An example he cites is writing an article about the “best anniversary gifts.” Search volume would be high here, but competition would be even higher. “However, if you write content like ‘Best Anniversary Gifts for Him’ and/or ‘Best Anniversary Gifts for Her,’ you can reduce the competition but still attract users who are lower in the conversion funnel,” he adds. The struggle for e-commerce bloggers is that you can’t necessarily rank for those larger keywords with a category or product page, which a lot of e-commerce sites are built around.
The main reason why some e-commerce blogs may be dying is that they lack effort and focus. With more sites posting blogs than ever, content that’s not actionable, well-researched, or effectively optimized, will fail to get traction. That’s why working with a third party may be necessary to get your current content strategy on track.
Enhancing Your Blog Posts
A good blog often lives or dies in the brainstorming stage, particularly when it comes to choosing topics. Google’s algorithms prioritize content designed around pre-chosen keywords, rather than keywords that are awkwardly shoehorned into an existing blog idea.
This makes the inspiration stage an important one for e-commerce blogging. Richard O’Connor, Strategic Marketing Director of First Mats Ltd, notes that “there are some great tools online that can give you ideas for what to write blog articles about. The new Keyword Explorer from Ahrefs.com shows a list of questions related to a keyword, and the free tool answerthepublic.com can also reveal common questions asked on Google. You can also get ideas from your sales and customer services teams as they will be asked questions by real customers every day.”
As an example, he regularly gets questions from customers on how to keep doormats clean after they buy some from his site. Their team was proactive and created an article on the topic, which is now the most popular piece of content on their website.
However, the effort doesn’t stop there when it comes to driving traffic to e-commerce posts.
Edyta Garcia, Online Content Marketeer at ShipSupport, cites social media as a key tool, but not the only method that her company uses: “We link to our blog posts from the related product catalogs and we directly refer those posts to our customers whenever we see they have trouble choosing the right part. For example, last month, a customer had problems deciding on the right cutter teeth model. We referred him to our post: Buyer’s Guide to Cutter Teeth, which helped him identify the right model to fit his equipment.”
She notes that not using that post may have resulted in them buying the wrong part. Taking that extra step resulted in the customer finding the post so useful, that they shared it throughout their entire organization.
In order to get that kind of traction, you need to have content that’s more useful than your competitors. Visuals are a key way to accomplish this, particularly infographics. Take complex data you may have retrieved from different sources, simplify the info with a few takeaway points, then put it in a unique visual package.
In many ways, the nature of e-commerce SEO makes blogging success more important than many other niches. However, quality will always win out over tricks when it comes to getting traction.