When implemented correctly, blogs are great for any business, but especially eCommerce stores. And, if you follow the tips in this article, blog writing for eCommerce isn’t that hard to do. Blogs can be a major contributor to brand reputation and can help drive conversion rates. If you combine your blog campaigns with your content marketing campaigns, then you’ll be onto a winning formula.
In this article we’re going to look at why you should be focussing on eCommerce blog writing, the benefits of it and how to do it effectively.

The benefits of writing a blog for your eCommerce store

Blogs can be called a number of different things; journals, scrapbooks, ideas, stories. Depending on the nature of your brand you might want to think outside of the box and come up with your own name for the blog. But they’re all essentially the same thing and follow the same concept; to provide relevant content to engage the customer and grow brand reputation. With that in mind, here some benefits of running a blog on your ecommerce website.

Trustworthiness

Building trust with your audience will help turn them into customers and increase your conversion rates. There are lots of ways to build up trust on an ecommerce site, you can use social media to show your audience how many fans you have. Utilise that even further by adding UGC (user generated content) onto your site. Use a review system to show real reviews on your site, this will reinforce trust.

If you’re creating relevant, factually-accurate and high quality content then your user is going to see you as trustworthy. As with any marketing campaign, planning is key and if you plan your blogs around other trust signals then you should be able to increase the trustworthiness of your online store.

Something to Share

Finding content for social media and even email marketing can be daunting and tricky. After you’ve shared all your products, new product ranges and maybe some exciting behind the scenes posts, what have you got left? By creating content on your blog, you’re creating content that can be shared around your social media and email marketing strategies. This will stop your posts becoming stale and boring and will help retain your user and customer base.

SEO Benefits

Blogs can also be a huge contributor to your search engine ranking efforts for several different reasons. SEO can get quite complicated but the basic rule to remember is: Google wants to provide the best answer to the users search query. Try to provide the best and most in-depth answer. While that’s the foundation to creating content, here are some other tips your can use to help boost your SEO ranking ability using blog content.

Long Tail Keywords and Semantic Keywords

You have probably got a list of 10-20 keywords that you want to rank for. These keywords are usually broad terms that can be difficult to get and if you were to bid on the keywords, you’d probably have a high CPC. Semantic keywords are keywords or phrases that are less common, but could be easier to rank for. Long-tail keywords are exactly what they sound like; longer phrases that are relatively common but easier to rank for.

If you create blog articles around these keywords, you could be bringing in more traffic in the long term. This is great if you can link the article in with a solution that you sell or collect their details for future re-marketing and targeting.

E-A-T

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. This isn’t a ranking factor more of a guideline that Google wants you to follow to rank higher. So we need to build these 3 factors. We already know that blogs create trust with your customers and you can increase expertise and authority by making some changes to the way you write your blogs.

Citing facts from educational resources or even conducting your own surveys can increase your expertise. Being factually correct is important to prove that you are an expert in the field. If your site says one thing but there are 100 different sites contradicting you because yours is wrong then it’s not going to be inline with Googles guidelines.

Creating sharable content creates authority. If your post is being spread across social media, cited and shared then it’s clearly an authoritative piece of content. If you’re writing about a certified subject, then you could use schema markup to show that author has authority and the expertise to write about that subject.

How to effectively write a blog for your ecommerce store

We know that a well planned out blog can help build authority, find new audiences, increase your organic SEO efforts. It also creates content that’s better to share on social media and to your email list. But writing a blog can be daunting and most people will get writers block the first time they try, so here are some tips to help you create a ecommerce content.

Be relevant

Trying to think of a decent blog topic can be hard, but it’s really important that it’s relevant. And when I say relevant, I don’t mean write 15 blog posts about how amazing your product is. What we mean by relevancy is to get into your customers head and write about what they want to hear about.
If you can somehow link the post to product pages then do so, but don’t try and force it and try to avoid tedious links. Research your audience to find out what makes them tick and feel free to ask in your email marketing and social media strategies what they’d like to hear about.

Fatten up your content

We’ve spoken about the SEO benefits of creating a blog, but did you know that Google hates thin content? Try to write longer form blogs over 500 words but less than 2000. That’s a rough guide, but obviously different subjects may require more or less.

When you start writing longer form content you’ll want to break it up with sections by using titles. Using images on a blog is also a great way to break up the content and keep the user engaged.

Use guest bloggers

Creating a community of guest bloggers is important because it can keep the style of your blog fresh and they might bring in different types of content. Guest posts with other online retail stores that share a similar audience demographic is a fantastic idea, because it helps grow your audience base in a very unique and organic way. If the guest blogger already has a trusting relationship with their audience, then they’re going to take up the recommendation of your site quicker.

Open up your comments

Don’t be scared to open up your comments. You might get some negative reviews, but it creates a community on your site and encourages your users to engage with your brand. It can also be a great indicator as to what your audience is enjoying, what they’re hating and help you come up with some other blog ideas.

Start Writing Your Blog

Spend a little bit of time researching your topics and just start writing. Remember to proof read it once you’ve finished to make sure any spelling mistakes are rectified and so that it reads well. If you need any help coming up with blog ideas or want to find out more about how blogs can help your ecommerce store, then get in touch.