Thanks to the ROI they bring – as well as a multifaceted range of effects and the permanent value they add – content marketing and SEO are considered to be one of the best ways to spend your e-commerce marketing budget.
Compared to email marketing, social media, and paid advertising, content marketing and SEO will require more of your energy in the beginning.
Stats show that 37.5% of e-commerce traffic comes from searches, so once your e-commerce builds its reputation and gets top rankings, you’ll boost your sales in the long term, with no repeated expenses.
Running an SEO-friendly blog on your e-commerce website is essential for the success of your business. It gives you more opportunities to offer top-notch content that both your target audience and search engines will love.
If you’re unsure how to create an advanced SEO-friendly blog that will boost your rankings, here are a couple of crucial steps.
Find the Right Keywords
In order to rank well in searches and attract more potential customers to your e-commerce blog, your blog posts need to include the right keywords.
You need to determine the words and phrases your target audience uses when looking for products to buy or trying to solve an issue.
The trick is not to use the most popular keywords, as you can hardly beat all the competition. It would be best if you looked for relevant long-tail keywords instead, as they can get you to the top much easier. Although these keywords will bring you less traffic, it will be more targeted and ready to purchase.
Using tools such as KWFinder, Google Keywords, SEMRuchs, or Ahrefs can help you with this task.
You will use the keywords in your blog posts to make it SEO-friendly. However, keep in mind that overstuffing your post with keywords can have adverse effects, so don’t exaggerate.
Use Backlinks for Authority
Search engines need proof of your website’s credibility in order to rank it high in searches. Having valid proof refers to the number and the quality of the backlinks your posts have.
When it comes to e-commerce business, link building can be quite challenging, as it can be difficult to get people to link to pages and posts with high commercial intent.
Blogging is a great link-building strategy for e-commerce sites as you have an opportunity to produce great content that, unlike your product pages, is not salesy. If your post provides value to your visitors, you are more likely to get the links you need.
Also, ensure you leverage internal linking to make it easier for your visitors to navigate your website, increase the time they spend on your site, and improve your sales numbers. This practice will help your SEO efforts as well, as search engines reward exceptional user experience.
Write Superb Content
Your next step is creating great content around the keywords that suit your e-commerce business the best. When searching online, your potential customers are looking for relevant information. To excel in SEO and content marketing strategy, you need to try to become the most credible source in your niche and deliver your customers just what they’re looking for…
Otherwise, all your SEO efforts won’t give the expected results. If your visitors read your post and don’t get the answer they needed, or find confusing and unreadable content, they’ll bounce off never to come back. Not only will this ruin your credibility and chances for making a sale, but it will also send signals to the search engine that your visitors are not satisfied with what they found on your website. And just like that – your rankings will drop.
Ensure all the content on your blog is of superb quality by following these steps:
- Tailor the content to the needs and interests of your target audience. The more you know them, the more you’ll be able to produce the content that answers their questions and solves their pain points. In other words, take the time to understand your customers.
- Use visuals. Your content needs to be easy to understand and grasp, so use visuals to break your text in smaller chunks. Furthermore, people understand graphics faster, so you can illustrate the most important points by using tables, charts, graphs, images, and infographics.
- Use various types of content. Don’t limit yourself to text and images alone. Video is at its peak, so you can choose a 2-minute video instead of a standard text-image piece and get your post 3x as many inbound links.
- Craft great headlines that will grab your readers’ attention – ask a question or make a promise. There are many great headline tools available online that can help you come up with a compelling headline.
- All your posts need to adhere to grammatical rules and should be easy to read.
- Don’t publish opinionated posts. Use data from research or studies to prove your points.
- Your potential customers don’ t like posts with promotional language, so don’t use it.
On-Page and Technical SEO
SEO goes far beyond keywords, link-building, and the quality of your content. It includes your website’s performance and making every little part of your website easy to grasp, both by humans and search engines.
This means you should optimize URLs by including keywords in them, making it easy on the eyes. Using meta-descriptions and alt-text describing your images is also a must if you want a search-engine-optimized website.
Furthermore, to keep your customers satisfied and keep your ratings high, your e-commerce blog needs to load super fast on all devices, including the mobile ones.
By following the tips above, you can create an excellent SEO-friendly blog, that will rank high in searches, attract quality leads, and increase conversions.
I’m Rebecca, a translator and avid traveler, a book worm and horror flick enthusiast. My job has given me the amazing opportunity to travel to dozens of countries around the world, and writing on Rough Draft gives me a chance to try to showcase some of them.
