You might not think a blog is going to help your ecommerce site gain traffic if you sell things like vacuum cleaners, pet food, picture frames, or something else that is lower on the spectrum of fun things to talk about. But selling such a product range could work to your favor if you follow the advice laid out in this article: your competitors probably aren’t doing the same.
There are several levels of quality and investment value when it comes to internal ecommerce blog articles. Poor quality articles are still better than no articles, if nothing else than for the keywords being recognized by search crawlers (as long as you aren’t keyword stuffing and the content is original). We’ll call this the first level of blog quality. In the first level, your blog posts are most likely written by a 3rd party that only has, at best, a cursory understanding of your business and products, and produces content purely for its own sake for SEO purposes.
In the second level, your articles will need to be written by someone who knows your products and industry eminently well. These articles will establish you as a thought leader, and you will showcase your industry expertise when you publish them. When people perform an organic search for specific information that has to do with your products or industry, your articles will come up. This is where it pays to team up with an expert to learn what the best target keywords are for you to write your articles around, so you know your content is in demand.
The third level is where your content gets psychologically strategic, you get to explore your creativity, and you have the chance to organically reach out to potential customers who are not already looking for or thinking about your world. The following are five ways to drive visitors to your site using third level strategy.
1. Interactive content
The most viewed articles in 2013 for National Geographic, The New York Times and TIME were interactive content. You can create quizzes that engage visitors instead of giving them static content to stare at. Be sure that you don’t bore them with polls or surveys that seem to take data for your own benefit. Make them light and silly, things they are entertained by. You want to make the results fun and something they will want to share, like “How Many Vacuum Cleaners Could You Take In a Fight?” – “I can take on 17 vacuum cleaners!” This example might seem absurd, but sometimes absurdity is what you want to project to make people think more than they normally would.
2. Talk about something people LOVE to hate
It’s easy to take advantage of the less-damaging characteristics of tribalism when you talk about something people love to hate. Some examples include the printer ink mafia, horrifying mortgage interest, or nightmare customers that test the limits of your violence restraint. When you do this, you are empathizing with your readers, and they will appreciate that you know and feel their pain. When writing articles about these things, you’ll want to make sure your humor is pleasantly exposed, and if it fits, give some solutions to ease these widely-felt pain points.
3. Attention-grabbing headlines
This one should be obvious. While you have headlines that are sterile and made for SEO visibility, like “How to solve problem X” (which are not without value), you’ll also want to pepper in some titles that will be sure to grab attention. Professional journalists will cringe at this advice, but you are not trying to put a sensationalist spin on a serious piece that demands journalistic integrity, you’re trying to sell and gain a buzz around office supplies! Also, in most cases on Facebook and Twitter, the headline is all people are going to be exposed to, so you’ll want to make it interesting and maybe even controversial. Be careful to only tip toe the line, not cross it.
4. Make education fun
6. Match the post to what people actually search
The creative, attention-driven tactics above pull in a cold audience; pairing them with intent-driven posts captures the warm one. For every "fun" piece, also publish content built around a real question your buyers type into Google — "how to clean a [product]," "[product] vs [alternative]," "is [product] worth it." Decide the search intent before writing, answer it directly in the opening, and link from the article to the product or category it supports. The personality keeps people reading and sharing; the intent match is what makes the post rank and convert long after the social buzz fades.
7. Build internal links so traffic turns into sales
A blog only lifts an ecommerce site if its traffic can find the products. Every post should link to the relevant category or product page using descriptive anchor text, and your strongest commercial pages should link back out to the supporting articles. This passes ranking signals to the pages that earn revenue and gives a reader who arrived for the entertaining piece an obvious next step toward buying — closing the gap between "got a visit" and "made a sale" that level-three content otherwise leaves open.
8. Measure which posts earn customers, not just clicks
Treat the blog as a channel you instrument, not a hobby. Use analytics and Search Console to see which posts bring buyers (not just pageviews), which queries they rank for, and where readers go next. Double down on the formats and topics that assist conversions, refresh the posts that are slipping, and retire or consolidate ones that never earned traffic. A measured blog compounds; an unmeasured one just accumulates.
Editorial note: this article's original third subheading and one example used crude and discriminatory language that does not reflect 1Digital Agency's standards. The intent of those sections — write attention-grabbing headlines for social feeds, and give your brand an appealing, inclusive personality while keeping divisive politics out of it — is preserved; the offensive phrasing has been replaced with the cleaner wording in the headline and bullet five. The post also references Twitter, which has since been rebranded to X; the headline-and-social-feed principle is unchanged regardless of the network's name.
People love reading about facts they can later weave into conversation, so try to write something that people will be able to use as fodder. Even if your industry is as boring as selling nails, there has to be something in its long history that is mildly interesting enough to raise an eyebrow and merit repeating later at the dinner table.
5. Give your company a personality, but only with agreeable traits
You want to put a face, a tone, and a sense of humor to your blog and by association your company. But be careful about voicing political viewpoints. Taking a divisive political stance or making remarks that demean any group will alienate a large part of the audience you are trying to win, and that backlash spreads fast on social media. Be funny, witty, informative, creative, and personable, and leave the politics out of the business model.