The Importance of eCommerce Blogging

Creating informative content for your audience is still one of the most important functions of any website, and is becoming an increasingly key component to SEO. This is especially true if you are running an online store, as you need to be regularly creating impactful content for your customers that helps them connect with your brand and learn about your products.

It’s important to understand the value that eCommerce blogging has on your business and how it ties in with your ability to get noticed in the search engines as well as on social media. Regardless of the products and services you may offer on your website, it’s often going to be your blog content that gets noticed the most by search engines and what your users will look for to best understand what your business is about.

For eCommerce store owners, writing a blog may not be at the top of your to-do list, but if you are interested in search engine optimization and long term results for your business, it’s critical that you begin investing time and thought into your blog. By creating quality content that informs your users and answers their questions, you are increasing the user experience quality of your entire website, which not only can translate into higher rankings in Google, but increased conversions as well.

This guide will outline several benefits of eCommerce blogging and how you can craft informative content on your website to help your users and enhance the quality of your online store.

Defining Your Brand

When users arrive on your website, they expect to see certain features that indicate authority. High-quality graphics, slick navigation, fast page speeds, social proof, and reviews are just a few of these points that users are trained to see. If your website lacks them, your website might be out of the race before anyone even sees your products.

One of the most important points of authority for any online store today is their blog. Users will often take a peek at a blog even if they have no immediate desire to read any content because it is often the quality of a blog that provides an easy determinant for the overall quality of a website. The layout of a blog and the quality of the articles on it can send signals to the user that tell them this is either a reliable and trustworthy website or that it is not worth their time.

Years ago, blogs were typically not all that common on eCommerce websites, but today users expect more out of the brands that they interact with. If a user happens upon your website, and they can’t find your blog, will they be able to get a clear judge of your brand’s voice simply by viewing the homepage? Do your secondary and tertiary pages provide all of the information that your users might want in regards to how to use your products?

Chances are, your users are looking for valuable and engaging content that encompasses more than sales pitches and “About Us” copy. Your users want to hear your voice as a brand, the story behind your products, your business mentality. You should have content on your website that your potential customers wouldn’t mind sharing to their Facebook or pinning on their Pinterest because they derived value from it and they know other people will too.

A well-designed blog can act as the voice of your brand, giving it form that product descriptions and homepage copy alone can rarely pull off. You want your website to act as an extension of your brand, guiding potential customers with usable information and interesting anecdotes. The worst thing you could do is assume that a blog should only be a supplemental asset and that your products alone should carry the day. In certain cases, your blog will immediately convey more value in the eyes of certain customers, which means it deserves equal consideration.

Providing Valuable Information For Your Customers

A blog can also add immense value to your website by enhancing your products. If you can go into detail about how to make use of your products in real-world situations, it will engender trust in your users and give the impression of both authority and relatability, two extremely important aspects of managing a business online.

You have to think about your online store from the perspective of your customers. Shopping online, while far more mainstream than ever, still comes with its own fair share of hesitation and caution. It is your job as an eCommerce store owner to assuage the fears of your users and provide them with all of the proper signals and information necessary to make them feel secure and help answer any questions they may have.

Ultimately, if your website doesn’t fulfill this role, some other website will. It just makes sense that you want to position yourself as the authority in your niche or industry in regards to the products that you sell. When users are searching on Google about products that you sell, you want them to come to you for the answers. Sometimes, you can’t cram all of the answers to their inquiries into the descriptions of your various products, because it would look cramped and awkward.

Instead, you want to make sure that your online store is outfitted with a high-quality blog that is regularly updated and provides loads of valuable information for your users that will genuinely address their concerns as well as provide news, entertainment, and even updates and insight into the management of your business and what it’s like in your brick and mortar locations if you have them.

Valuable information is gold online and always has been. The difference now however is that the search engines are looking for websites that best address users’ needs as a major ranking factor, which means that if your website contains genuinely unique or helpful information on it, you stand to pull in a ton of organic traffic.

If you are looking for a way to help your business grow, you need to take eCommerce blogging seriously. Google is increasingly looking at user experience as a ranking factor, and judging by the behaviors that users exhibit on your website, Google knows whether or not your content is addressing their expectations correctly. By implementing proper SEO techniques into your blog posts and writing about topics that your users are interested in, your website will have a far greater chance of ranking than simply trying to rank with products alone.

High-quality blogs are one of the cornerstones of ranking high in the search engines, as you will notice that the vast majority of what comes up for the top spots in Google are typically blog posts. Google wants long-form content that goes into detail about certain topics, and which adheres to certain SEO guidelines. This holds true whether you are a service industry, hobby blogger, or a full-scale eCommerce business.

Increase Conversions

Another important aspect of having a blog on your online store is the fact that a well-implemented one can help you increase conversions. In fact, a blog post can act as a comprehensive sales funnel that pushes users to certain specific products after weighing their benefits or discussing their real-world uses.

This is not the only way that blog content may raise your conversion rate, however. As you create quality content for your blog, you will inevitably see an increase in your organic traffic. If your blog articles are properly optimized, they will not only attract more users to your website but ones that are more willing to purchase your products. If you continuously create high-quality and informative content that revolves around specific products, Google and the other search engines will serve your content specifically to people that are hungry to buy these products based on search intent.

The better your website utilizes eCommerce SEO, the higher the chances that you will attract potential customers. Since you can’t expect your products or your homepage to pull all of the weight when it comes to climbing the SERPs, you need well-crafted blog articles that are rich in relevant keywords and valuable information that your customers can use to put your products and brand in the right context.

Taking the Right Approach With eCommerce Blogging

Your blogging efforts shouldn’t exist on an island but need to be supported with other optimizations such as in-depth keyword research, page speed enhancements, internal linking, and comprehensive backlinking strategies. For this level of quality when it comes to the state of your eCommerce SEO, you need the expertise of an agency like 1Digital®.

Here at 1Digital®, we specialize in providing sophisticated solutions for eCommerce businesses, that include creating valuable content that can help connect users with your brand. Our digital marketing campaigns cover all aspects of search engine optimization and will help get your online store in front of more users while communicating your brand message with thoughtful and engaging blogs and other on-page content improvements.

If you want to increase the SEO value of your eCommerce site and drive more sales, it’s in your best interest to put together a blog. Of course, as a store owner, you can’t always be expected to have the time to sit down and write optimized and informative content for your users, which is why our SEO services may be the perfect fit for you. Call us up at 888-982-8269 or take our free SEO audit and see for yourself what areas of your store could use a little improvement.