A blog for SEO in e-commerce

If your goal is to establish a relationship with your customer, try to present your offer in an unconventional way. Stand out from the competition, there are many ways to do it. 😃 We will present you one of them.

No matter what industry you operate in, you should have your own blog. Running it will take some work and commitment, but the results will be very satisfying. By publishing posts on a regular basis, you will improve your website’s SEO. This means that it will be more visible in the search engine and users will look at it more often.

You should remember that your content should reach two types of audiences: readers and search engines. The content you publish will not only influence your audience but also your website positioning. SEO brings results in the form of increased organic traffic to your site, more user engagement, and thus more leads.

Let’s answer the question, what is SEO?

It is a set of on-page and off-page actions aimed at showing your website for as many queries as possible. Good blog content has a significant impact on website SEO. It will allow your website (depending on your industry, strategy, and competitiveness) to rank for more phrases on the first page of search engine results. You achieve the objectives by saturating the content with keywords, developing the structure of the website, and increasing its substantive value. The effects of SEO are best verified on the basis of changes in organic traffic, as well as in the visibility of the site in Google.

Quality content

Before you get down to setting up a blog and writing texts, think about who it will be targeted to. An accurate identification of your audience is fundamental to make your marketing strategy succeed. You should formulate your message differently to an 18-year-old and a 50-year-old woman.

Next, take a critical look at the content on your website. Pay attention to how your products are described and ask yourself if this description would encourage you to buy it. Also, take a look at your competitors’ sites. Chances are they’ll inspire you on how to run your own blog or be a tip on how not to do it. There is more content being produced than we can assimilate. The most important thing is to stand out from the crowd. Present your own point of view in your articles. It will be a differentiator not only for the blog, but also for your business.

Good content and interesting articles will increase interest not only of your website, but also of your offer. Customers often analyze products closely when making a buying decision, so a blog is a great place to help sell your products or services. By presenting them in an unconventional way, you can encourage a purchase decision. However, you should guard against being too controversial. There are many examples of brands that have had to completely change their communication strategy after a mishap, which always comes at a great cost and organizational difficulties.

Keywords

If you are already working on SEO you can skip this point. If not, we have some good advice on how to run a blog to achieve the highest ranks in search engine results. When reviewing the content on your website, think about keywords that you want to be visible for in a search engine. A blog is used primarily for positioning long-tale phrases – consisting of 3 or more words. It is good to choose words related to your business. If you run an online florist shop, you can have a “bridal bouquets” offer subpage and at the same time create articles about bridal bouquets from particular flowers. In e-commerce stores, phrases such as ranking of laptops to 1,000 dollars, the best dress for the summer, the most interesting places for a weekend trip or a pram to X dollars work well.

Google prefers content with lots of characters and value for the customer. For blog texts, we recommend a minimum of 6,000 characters with spaces. For the search engine, this is a signal that the topic has been covered and it contains the answer that the reader needs. Keep in mind that search engine robots are able to analyze text. Therefore, all kinds of plagiarism are punished, and in order to properly saturate the text with a given key phrase, you should use it 2-3 times per 1,000 characters.

It is also worth checking from time to time for which keywords the blog often displays, although this generates very few referrals from search engine to blog. It’s a good idea to “recycle” content, make minor corrections to the old texts, re-edit it, or add a paragraph to optimize it for new keywords. We need to repeat the process at least quarterly.

Types of posts

While how you present your content should be something individual to each business, there are a few universal practices that will help you get started. First and foremost, you should create original content. This affects both the search engine and the reader.

Users spend a lot of time searching for the perfect product. If you capture their attention with interesting ideas, you will become recognizable and increase the likelihood of them choosing your brand.

One of the most important things is to publish regularly. Your content should always be relevant. Prepare some articles as a backup. Systematic publishing of articles is a signal for the search engine that the website is constantly developing. Additionally, you will make the user used to fresh and valuable content on your website, so they will be more likely to return to it.

We’d also like to share the types of posts that get the best results. Readers are most likely to reach and share them. As a result, they translate into increased sales and brand popularity.

Examples of posts

Rankings, calculations

By creating an article for example under the title: 13 clothes that everyone should have, you can present as many as 13 of your products

Q&A, FAQ

These are posts on a question and answer basis. If it happens that you often get an inquiry about a particular thing – you can write an article about it. By describing an issue on your website, you won’t have to do it in person.

User-generated content

Encourage your customers to send you photos that show your product. This will increase engagement with the brand.

(Info)graphics

We tend to understand the information in a graphic form much more easily. Try to use this fact when creating content for your website. Enhance your blog with illustrative graphics. These can be pictures, diagrams or even bullet points of the most important information from the article.

Practical use, Inspiration

No matter what you sell, you can show how your product can be used in various interesting ways. Perhaps by doing so, you will become an inspiration to your customers who will use your goods in many areas and moments of their lives.

What’s important

It’s a good idea to create posts that stick to one topic area. By preparing posts like gaming laptops for $2,000, $3,000 or $5,000 on the one hand you narrow down your audience, and on the other you make it very precise, so it will be easier to reach them. Those looking to make a purchase and having a specific budget will deliver better leads than those looking to find out what a laptop is.

The more valuable content your blog contains, the longer a user will stay on the website. As you work on the texts, you should combine them into thematic groups. It will make your writing easier. Also, if you group articles into topics that interest the reader and link them together with internal links, you will increase the time user stays on your page. It is a good practice to include hyperlinks underneath the article in the form of tiles or a list of related posts. This also affects Google’s robots, which will navigate your site easier.

Internal linking

Posts such as rankings or lists make internal linking much easier. It’s the effective path that a user can go along from the blog to the actual product on your webpage. On it, he can make the purchase.

Internal linking strengthens the website, as well as individual subpages. The more links leading to your bookmark (embedded with the right keyword), the better. This tells the search engine that the page is crucial.

A good practice in terms of SEO and how to use your blog in it is to link thematically and create so-called “silos”. In practice, if you run a blog for a shop with electronic equipment, it is worth creating thematic catalogues grouping articles separately into those that are about laptops, mice, monitors, etc. Then we only link them to products related to the ones mentioned in the article.

Problems with blogging

Creating good and engaging texts requires the knowledge and time of a specialist. This is usually lacking in companies, so creating them is outsourced to external copywriters. This generates costs that range from a hundred to even several thousand dollars. Additionally, it’s hard to find a permanent partner to work with right away that you’ll be completely satisfied with. In the beginning, you will have to spend a lot of time proofreading and editing texts. However, over time you will develop a common style, and ultimately outsourcing your articles will save you a lot of time.

It’s hard to stay level-headed and hard to avoid boredom. So even though we’ve written how important it is to publish regularly, if you don’t have anything interesting then don’t publish by force. Users will notice the difference and it can have a negative impact on their relationship with your business. The text must be unique. Search engines take a negative approach to any attempt to copy content.

SEO positioning – the most common mistakes on blogs

In SEO, the best results come from a proper keyword strategy. They can get you to your destination, they can also get you away from it. We will present the most common mistakes when optimizing texts:

Poor blog indexation

This means that despite publishing new content, it is not visible in the search engine. There may be several reasons: incorrect page architecture, lack of buttons directing to subpages or lack of a site map.

Thin content

This is not a keyword error, but it does carry the threat of a penalty from the search engine. It is triggered by articles with a small number of characters (200-300 characters), and therefore of questionable merit.

Keyword cannibalization

As we mentioned before, each keyword should have one landing page associated with it. This means that for example, the keyword “gaming laptops up to 2000 dollars” should appear only on one subpage. If you base several blog articles on this phrase, the search engine will not know which one to display.

Lack of keyword optimization

Occurs when the potential of a page is not used, and the positioned keyword appears in the text too rarely. In such a situation, the subpage is not able to get a high position, because the search engine will not know what its topic is.

Keyword stuffing

Is the exact opposite of point 2 and means oversaturating the text with phrases. In such a situation, keywords are used in an unnatural way and hinder the reception of the text.

How to get people to read your blog?

The beginnings of most blogs look similar – posts are read only by their author or a few of his friends, it is difficult to get comments and traffic, not to mention shares. The priority at this stage is to create a group of regular readers and systematically attract new ones. See what you can do to increase your website traffic:

Search Engine or Social Media Advertising

Google Ads allows you to redirect people who are searching for content related to your topic to your website, even when your website does not yet appear in meaningful search engine ranks. An investment in advertising brings quick results. It’s worth opting for additional support from social media, which is invaluable in building customer engagement.

Collaborations and guest posts

Build your image as an expert by showcasing your expertise on other blogs and themed sites. If your articles interest readers, they will undoubtedly visit your blog for more content. You can also choose to work with an influencer who, by sharing a link to your post or mentioning you on social media, will significantly increase the number of visitors to your website. It’s worth building relationships with influencers by recommending their services, e-books, or valuable posts.

Content, content is king

Internet users like to read blogs that solve their problems, give advice, help, and inspire. Make sure that your post is interesting and valuable in terms of content. Don’t bore, use light, understandable language if possible. There’s a man on the other side, remember.

Engagement and presence in the industry

All sorts of groups, topic blogs and forums are places where you can build your visibility and acquire links leading to your site. Internet users especially appreciate the help in solving problems. It does not matter that you advise a man from New York, while your furniture store is in London. Your friendly gesture will not be forgotten, and when there is an inquiry about a specialist in your area, you may unexpectedly receive a recommendation from a friendly web user.

How to take advantage of social media to promote your blog?

Once you have a website and have decided to create a company blog, the final step is to set up your company’s social media profiles. They allow you to build brand awareness, gain new readers, and encourage previously acquired customers to use your offer again. Of the four leading sites – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn – choose two whose nature best suits your business (a company profile on Facebook is kind of a must have). Share your new blog posts, photos, infographics, and inspiration on them to build your blog’s popularity.

6 SEO tips for e-commerce

The choice of appropriate marketing actions depends on the needs of a given e-commerce. When deciding on SEO it is worth remembering a few rules:

• A careful keyword analysis is important – choosing keywords is difficult. You can use Ubersuggest, but these keywords are not organized by meaning but alphabetically, so it’s better to create an optimized keyword database for the products you sell.
• It is worth analyzing and checking how the competition is positioning itself.
• It is a good idea to organize the sold-out products in terms of keywords and to choose key phrases so that they bring traffic, i. e. to divide them appropriately: to put general keywords on the homepage, detailed ones on the subpages with specific products. We match phrases with valuable potential to the product description.
• Keywords are the basis for the rest of the optimization. The URL, title and description tags are important for SEO because robots read the value of a subpage from them.
• It is important to tailor your campaign to the requirements of the Google search engine, as it is the largest source of traffic.
• Thanks to keywords we inform what the subpage is about.

Also, remember that SEO is a long-term effort. It’s not enough to optimize your website just once – you have to constantly take care of its position in the Google ranking. New sites are constantly popping up in the webspace and each one of them wants to rank as high as possible. Maintaining a high page rank is like a race that repeats itself every day.

A blog for e-commerce – how much does it cost?

If you choose to do it yourself, then blogging is relatively inexpensive. Though as you can see somewhat a time-consuming way to get traffic and conversions to your site. Promotion and involvement in the project will allow you to gain a group of loyal readers and regular customers, significantly increase the number of keywords for which your website ranks and build a positive brand image. Although you may have to wait a while for results, a company blog can benefit your business and personal brand in many ways.