If you are not yet blogging for your online store, you are saying “no” to a steady and targeted influx of traffic that is going to your competitors instead. Did you know that the average word count for top ranked content on Google and the other search engines is between 1,100 and 1,400 words? When you consider that most of the products in your online store have short descriptions (between 50 and 100 words), it’s easier to understand why people are not finding your listings in the search engine results.
Blogging is just one of the many effective marketing methods that you can undertake to help gain traction with rankings and attract targeted, organic traffic to your online store. We’ll help you get ahead with these straightforward blogging tips for online stores.
Before we dig in, let’s look at a few more facts. There are other ways that blogging helps you, aside from getting you top rankings. Blogging has a personal appeal – when done properly – that can add flare, uniqueness and veracity to the products that you are selling. When trying to position products, like those listed in your online store, consistent blogging has been shown to have 130% impact on your ROI, say the most recent reports.
Blogging also helps you get more conversions because SEO leads (the types of leads you will attract by blogging) have been shown to have a healthy conversion rate of 13%. When you blog, your content gets indexed and ranked by Google. This results in more people finding your online store and actually clicking through to read your blog and learn about your products. With more than 70% of people ignoring ads and favoring organic listings, it’s easy to understand just how powerful a blog can be.
What can you do to make blogging a routine marketing method for your online store? We’ll help you get the ball rolling with these all-pro blogging tips for online stores.
Here’s what you need to know.
Finding Keywords That Drive Traffic
The first place you are going to want to start with is your keywords. Since most people don’t really think about how other people might be finding them – as in the keywords or phrases that they are typing into the search engines to find what they are looking for – your best place to start with is a keyword research tool like Moz.
Using this tool, you can type in the short or long tail keywords of the products or phrases that you are trying to rank, and this tool will give you a list of each related keyword, it’s potential, how tough it will be to rank, and how much traffic it will drive. Using this keyword tool, you’ll be able to figure out what keywords are the best ones to focus on or include in each new blog post you create, so you can maximize your efforts.
Another great resource for finding keywords is a service called Hit Tail. What is this service and how can it help you find new keywords?
Hit Tail is a unique service that requires that you add a tracking pixel to your online store and website. What it does is rearches all the keywords that people typed into Google to find your store. It then creates new suggestions called “hot keywords” that help you determine what type of content to post next. If you use the hot keywords list, the content you create has a higher potential of ranking on page one of the search engine results by using easier to rank, traffic-driving, long tail keywords that Google loves.
Implementing Proper SEO
Most people are not going to be SEO experts, and you don’t need to hire one if you just follow these simple blogging tips for online stores. But having the right tools in place makes all the difference. This is where a helpful SEO plugin in place like Yoast Premium can help.
Yoast premium costs around $70 and it saves you a lot of time while ensuring that your SEO is correct. Yoast will tell you what you are missing or doing wrong and why, and uses a stoplight system to gauge your SEO, with green being “OK” and red meaning there are issues to correct. Follow the suggestions offered in each post until your SEO light is green, and you will know that your next blog post is primed to rank and help attract more traffic to your online store.
You don’t just have to use Yoast, there are plenty of great SEO plugins that are available, including All in One SEO, which helps you better optimize your online store for search engines and improved rankings. Most importantly, you’ll want to make sure you’re following the seven ironclad rules of SEO for online stores to make the most of your marketing efforts.
SEO goes beyond just optimization, proper SEO for ecommerce also involves keyword optimization, content curation, social signals and more. Glean even more insight on this from our related guide on Ecommerce SEO Tips.
Use Proper Grammar
Google uses thousands of algorithms to rank content and blogs online. The most important one is grammar, inclusive also of style and prose. Let’s face it, most of us are not professional writers. To avoid getting dinged on rankings for your blogs due to bad grammar, use a service called Grammarly, which proofreads the content you are writing before you post it and helps you correct bad grammar and spelling errors while simultaneously improving readability along the way.
It’s important to understand that not only Google is judging the quality of your writing, but your prospective readers and customers are, too. Poorly written content rarely ranks high in Google’s results because it must contend with excellent content that offers a real value to the end user. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure you take the time to write gourmet content that Google devours. If you’re not skilled at writing web content, look to services like Scripted to hire professional freelance writers that will make your content shine.
Images Matter
The images that you add to each post are important, too. Google loves media rich blogs, but only if it knows what your images are about. When adding images to your posts, make sure you add a description, alt tag and tags to each image. This sounds a lot more confusing than it really is. In fact, if you are using Yoast, as suggested above, they offer a helpful guide on how to properly tag images that you really ought to read so you know once and for all.
One more reason to ensure that you’re using engaging, properly tagged images is because these help you with ecommere social proof, and become embedded assets to each blog and social post you syndicate as a result of your efforts. For even more info, we turn to our friends at SEO Sherpa, who have recently published an updated and comprehensive guide and infographic on image SEO. Have a look at it for even more insight.
Adding Video to Your Blogs
Videos can be powerful marketing tools on their own. But when you add them to your blog, you also help it rank better and faster. This is because video adds multimedia content that feeds a link back to your blog (from the video description).
For example, if you made a video, like the one you see near the top this blog, and posted it to YouTube with a short description and link to your blog, as well as on your other social circles, like Facebook or Twitter, now you will have powerful social signals (which we will get to in a moment) pointing into your blog. This helps add more authority, and helps you attract more traffic along the way as well.
What’s more, videos are proven to increase conversion rates at your online store, even if you’re just adding them to the blog (like we do). Need some more convincing? Glean some insight from these stats, which we originally posted in our related guide: Why Product Videos Increase Conversion Rates:
- Videos have a 16.85% conversion rate as compared to standard banners (2.14%) and mobile (1.62%). (eMarketer)
- 58% of consumers trust brands with videos more. (Retail Touch Point)
- 59% of consumers will watch a video that is part of your website content. (Reach Engine)
- 96% of shoppers rely on product videos when making a buying decision. (Animoto)
- 92.6% of shoppers rely on visuals when making a buying decision. (VoucherCloud)
- Consumers who watch a product video are 1.7 times likelier to convert. (Invodo)
- 12% of consumers will watch a video on an ecommerce site. (MediaPost)
- 57% of shoppers will return less and buy in confidence when product videos are offered. (MediaPost)
The Power of Social Signals
Social signals do wonders for SEO. So what are they? Every time someone shares a post with a link to your blog, or creates a bookmark, it counts as a unique social signal. Google and the other search engines count these and use them to help rank the popularity, relevance and authority of each piece of indexed content. While social signals certainly help rankings for your blog content, it’s important to keep in mind that they are only one piece of the content marketing puzzle for online retailers.
If social medai isn’t part of your ongoing marketing game plan, you really need to change things up. To better convince you, take a look at these 28 reasons why you need to add a social media marketing plan to your agenda. When considering social, it’s important to also incorporate a diversified strategy that helps you reach more potential readers and prospective customers by expanding your reach across multiple social channels. Along the way, make sure you don’t overlook the power of these helpful social media tools.
When in Doubt, Reach Out
Struggling to get those blog posts created in a timely fashion? Lucky for you, there are plenty of services online that offer freelance writers, posting services and even social syndication. You’ll want to compare each service provider to determine quality and pricing before choosing one. With some time and online research, you can easily find reliable services provider to meet your needs.
Now we’ve already covered a popular service above called Scripted, but they’re not your only option. Look to some competing services as well, especially if your marketing budget is trim. You can easily find competitive rates on sites like Fiverr, UpWork, OneStopWritings and many others. Do yourself a favor and take the time to thoroughly vet any writers your plan on bringing on board, so you can ensure that you’re getting top-notch content from the get-go.
Syndicating Content
Lastly, make sure you take advantage of content syndication. You’ve worked hard on creating that newsworthy blog post, now it’s time to share it with the world. Services like Outbrain get your content featured on millions of websites and help drive targeted traffic back to your blog. All you pay for is each click and you set and control the monthly budget, too.
Outbrain isn’t the only content syndication service you can consider, though. Competing services, like Taboola offer the same type of spend and spread and work in nearly an identical manner, too. This gives you more options to consider and will help you find the write type of content syndication service for your marketing needs.
Creating a Content Marketing Machine
Take a look at this helpful infographic we’ve created. It illustrates the many steps that we’ve outlined for you in today’s post. In no time at all, you can be getting more sales by using one of the most effective marketing methods known to man: Blogging.
