SEO: 7 Ways to Jumpstart an Ecommerce Blog

SEO: 7 Ways to Jumpstart an Ecommerce Blog

Blogs can be excellent way to rank for informational searches that might otherwise be difficult for an ecommerce site. Your voice should suit your brand, but also offer something interesting to the reader in the style that it’s written. If you promote products, try offering relevant, informative content alongside the promotion, like Nordstrom does, below. In addition, adding too many links from a blog post could be seen as over-optimization and devalue the whole page, or even the whole blog if enough posts link too frequently to products. Most ecommerce managers understand the concept of linking from blog posts to relevant individual products, to feed relevance and authority from the blog to the product. Build up blog authority, and increase its visibility with customers, by linking from product pages to specific, relevant blog posts. If your navigation is entirely calendar-based — such as November content or 2017 content — you’re missing a chance to associate relevance with different groups of posts. These days, search engines would devalue as thin content tag pages with one or two blog posts linked on them. If another cataloguing system would be valuable to customers and provide additional contextual relevance for natural search, it can be a good way to increase the number of useful pages that expose older but still-valuable content. Promote Your Content If no one reads or links to a blog post, it’s not going to drive SEO performance.

How to Get 1,034 Email Subscribers in Two Months Using Emotional Triggers
Top 7 WordPress Plugins That Will Turn Your Blog Into a List Building Wizard
10 Browser Extensions For Bloggers That Can Make You a Superstar

Blogs can be excellent way to rank for informational searches that might otherwise be difficult for an ecommerce site. But ecommerce marketers who implement a blog sometimes conclude early on that it doesn’t work.

Where’s the disconnect? The implementation of a strong blog strategy is more difficult than it sounds. The problems with blogging as an search engine optimization tactic usually stem from seven areas.

Say Something Interesting

The first hurdle is actually having something interesting to say. Give your blog a voice, a personality. Do you want to be helpful, playful, provocative? Your voice should suit your brand, but also offer something interesting to the reader in the style that it’s written.

Put on the reader’s hat for a moment: What is her incentive to read your blog or to share it? Is your content informative, or beautiful?

Regardless of the voice, your blog posts should be relevant to your company or industry. Your company is likely full of experts. Harness that energy to fuel the blog.

If you promote products, try offering relevant, informative content alongside the promotion, like Nordstrom does, below.

The Thread is a blog by Nordstrom. It features promotions plus relevant, useful information.
The Thread is a blog by Nordstrom. It features promotions plus relevant, useful information.

Pairing a promotion with strong content has the added benefit of increasing the potential to be shared.

Include Topics Shoppers Care About

Keyword research provides excellent insight into the topics that real searchers and shoppers want to know more about. For merchants who say, “I don’t know what to write,” I say, “Then you haven’t done your keyword research.”

Look especially for questions you can answer. The five W’s (and one H) make a good entrée into topical research: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Find these questions and answer them.

For more on keyword research, read “SEO How-to, Part 5: Keyword Research in Action.”

Interlink with Product Pages

A blog is like other content: to be successful, it needs to have an influx of link authority. The most logical way to accomplish this is to link to the blog’s home page in the header or footer, on every page of a site.

In addition, link sparingly to products and categories from the text of blog posts. “Sparingly” means one to three links in a post, such as what The Hanger Project does.

The Hanger Project Blog links in a controlled way to relevant product categories.
The Hanger Project Blog links in a controlled way to relevant product categories.

You don’t need to link to the same product repeatedly — it doesn’t pass more authority and it’s annoying to readers. In addition, adding too many links from a blog post could be seen as over-optimization and devalue the whole page, or even the whole blog if enough posts link too frequently to products.

Linking from product…

COMMENTS

WORDPRESS: 0
DISQUS: 0