There are many reasons why blogging is great for e-commerce. As well as helping to drive traffic to your website, promote brand awareness, and inform customers of news and offers, blogging also has many technical SEO benefits to provide for your website.
It’s no secret that Google loves fresh, dynamic content and therefore any blog on your domain which is consistently producing new posts on your area of expertise is bound to be viewed favourably by Google’s algorithms. Strategic links back to your own main site are a great way of increasing page ranking, as are link exchanges with other online brands.
As well as the technical SEO benefits, content marketing in and of itself cannot be underestimated as a means of driving traffic and increasing conversions. In order to do this, it’s important that you build up a following for your blog which means, first and foremost, only producing high quality content. Weak, derivative, link-cluttered clickbait simply isn’t going to cut it here.
So we’ve established that blogging for e-commerce is far more compulsory than you may have realised. The next stage in the content marketing lifestyle is to share your content far and wide; place links to your blog posts across all of your social media channels and also look at having these links shared by influencers within your industry wherever possible. Premium quality content is great, but it’s not worth as much if no-one’s going to see it.
You should also place careful consideration on the type of content you are producing. As well as writing articles on trending topics, it’s also important to have evergreen content – blog posts which cover perennial topics that are always going to be popular within Google searches. Such blog posts will index higher over time, attract more traffic, and inevitably provide more conversions.
Google Analytics will prove to be an invaluable tool when it comes to monitoring blog traffic, analysing conversion rates and working out which types of article and topic are proving to be more popular and more profitable. In this way you can put your blog to use in a wider SEO and content marketing strategy over time.
In instances of popular blog posts, it’s worth considering re-purposing content that has performed well for you, either in a guest-blogging capacity or by re-working old blog posts into other shareable forms of online content; think infographics, videos or online slideshows. These can also be shared across your social media channels with captivating pull-quotes taken from the blog text to capture your audience’s attention and imagination. There are a number of creative ways you can promote content online and drive traffic back to your website; the sky’s the limit here.
Blogging is such a vital part of any online presence these days. It doesn’t take too much time either but can have a huge influence on your site, sales and traffic. It’s also a great way to connect with readers and offer them something extra; I’m always reading the blogs of my favourite shopping sites.
Great post and a must read for any business thinking about starting a blog.