Ecommerce blogging: five proven reasons why it should be part of your SEO strategy

Should ecommerce businesses blog?

That’s a question many ecommerce business owners find confusing; it’s easy to visualize the benefit a small business with a few products can get by blogging, but when you run an ecommerce store with hundreds or thousands of products, is there still any benefit to blogging?

Apparently, there is.

According to research by Seewhy, 99% of people won’t buy on their first visit to your site. There’s also a popular marketing axiom called ‘the rule of 7’. It says that many of your prospects won’t buy from you until they have seen your marketing message at least seven times.

To top it all, there’s the issue with SEO. Google and all other search engines that matter LOVE content; having more content – especially targeted, optimized content – will go a long way to boost your overall search engine rankings, leading to more sales for you.

If you run an ecommerce store, blogging can still serve as a good way to give yourself a dramatic boost in search traffic and sales.

Here are five proven ways to use blogging as a core part of your ecommerce SEO strategy:

1) Publish longer, more comprehensive content

When you want to compete with major competitors who are often willing to spend millions of dollars on SEO to promote individual product and category pages, blogging just might be your saving grace.

It’s no secret that Google really loves content, and having rich and informative content of any kind automatically gives you an advantage over a product page.

If you want to compete for major keywords, however, you need more than just “content.” You need comprehensive evergreen content.

Several studies have been conducted to determine the kind of content that leads to high search engine rankings and the consensus is that longer content of above 1,000 words rank better.

In fact, an authoritative study by serpIQ concluded that you need content of at least 2,000 words to rank in the top 10 positions in Google.

There are many benefits to publishing longer, more comprehensive content. These include:

• Google and other search engines naturally loves authoritative, comprehensive content.
• You have a higher chance of getting more traffic through long-tail keywords.
• Research shows that longer content get more social shares and backlinks – all factors that influence search engine rankings

If you really want to make blogging work for your ecommerce business, be sure to invest in long-form content.

2) Publish more content

You need to work on your content frequency if you want blogging to really work for your ecommerce business. Publishing whenever you feel like it, or publishing one or two articles a week, won’t cut it for an ecommerce business.

You need to ensure that you’re constantly creating new content that promotes your core categories and product pages. For this to really make an impact you need to publish more content.

Interestingly, statistics from Hubspot show that businesses that publish 16+ blog posts per month get up to 3.5 times more traffic than businesses that publish less than four blog posts per month.

As the statistics show, content quality alone isn’t sufficient. Quantity and frequency matter too. Publishing more content will make blogging more effective for your ecommerce business.

3) Make your blog a core part of your internal link building

Internal link building is one of the most effective and underrated on-page SEO techniques. Many people are crazy about getting links from external sources, which can be time-consuming, yet they ignore precious real estate on their own websites that can help improve SEO visibility for some of their key pages.

In a recent case study, Mention was able to increase their search traffic by a whopping 373% in 6 weeks by implementing on-page SEO strategies. Apparently, internal link building played a key role in this increase.

It’s highly unlikely that people will want to link to a commercial product page on your ecommerce store, but they are much more likely to link to an informative article on your blog. This leads to more page authority for your blog posts, which you can channel to key product pages by directly linking to them from your articles.

4) Make it a core part of your link building strategy

To enjoy great search engine rankings you need a lot of links, but how likely are people to link out to a product page on your ecommerce store without receiving some sort of compensation from you? Highly unlikely.

However, how likely are they to link to your blog? Very likely.

You can effectively use blogging to boost your domain authority and search traffic to your individual posts; these individual posts can then channel this traffic to your top product and category pages.

Many people have reported experiencing a massive boost in search traffic from using an outreach strategy like the Skyscraper Technique to promote their blog posts, but it’s highly unlikely that you can use similar strategies to boost traffic to ecommerce pages.

For these techniques to work, you need quality content for people to link to. The solution is instead to write high quality content (on your blog), then do effective outreach to get people to link to this content. The content improves in search engine rankings, links back to your product pages and funnels some link juice and traffic back to these pages.

Also, the data doesn’t lie. Statistics from Hubspot show that businesses that blog get 97% more links than businesses that do not blog.

5) Answer user questions

Most of the queries people type into Google and other search engines are in the form of questions. If you run a wedding ecommerce store, it isn’t unusual to have people searching for “what is the best wedding dress?”

Naturally, you can’t title your product pages “what is the best wedding dress?”, but you can create a blog post with just that title. This blog post can then go further and compare various wedding dresses based on certain factors and then link to these individual dresses on your store.

Blogging makes it easy to create content tailored to queries users have. You can then use this content to drive traffic and sales to individual products.

Conclusion

I’ve been a blogging coach for years now (having helped thousands of people setup their own blogs). However, I’ve found the question of whether blogging can be used for ecommerce to be one of the most confusing ones among business owners.

On the surface, there seem to be no connection between blogging and ecommerce. When you consider the above usages of blogging however, it makes sense that it is a perfect fit for an ecommerce business.

Robert Mening is a blogging consultant, entrepreneur and founder of the Website Setup blogging project.

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