How Your eCommerce Blog Can Improve Your eCommerce Sales
Disclaimer: If you’re an existing online retailer, these eCommerce blog tips will push your eCommerce sales over the edge.
As an eCommerce agency whose primary objective is to increase revenue and profitability for eCommerce sites, our wheels began turning at the question:
“What can your eCommerce blog do to improve your eCommerce sales?”
Everyone is always buzzing about the importance of blogging. Blogging takes time, energy, thought, and content. You know what builds credibility with customers and search engines? Time. Energy. Thought. Content. That’s why an eCommerce blog is a powerful asset to any eCommerce strategy.
Here are 3 tips to help you improve sales through your eCommerce blog, drive more traffic to your eCommerce site, and give customers and search engines the content that they are starving for:
1. SEO… duh.
Your eCommerce blog can have the strength to become a search engine’s best friend and a customer’s guiding light to sealing the purchasing decision. Optimizing your eCommerce blog for targeted keywords means increased traffic to your eCommerce site, more eyeballs, and inevitably increased sales.
The keywords you use in your eCommerce blog give power to the keywords that your eCommerce site is already optimized for. If you’re a Magento eCommerce merchant or a Wordpress blogger, our favorite extension/plugin for SEO ranking is Yoast. It dumbs down the search engine optimizing for you by reminding you where and how to implant your SEO keywords on both your blog and your website.
Here are some SEO blog tips that will help you remember where to put your target keywords:
- Your blog title
- The first paragraph of your blog copy
- Repeatedly through your blog copy
- The blog article URL
- The blog meta description
- The alt text on your blog images
- Alongside related blog keywords
Here are some other SEO best practices for blogging:
- Bold your keywords (because search engines read your blog like a person would; the important words should stand out.)
- Include an image in your article. Let your images rank in an image search with the appropriate alt text.
- Have the optimal number of words (a 300 word minimum) for higher search engine ranking.
- Use short sentences. The easier it is for a human to read your blog article, the easier it is for a search engine to read it.
2. People believe what they see, so make sure your site is slightly.
Your eCommerce blog could very well be the first impression of your eCommerce business that visitors see. If you want to drive conversions through your blog, then you have to expect that people will do their research and browse around the rest of your eCommerce site. The way the rest of your site looks, feels, and operates can either support or hurt an online customer’s purchasing decision.
Just because you’re pushing out content every day, optimizing your eCommerce blog like a pro, and following all the other blogging best practices, it’s no excuse for thoughtless, standardized, “out-of-the-box” user experience design and development. If your site is unsightly or unfriendly to users, you’ve got a major problem on your hands.
One of the most convincing drivers of conversions is good user experience and user interface design and development. The purpose of user experience is to make your customers’ lives easier. People love things that make their lives easier, and if your eCommerce site does that for visitors who come through from your blog, you’ll be leaps and bounds closer to driving conversions and improving eCommerce sales.
User experience/user interface design and development isn’t just the key to driving conversions, but it’s fundamental in turning your online store into a customer loyalty machine. Give people a reason to keep returning to your blog and your eCommerce site with a friendly user experience/user interface. Learn more in our article: 5 TIPS TO CREATE CUSTOMER LOYALTY THROUGH USER EXPERIENCE.
3. Be consistent in showcasing your products.
Being consistent doesn’t only pertain to posting blog articles regularly and on schedule, but it relates to consistently posting on a related series of eCommerce blog topics. For instance, since you’re trying to boost your eCommerce sales through your eCommerce blog, it’s a solid idea to feature a product in your blog each week.
Use your “Product Feature Blog Series” as a tool to divulge information about the product that users wouldn’t be able to get from your site’s product page alone. Let your passion for your product shine through in this regular, weekly product-feature blog post. Show your readers how much you love the product and get them hyped up about it; hyped up enough to contribute in the comments section.
There doesn’t need to be a discount involved in your weekly product feature, but you absolutely want to drive conversions through this weekly blog article. Don’t forget to link to the product page in your eCommerce site. The more unique and innovative your blog article on the product is, the more engaged with product your reader will become.
Remember, there are a couple of things that eCommerce shoppers have to face by shopping online rather than at a brick-and-mortar location:
1) There is no sales person to walk them through the buying process.
2) They are unable to hold the product in their hand before they buy it.
Keep this in mind as you are writing about your product. Let your blog article convey all the juicy details and paint a picture in the shopper’s mind about the product that you are driving them to purchase.
Now go forth, be fruitful and multiply your eCommerce blog. If done properly, these eCommerce blogging tips will yield you:
- Higher site traffic
- Repeat blog traffic
- Increased eCommerce sales
- New online customers
