{"id":6895,"date":"2017-09-26T08:36:19","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T05:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/?p=6895"},"modified":"2021-06-29T08:19:34","modified_gmt":"2021-06-29T05:19:34","slug":"ecommerce-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/ecommerce-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Use a Blog to Increase Traffic and Sales of Your Ecommerce Store"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blogging is a valuable tool for all online businesses and that includes eCommerce stores.<\/p>\n

Through blogging, you can increase traffic coming to your website either organically (search traffic) or from social media networks. It\u2019s great for brand awareness, customer support and if done correctly, rankings and conversions.<\/p>\n

Why should all eCommerce websites have a dedicated blog?<\/h2>\n

There are many reasons why all eCommerce websites should have a dedicated blog.<\/p>\n

Many eCommerce owners believe that it\u2019s a waste of time, but as we will see below, a successful blog<\/a><\/strong> can assist in the growth of an online store and in many ways, guarantee long-term success.<\/p>\n

\"benefits<\/p>\n

Source<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Less dependency on Paid Advertising<\/h3>\n

The majority of eCommerce startups follow the same business plan which consists of three main steps:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Build a website<\/li>\n
  2. Add products<\/li>\n
  3. Run campaigns on AdWords<\/strong><\/a> or Facebook to get traffic and make sales.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    While this is a good plan, once they stop putting money on advertising or for various reasons advertising costs increase making the campaigns not profitable, sales drop and problems rise to the surface.<\/p>\n

    This is the point where they start looking for alternative ways of getting traffic, and soon they realize that putting all their eggs in one basket was not a very good idea.<\/p>\n

    The thing is, blogging can be an alternative way to get traffic to a website but it\u2019s not as immediate as AdWords or Facebook Ads.<\/p>\n

    To take advantage of blogging, you have to plan for it in advance.<\/p>\n

    Any money you spend on setting up a blog or publishing content will not generate any returns in the short term but it\u2019s one of the best investments you can do for your businesses in the long term.<\/p>\n

    It takes a lot of time to rank in Google<\/strong><\/a> and get traffic to your blog but it\u2019s a step you have to take and the sooner you take it the better it will be.<\/p>\n

    Over the years I had the opportunity to SEO Audit<\/strong><\/a> a number of eCommerce websites, both new startups, and mature businesses, and it always comes to the same advice.<\/p>\n

    Don\u2019t spend all your advertising budget on ads.\u00a0 Allocate at least 20% of your monthly budget on content marketing and blogging and increase that gradually until you reach of point where the dependency on Paid advertising is manageable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    The Internet is changing rapidly, advertising costs increase and competition is becoming more intense in all niches but one thing is for certain.<\/p>\n

    A well-planned blog with high-quality content is likely to attract traffic from search engines<\/strong><\/a> and social networks for years to come.<\/p>\n

    More quality pages in search engines index<\/h3>\n

    Ecommerce websites tend of having a lot of pages (products, categories, tags) but many of them carry the same content. While this is not necessarily bad for SEO, it\u2019s not good either.<\/p>\n

    Category and tag pages have the same content as product pages, the same products may be available on other websites on the Internet and this creates duplicate content issues.<\/p>\n

    Besides optimizing your category<\/strong><\/a> and product pages<\/strong><\/a>, another way to increase the number of unique pages search engines have in their index is through blogging.<\/p>\n

    More quality pages in the index mean better rankings and more traffic.<\/p>\n

    Link building<\/h3>\n

    When you start a link-building campaign to improve the rankings<\/strong><\/a> of your shop, you will soon realize that other bloggers or websites are not willing to link to your homepage or product pages.<\/p>\n

    Why is that? Because nobody wants to promote a product for free (unless they are affiliates or have other benefits), and because they are afraid of getting a Google penalty (if Google thinks that the links were paid for).<\/p>\n

    So, how do you get out of this loop and build natural links<\/strong><\/a> that can increase the rankings of the most important pages of your store? The answer is through blogging.<\/p>\n

    Everybody is willing to link to high-quality pages, even if these pages are part of a website selling goods or services online.<\/p>\n

    Ok, but the links will point to the blog, how will this benefit my website?<\/em><\/strong> In a number of ways.<\/p>\n

    For starters, it will improve the authority of your domain<\/strong><\/a> and it will increase the overall rankings and traffic of your blog.<\/p>\n

    Second, as we will see in a new post dedicated to link building, there is a way to take advantage of the incoming links to boost the rankings of your product or category pages.<\/p>\n

    Internal Linking<\/h3>\n

    One of my favorite SEO methods is internal linking<\/strong><\/a>. Internal links are links pointing to other pages of your website (and not to pages outside your domain).<\/p>\n

    Unlike external links, there is no fear of Google penalties and besides being useful to users, they also help search engine crawlers discover and index more pages from your website.<\/p>\n

    Having an active blog is a great way to build internal links pointing to your homepage, category, and product pages.<\/p>\n

    Social media Marketing<\/h3>\n

    Social media marketing<\/strong><\/a> is essential for eCommerce websites. Having a solid presence in social media networks is a good way to promote your brand (awareness) and products.<\/p>\n

    To be successful in social media, besides using paid ads, you also need to keep your accounts loaded with fresh, high-quality content and a blog is a perfect tool for that purpose.<\/p>\n

    Enrich your blog posts with images and videos so that they are more interesting and attractive when shared by users.<\/p>\n

    The graph below shows the different types of content and their average shares in social media networks.<\/p>\n

    \"average
    \n    Source<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

    Customer Care and Support<\/h3>\n

    An active blog can also be used for customer care and support purposes. Use the blog to cover topics related to your products that your users might have questions about.<\/p>\n

    Use the blog to make new product announcements and establish a communication channel between your company and customers.<\/p>\n

    Brand Awareness and Trust<\/h3>\n

    Before making an online purchase, users need to feel confident that they will not lose their money, so one of the things they do before hitting the \u201cBuy Now\u201d button, is to search Google and find out more details about the particular company.<\/p>\n

    If you have a blog, then it is very likely that a number of posts will show up for searches related to your \u201cbrand name\u201d and besides indirectly promoting your brand, it helps in establishing trust.<\/p>\n

    \"benefits<\/p>\n

    Infographic Source<\/a><\/p>\n

    How to set up your eCommerce blog?<\/h2>\n

    There are many ways to set up a blog, depending on the eCommerce platform you are using.<\/p>\n

    If you are already on WordPress and Woocommerce then adding a blog is a very easy task since this is already built into WordPress.<\/p>\n

    If you are not using Woocommerce, you can still set up a WordPress Blog as a subdomain i.e. blog.myecommercewebsite.com<\/em> or folder myecommercewebsite.com\/blog.<\/em><\/p>\n

    What is important is to use one of the two versions above (i.e. subdomain or folder) and NOT to set up a blog on its own domain.<\/p>\n

    The reason is that you want to take advantage of the pages\/posts of the blog and increase the number of pages you have in the index and of course to consolidate the link juice <\/em>from any incoming links pointing to the blog pages.<\/p>\n

    Hint: <\/strong>You can read my detailed guide on how to setup a WordPress Blog<\/strong><\/a> to get started in minutes.<\/p>\n

    Other things to take care, related to the setup of your eCommerce blog:<\/p>\n