5 effective content strategies to employ for eCommerce
In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, it might feel a little daunting to try and make your products and services stand out amongst all of the other options available on the World Wide Web. However, with these five effective content strategies, you can master eCommerce SEO and maximize your online sales.
Marketing developments and eCommerce
Search engine optimisation is essential for boosting your rankings on SERPs to drive organic traffic to your website. This makes conversions much more likely as you establish a visible brand identity and build up a strong customer base.
Technology and digital platforms play a fundamental role in e-commerce, from website optimisation, to increased visibility and CRM (customer relation management) through mobile apps and social media. All of this helps to increase a customer’s likelihood to buy.
To make the most out of marketing developments and online platforms, you must understand how to implement SEO into your content strategy. Not only will this help you to market your brand as more accessible, authoritative and trustworthy, but it will enable you to establish links between your website and other companies, to carry out thorough audits, and better understand your target audience to make sure you’re providing the products and services that people actually want.
Without further ado, here are five content strategies to boost your visibility and maximise your sales:
Thorough and insightful keyword research
When constructing an effective SEO strategy for eCommerce, conducting thorough keyword research is one of the first things you should do. This will help you gain insight into the sorts of terms your target audience are searching for. Once you know which terms are relevant, you can work on creating content that fits these keywords, whether through exact matches, phrase matches or broad matches.
- Exact matches – Queries must match your keywords meaning exactly. These keywords have the lowest reach because of their specificity, but are the most relevant.
- Phrase matches – Queries must include your keyword’s meaning, but they don’t have to be verbatim. These keywords have a higher reach than exact matches, but are not as relevant.
- Broad matches – Queries must relate to your chosen keyword, but there is a little more wiggle room in terms of phrasing. These keywords have the broadest reach but the lowest relevance.
It’s important to know how your competitors are using keywords related to your products to see which terms are most relevant. Metrics used to carry out keyword research include relevancy, volume, competition and buyer intent. Google search engine’s autofill feature is a great way to understand common query terms, but you can also use platforms like Reddit and Twitter to see which keywords are popular and trending.
Website layout and accessibility
It’s all very well boosting organic traffic to attract customers to your page in the first place but to get them to stay you need to make sure your website is optimised for user browsing. An accessible website layout will also make it much easier for Google crawlers to index your page so that your site can rank higher in SERPs.
Having an accessible website isn’t just about writing clear and coherent yet creative content that will entice your customers to stay. To optimise user experience, you also need to make sure that customers can navigate easily between web pages. In general, a good rule of thumb for this is that no web page should ever be more than three clicks away from the home page.
Additionally, with mobile devices generating more than half of global website traffic (according to a 2023 survey carried out by Statistica) it’s more important than ever that your website is mobile-friendly. You might want to consider spacing out your links, stripping back your content, and eliminating pop-ups as part of your site’s mobile SEO. For more advice on this in particular, you can visit our Mobile SEO page, or contact us for more information.
To guide Google crawlers to your site we’d also recommend submitting a sitemap to Google. This is a file that contains information about the important pages and files on your site, as well as the relationships between them.
Compelling, high-quality crafted content
As well as SEO technicalities like keyword research and site function and accessibility, one of the most important factors of a site’s search optimization is its actual content. Rather than just shoehorning in relevant keywords to your web page, you should concentrate on producing content that reads well and conveys relevant information about your product in a professional yet accessible tone of voice. In order to make your website stand out against your competitors, you should follow EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust).
You can establish authority by creating links that encourage other sites to link back to yours, or by including testimonials to prove that you have experience in your field. Like this one from BCB Group:
“There aren’t enough superlatives to describe the Embryo team and the digital marketing solutions they’ve provided for our business. We’ve been working with the team for over 18 months, and I can say that they are an extension of our in-house marketing team and consistently go above and beyond with service levels, creative solutions and input, as well as supporting our day-to-day efforts.”
In addition, your content should include title tags (a bit of HTML code used to specify the title of a webpage) and meta descriptions (this summarises a page’s content and presents it to users in the search results). Websites that also include images, product and category pages and URLS also tend to lead to higher conversion rates than those that don’t.
In, out, in, out, and you link it all about
One of the best ways to establish your website’s authority amongst a swathe of other businesses on the internet is to use the online network to your advantage by building consistent links within your own website and with external sites. The more good links your website has – defined by the relevance of the page that has been linked to – the more trustworthy your website will be regarded as by Google.
Internal linking:
Say for example you’re writing content about Network Science, Digital Marketing Podcasts, or even Nostalgia Marketing, if you can link to these parent pages on your website your customers can easily click through and find the content that is useful to them
Backlining to external sites
To increase your site authority even further you should work on establishing partnerships or connections with other websites who can then create links to your content. This works a bit like an online review so that you can generate more organic traffic to your own website from external sources.
Tools like Semrush are extremely useful for finding any mentions of your website that don’t contain a direct link. Additionally, you can apply to have relevant links redirected to your web pages if they link to a site that is no longer in use.
The websites of your existing clients are a great resource for this, as are journalism articles and internet forums. For example, when our CEO Ross Green was interviewed for Ilovemanchester, the published article contained useful backlinks to our website.
Carry out regular reviews and audits
To have an accurate and up-to-date idea of how well your eCommerce is performing, you must carry out regular reviews and audits of your website. This will allow you to improve on the things that are working, and to make changes to the things that would benefit from a reconfigurement.
While the rapid development in technology and the digital marketing industry means lots of exciting new opportunities for establishing your brand identity and growing your customer base, it also means that there is an even greater need to carry out frequent analyses.
You can perform content analysis by using SEO tools to identify problems with titles or description tags, duplicate content, fix broken links, and increase site speed. Google Analytics is really useful for measuring the impact of your SEO content strategies by tracking changes in your organic traffic, keyword rankings CTR and bounce rate, and profit.
Let the eCommerce commence
Now that you have these content strategies under your belt, it’s time to go forth and implement them into your website. Start with keyword research and focus on crafting high-quality content that conveys accurate and clear information about your products and services. Make sure that you don’t underestimate the importance of network connections and B2B relationships, and don’t forget to carry out frequent reviews.
Interested in learning more about how you can implement SEO content strategies into your eCommerce?
