Why content is essential for your business now more than ever.
When it comes to eCommerce, nothing is more important than the words that convince your customers to buy. Even with a fabulously designed website, your customers are unlikely to hit that buy now button if your message isn’t convincing enough.
Quality content and well-crafted copy should be at the core of your eCommerce strategy. But in order to convert those visitors into buying clients, your content must be above average.
Create Content That Stands Out
Did you know that every minute on the internet across the globe, 347,222 stories are posted on Instagram? How about the whopping 41,666,667 messages sent via WhatsApp every 60 seconds? Or the 500 hours of video uploaded on YouTube? That’s a whole lot of content in just one minute.
Meanwhile, during those same 60 seconds, consumers worldwide spend almost 1 million dollars on online shopping.
So how do you stand out from the crowd and attract the buying force of the internet when they are bombarded with ever-increasing digital information?
You step up your game.
Enter the eCommerce Race With A Prize-Winning Stallion
Think of eCommerce as a horse race – entering the competition with poorly produced content is like trying to win the race on a three-legged horse. Instead of finishing as a winner, you won’t as much as budge at the start line. Where you’ll end up is called the sausage factory.
To avoid the sausage factory, start by creating high-quality and engaging content targeted at your audience.
Create Relevant Content For Your Business
Your top priority should be making sure that your content is engaging for your audience. Who knows, you might even get those highly desired backlinks that help your business rank higher in search results. And the more good quality links you get, the more Google robots like you.
In other words, linking is a vital ranking factor. And how do we get the links? By writing relevant content!
See how easy this is?
Also, when you create relevant content for your business, you not only attract more traffic and increase your visibility in the search engines. You build brand awareness and authority in your field at the same time. Win-win.
Use Different Types Of Content To Boost SEO
While video is nowadays considered king, there is still power in the written word. Besides, producing copy is far more budget-friendly than a complete video production.
The best way to stay in the game, though, is to create a good combination of content to help your SEO efforts. Think of a mix of text, video, and infographics, for instance.
Here’s a few examples of the types of content to add to your eCommerce store:
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Blogs. Blogging builds authority in your field and brings more sales. It can drive a steady stream of organic traffic to your website and help you rank higher in Google search over time. Treat your Shopify blog as an essential part of your eCommerce strategy.
- Email newsletters. Your pathway straight to your client. Great platform to inform about product launches or anything you want to communicate to your client. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to scale your business.
- Infographics. Visual representations that give an easy-to-understand overview of the topic. They’re not only easy to digest, but they also get shared too. Just take a look at your Pinterest or LinkedIn feed, and you’ll get the picture. (Pun intended).
- Video. Think of brand films, animations, tutorials, testimonials etc. Costly but a great way to build brand awareness.
- Downloadable Content. E-books, white papers, templates etc. By offering your visitors something of high value, you will increase your chances of turning them into leads.
- Podcasts. Easily consumed. You can reach your audience on the move. Also, podcast listeners are usually the most loyal content consumers.
- Social media content. Builds brand awareness and directs traffic to your store. A great way to engage your audience.
To get higher rankings in the search results, your website copy needs to be search engine optimized with relevant keywords, title tag, meta description, and headings.
And you need to make sure your text is original.
The Danger of The Dupes
Duplicate content is a problem, especially in eCommerce. For instance, when different stores sell the same items and all use the same product descriptions provided by the manufacturer, identical content ends up all across the web. This makes it difficult for crawlers to identify which one they should favor.
Search engines rarely show multiple versions of the same content. Instead, they will choose the best page version and put that on the top.
So, duplicate content might lead to lower rankings and traffic losses, hurting your sales significantly. To stand out and make it to the top, stop using the same product descriptions as your competitors. Customize your copy to make it original and tell a story about your product. It might take more time and effort, but eventually, it will lead to more sales.
Content Marketing vs. Paid Advertising
Where many businesses go wrong is that they focus on paid advertising alone. When in fact, content marketing and paid advertising work quite nicely together.
The great thing about paid advertising is that you will see immediate results: you can shoot to the top of Google search in an instant.
However, the downside is that once you stop paying for those ads, your visibility goes “poof”. It’s gone.
Good thing we have content marketing! Yes, there are some upfront costs there, and it might take some time to start seeing results. But once the content is published, it will begin climbing the SERP ladder earning clicks along the way, without you ever having to invest in it again.
So why waste all the cheddar on paid advertising when there’s a much more economical way to drive traffic to your eCommerce site?
From "okay" to "Amazing"
Competing in eCommerce is tough. In order to hit those sales goals, your focus should be on making sure all the parts of the engine are well oiled and working together.
If you’re still struggling with content creation and wish to take things to the next level, let our Growth Services help.
JENNI REHN, SEO CONTENT SPECIALIST, WOOLMAN OY