You have e-commerce. Do you want to boost your traffic and improve your conversion rate?
Then you must keep a blog. It is not the advice most often put forward, but it is probably one of the most important in the end.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to publish an article every other day to get meaningful results.
If you have an e-commerce site, you should seriously consider the idea of creating a blog! We tell you why.
Creating a blog improves the natural referencing of your e-commerce site
Creating an e-commerce site is one thing, developing your traffic is another. To develop your e-commerce activity, your turnover, your profits, you must do two things:
Increase traffic, i.e. the number of visitors, the audience…
Improve your conversion rates > the proportion of visitors who turn into customers, who buy.
Why create a blog on your e-commerce site? The first answer is that it helps to improve the natural referencing of your site. Natural referencing refers to the visibility of your site’s pages on search engines (on Google in particular). You must aim for a good SEO, i.e. make sure that the pages of your e-commerce site appear in the first results of Google on your target queries.
Regularly publishing new content is one of the main techniques to improve the natural referencing of your site. For several reasons:
This increases the number of pages on your site and makes it possible to increase the internal links between the different pages of your site.
This makes it possible to obtain backlinks, i. e. links on third-party sites or social networks that link to pages on your site – in this case to articles on your blog. Backlinks have a very important role in SEO. However, it is difficult to obtain backlinks when the site you have only has product pages…
This sends a very important signal to search engines: your site is alive, active, and is regularly enriched with new pages. Regular publication is the key to maintaining and improving natural referencing.
This allows you to “work” on your key expressions and keywords – i.e. those associated with your activity, the products you sell. For example, if you sell jewelry, you could write an article answering a question that some of your potential customers may ask themselves, such as: “What jewelry to offer at a christening?».
Result: Cleor now appears in first place on the query “jewel offer baptism” (and other expressions associating these keywords).
This is an excellent technique: if you are looking for story ideas, list the questions your potential customers have about search engines. Do you sell clothing for pregnant people? Put yourself in the person of a pregnant woman and list her concerns. Ultimately, each question can be the subject of an article! Every time a visitor to your site sends you a comment with a question, why not publish the answer as a blog article?
In SEO, content is king. Creating rich and quality content is the best way to improve the visibility of your e-commerce site on Google and other search engines. That’s why you need to keep a blog.
As we said at the very beginning of this article, your objective is twofold: to improve incoming traffic to your e-commerce site and to improve the conversion rate. We saw that keeping a blog made it possible to achieve the first objective. We will now see that this also makes it possible to achieve the second objective.
Natural referencing is a lever to win over customers. It improves the visibility of your online store and attracts more people to your site. A blog is a tool for customer acquisition, but it is also, and this is what we will discuss here, a loyalty tool. Blogging allows you to build a community spirit, to create a link between your customers and your brand.
Indeed, the blog is the best support to share your values, your news, your state of mind. A blog allows you to do storytelling, to tell your story, that of your company, your team. The blog article is the ideal format to tell a story. Not too long, not too short. You can integrate visuals into your articles to make them more lively and engaging.
Keeping an e-commerce blog is also a way to showcase your products – your key products, your new products – in their best light. Where did you get the idea? How are they produced? What are their characteristics?
In a word, the blog is a channel for customer dialogue and customer dialogue is the key to customer loyalty.
Keep an e-commerce blog to develop your notoriety, position yourself as an expert in your field and reassure your visitors
Writing well written and interesting content allows you to have more readers and more sharing. This ultimately results in an improvement of your natural referencing. Links to your site, whether they come from social networks, other blogs, forums, are all positive signals sent to Google.
Keeping an e-commerce blog helps to boost the number of shares on social networks and links. If you only have static pages on your e-commerce site (for example your “Who are we? “, how do you want to share pages from your site on social networks? You cannot share the same pages indefinitely. Hence the importance of dynamic pages.
Publishing blog articles on your website allow you to show your visitors and potential customers that you are an expert in your field. To show it and prove it. In e-commerce, one of the major challenges is reinsurance. Internet users are a priori suspicious of e-commerce sites as long as they are not known brands. Keeping a blog helps to reassure your audience, to give them confidence, to demonstrate that you are a serious and reliable merchant.
How to find good blog post ideas?
When we advise an e-commerce trader to keep a blog, the answer is invariably the same every time: “I have no writing skills” or “I don’t have the time”. This is not the way to think. We saw that blogging was not a “little something extra”, one aside. This can have a decisive impact on the growth of your traffic and the improvement of your conversion rates. You necessarily have time to write one article per week. No need to write novels. The important thing is to write relevant articles that may be of interest to your target audience. 300 – 400 words can do the trick!
The real challenge is not writing the articles, it’s finding the topics. To do this, you can consult the sites and blogs that deal with your theme, which are linked to the products you sell. Reading what others write is always inspiring.
You can write articles about:
- The history of your company, its genesis, its values, its growth, its vision.
- Your products. How were they designed? How are they made? Where do they come from? What are they used for? How to use them? What are their characteristics?
- Your news: events, new product launches, sales announcements, promotions…
- News in your niche. If you sell swimming pools, inform your customers about the evolution of the regulations.
If you really feel unable to write a single line, if you are definitely angry with the spelling, consider using the services of a freelance writer. Today, it is very easy to find them, thanks in particular to platforms such as Malt or Freelancer.
Find out how to find and choose a good freelance editor and our overview of web editor rates.
Conclusion
You will have understood, we would not encourage you too much to launch a blog on your ecommerce site. Some ecommerce CMS allow you to easily implement a blog on your ecommerce. This is the case with Wix, for example. Keeping a blog will allow you to make your site more lively, more human, richer, more interactive too (via sharing, comments) – not to mention the decisive impact that a blog regularly updated with articles can have on SEO.
Keeping a blog requires a certain investment, especially time, it’s true. But if you really want to develop your ecommerce business, the time spent managing your blog will not be a waste of time. This may be the best way to use your time.
Services to create, maintain and rank your business blog
- Content Writing: Answer your customers’ questions with content that is enjoyable and converts
- Creation of backlinks: to pave the way in search results for multiple keywords
- Social Signals: an important factor to attract traffic, rank and broadcast your content
- Promotion: Combines the creation of backlinks and social signals in an integrative strategy
- Conversion to other formats: you can convert your posts into videos, presentations or PDFs to create backlinks and attract traffic from other platforms.
