Why You Should Add a Blog to Your eCommerce Store

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As an eCommerce website, your primary objective is to attract qualified traffic to convert those browsers into buyers. You might focus on leveraging paid advertising or refining your product listings. While these tasks are certainly important, they aren’t the only things you can and should increase sales.

It’s no wonder that eCommerce platforms have started offering packaged blogging solutions in recent years. If you’re an online retailer of any kind, you need a blog. Why? Of course, in most cases, blogs are affordable and effective marketing tools for digital businesses. An interesting blog that attracts readers can highlight your brand’s values, voice, and vision while boosting your SEO success.

However, blogging can accomplish far more than that with the right strategy in place. It will attract organic traffic from new sources and give visitors a reason to stay longer and share your store and products with others. In this guide, we will explore the following topics:

  • Search rankings
  • Content generation
  • Engagement
  • Link building
  • Reliability
  • Product promotion
  • Relevance
  • Organic traffic

So, without further ado, here’s a detailed look at why you should add a blog to your eCommerce website.

Search Rankings

Among the numerous benefits that blogging has for SEO is the ability to help your site rank for relevant keywords.

This comes with determining the most suitable search terms and phrases to be targeting. Of course, you may already do this for your product descriptions. In which case, you’ll know that it has its limitations. For example, there are certain strings of text that you cannot put into the title text, and this is where your blog comes in.

A blog post provides far more keyword real estate, giving you the room that you need to start ranking for the terms potential customers are searching. This can give you a significant advantage over competitors, especially when you can be the first to start capturing users who are typing their queries directly into search engines.

Content Generation

Specific trends remain constant in how Google ranks websites, including how many posts and pages a website has and how regularly that content is updated. This remains a key ranking signal for your site’s visibility on results pages. By having a blog, you can use it to your advantage.

With virtually unlimited real estate, blogging allows you to create as much content as you can manage. The more you put out, the more visible your site will become. This obviously doesn’t mean spamming your readers with an onslaught of sloppy articles. Instead, your content should always be engaging, relevant, unique, and well-written.

In most cases, you only need to publish between one and three such posts per week to start seeing improvements in your rankings. It’s always possible to scale up as you develop the capability.

Engagement  

Here is one of the reasons why it’s wise to ensure that your content is interesting and relevant to your target audience. In doing so, you encourage them to interact with your blog by discussing in the comments or sharing the post on social media. This is a sure-fire way to develop a loyal online community that can do wonders for your eCommerce website.

With visible engagement in the form of busy comments sections and a social media presence, buyers will be inclined to return for more compelling content in the future. This also gives you an effective platform for raising issues or making announcements in response to your customers’ concerns.

Link Building

Another way that blogs can benefit SEO is by serving to construct internal and external links for your website. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-often neglected technique, despite being useful to increase visibility. All you need to do is place links to higher-ranking websites (that aren’t competitors) in your blogs.

You can also build internal links by referring to your products in your blog posts. Both practices will improve your page and site authority. In addition to moving your website up on search engine rankings, link building is a great way to promote new and less popular products through your blog, thus potentially increasing sales.

Reliability

Now more than ever, consumers are wary of spending their money on unfamiliar websites. An attractive and efficient storefront with great prices isn’t enough. You need to prove that your business is trustworthy and reliable.

An effective way to highlight your credibility is by allowing visitors to go behind the scenes and explore the inner workings of your company. This can include glimpses into the office and production process and interviews with the people involved. Equally important is to prove your industry authority with opinions on current trends.

Your potential customers will also be more likely to spend money on your website if you put out regular industry news and updates that show you know what you’re doing. Any charity work or special events that your company participates in are also good to showcase, as they give your business a human element.

Of course, your blog is where all of this comes to light. It’s where you can publish industry insights and expert content. It’s where you can post news and interviews with the team and updates on what you’re doing. To illustrate this point, let’s look at this article about buying stocks on the Wealthsimple website. It’s an in-depth, detailed post relevant to what the company does, offering financial tools for managing your money. This includes automatic investment portfolios and stock trading services, so the article in question is right up the alley of their target market. In the end, it also contains a call-to-action, which brings us to our next reason.

Product Promotion

As you can probably guess by now, blog posts are an ideal location for placing call-to-action elements that drive readers to your store. Whenever you publish an article, you open an avenue for tapping into the minds of potential customers. When someone is reading your (good) content, you have their attention and the ability to direct it where appropriate.

This naturally includes product pages. However, with a bit of research and deliberation, you can identify the most effective pages to direct readers to with your calls to action. For example, it might end up being more beneficial to link to your best-selling product than the least popular one. Just remember to keep it relevant and avoid being blatant with your promotions.

Relevance

Let’s assume you sell accessories such as cases and screen protectors for Samsung smartphones. Then, when the company in question releases its latest flagship device, what can you do? Not much if you don’t have a blog.

If you have a blog, it’s the perfect opportunity to react to the news by providing your own unique commentary. In addition, since the topic is trending, your early report will likely bring in a large amount of traffic, many of whom probably own or will own Samsung devices and would thus be interested in your products.

How much you can accomplish by reacting to industry events and trends depends on it. With enough writing flair (or the help of a good content marketer), you can provide unique and valuable insights that create trust among your target audience and establish your company as an authority. This can see your reputation skyrocket.

Organic Traffic

Finally, one of the more obvious benefits of having a blog is increasing real and relevant web traffic reaching your eCommerce website from search engines. As long as you publish compelling content regularly, you create more and more opportunities for potential customers to reach your store from Google or even social media sites.

Even sheer traffic figures are a crucial ranking signal for search engines, so simply having more visitors coming to your website can see you rank higher for your keywords. Likewise, if your blog posts are properly formatted and equipped with an effective sales funnel, they will bring that new traffic to your product pages and increase sales.

It should be clear at this point that having a blog can lead to a cascade of positive effects for your eCommerce website. However, just how much you benefit from this endeavor depends entirely on the amount of effort you put in. Remember that original, engaging, and unique content is the way forward and that quality always trumps quantity.

Conclusion

It will take time and effort before the effects of your blog will become tangible. However, rest assured that it will all be worthwhile, as we now know that there are serious benefits to publishing blog posts as an eCommerce website.

If you’re unsure where to begin, the internet has all the information and tools you need to get started. Depending on your abilities, you may also consider outsourcing certain aspects of the blogging process. Sometimes, it’s best to invest in professional help for the superior results that it will produce.

Why You Should Add a Blog to Your eCommerce Store

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