The benefits of creating a blog for your ecommerce site are plentiful. For example, blogging can help generate new leads for businesses and build brand awareness, and many online stores use their blogs for the major perk of increasing their search rank.
But ecommerce blogs need to be careful of falling into the SEO trap. Your blog shouldn’t be used solely to boost your store’s search engine ranking, rather it should be considered an extension of your brand, and should be given the time and thought it deserves as a major lead generation tool for your businesses.
The quality of a blog is determined by the posts it’s comprised of, so to build a better ecommerce blog, you have to start with your blog post strategy. Below, we list three tips for optimizing your blog posts for lead generation to ultimately help you build a better blog for your ecommerce store.
1. Create Blog Topics Focused On Your Buyer Personas
When it comes to blogging, ecommerce sites should never begin without a plan. To determine what topics to blog about, first you must know what your audience wants to see, and this begins with the creation of buyer personas.
Buyer personas are fictionalized representations of your ideal customers created from data and trends pulled from your actual customers and prospects. Creating buyer personas allows you to better understand the motivations, behaviors, and purchasing patterns of your leads, which will help you create the content that will turn them into customers.
Still stuck for topics? Here are some of our ideas:
- Highlight customers using your products in innovative or creative ways
- Show real world uses for your product throughout different industries
- Create posts around the keywords your target persona are searching for
2. Use High Quality Pictures in Your Posts
Consumer behavior is highly influenced by visual content, and if your ecommerce blog isn’t incorporating high quality product pictures into your blog posts, you’re missing out on a huge conversion opportunity.
Say your online store sells camping equipment and you’re writing a post on “4 Qualities You Need in Your Next Tent”. Don’t you think a reader would be more inclined to look further into your business’s selection of tents if you incorporated high quality images of them into your post? In fact, 40% of people respond better to visual information than plain text, so the answer is yes. The pictures you use don’t have to be limited to product pictures, but they do need to be high quality and relevant to the overall topic to attract customers to your brand and store.
3. Incorporate Internal Links to Relevant Product Pages
You can drive sales and conversion rates through your blog by including links to your product pages in your posts. This will allow a reader to act on the interest raised through the products referenced in your post. For example: If your online camping equipment store is blogging about the “10 Best Camping Spots for You and Your Dog,” include links within the post to your products that might interest the specific reader. A reader of this post is likely a camper and a dog owner, and might be interested in products of yours such as your durable dog bed selection or folding water bowls. Easing a reader’s product hunt by linking them directly to your products referenced within your blog post will make them more inclined to act on their interest.
We hope you can use these three tips in your blog posts to optimize your ecommerce blog for lead generation and conversion.
