How to Leverage Content for Ecommerce

Chapter 4: Writing Exceptional Content for Ecommerce

As we’ve discussed, there are likely hundreds of great blogs that you’ll be competing with. All of this content is likely to be free, so there’s no reason for a potential customer to waste their valuable time on anything other than the best content. So how do you get exceptional content on your site?

Writers

Right now, Google’s search algorithms favor blogs that produce content frequently. But you’re running an ecommerce business, so you probably don’t have the time to research and write content for a few hours a week. If you do, that’s fantastic! If not, you’ll need to have a plan that allows you to publish content multiple times each week. What are your options?

• Ghost writers
• Guest writers
• Full-time staff writers
• Part-time staff writers
• Contract writers

For the most part, a mixture of the above options is what works best, but you may not have the contacts, time, or budget to make some of these options work right away.

Ghost Writers

Ghost writers can be found on sites like Upwork.com who can write multiple articles each day. This is very affordable, but as they are generally paid on a price-per-100-words basis, the faster they work, the more money they make. This is not ideal for you if you want quality. However, this is still a good place to look for talent, and you can certainly offer a good writer a much better wage in exchange for great content.

Other sites like Scripted.com specialize in sourcing blog writers specifically for marketing purposes. This is more expensive, but can help you find better quality writers without having to sift through dozens of applicants.

Guest Writers

Guest writers are contributors from other websites. The great thing about guest writers is that by placing content on your site, they expose themselves to a larger audience, and earn backlink authority that will help them rank better on Google. You don’t usually have to pay guest writers as these content placements are just as helpful to them as they are to you. But you’ll need to have at least a couple of pages worth of decent content before they’ll consider spending a few hours creating content for you.

But if you want to be successful at hosting guest writers, there are a few things you need to do for them.

• Promote their content
• Allow them to include links to their site
• Be easy to work with
• Be clear about article requirements

When we say you should promote their content, we don’t just mean the content they publish on your site (of course you should do that too). Partner with them, and help them grow their audience by regularly sharing content on their site. Promoting content on social channels is a good way to help great publishers to know about your brand. This makes introducing yourself and asking for guest contributions a lot more simple. Promoting their content also creates a reciprocal effect. In other words, if you’re regularly sharing their content, they may feel obliged to share your content as well.

Far too many old school publishers have extremely strict rules about links pointing away from their site. At least right now, Google doesn’t penalize sites (not directly, anyway) for having these types of links that take visitors away from their site, so there’s really no reason to be so picky about this.

If you aren’t a huge publisher, guest contributors have no reason to work with you if you won’t allow them to link to their site naturally in their article.

That said, links should provide valuable reference, and not just point to their homepage or a landing page. Links should point to articles that are related to the topic at hand.

Full-time staff writers

This is probably not a great option when you’re just starting out, unless there’s a massive hole in the industry in terms of content and ecommerce. But at some point, paying employees to create content on a full time basis will ensure a steady stream of quality content.

These individuals should have a background in creative writing with some marketing experience.

Part-time staff writers

One of the best options for those new to ecommerce blogging is to use existing staff members to create content for the blog. Different members of your team will have varying backgrounds that can help them write unique and interesting content.

Contract Writers

If at all possible, you want to find a writer that has experience or knowledge of your industry. If you spend some time reading other industry blogs or on social media, you’ll likely be able to find a few influencers who you can use as a source of high-quality content for ecommerce.

Research

Next to the actual quality of the writing, research is the most important aspect of ecommerce blogging. After all, if what you’re saying isn’t interesting or accurate, why should anyone read it. Marketers like Niel Patel have shown that data-driven headlines drive a lot more engagement. The research phase helps you to determine what questions your audience has, and how to answer them truthfully.

In our experience, this phase should comprise anywhere from 50% to 90% of the time you spend producing an article. By a large margin, the articles we’ve spent the most time on have made the largest impact on our community.

The previous chapter discussed how to find the questions that your readers are asking, but how do you find the answers?

Proprietary data

Since you’re in the industry, you may very well know the answers. If you have any proprietary data, use that to prove your point. For example, as a retail search provider, we have access to search data. We were able to extract that and find out what the best design is for a search bar. While they did face some backlash, Facebook manipulated their feed to see if they could affect people’s emotions. Then they published their research online.

Whenever possible, try not to guess or copy and paste well-known industry facts and figures. When we published our search bar best practices, we found out that some oft-quoted industry stats were just plain wrong. You may learn something similar.

Even if you don’t have access to the data that you want yet, you can survey customers, or perform internal experiments. Imagine being able to write a headline like “90% of men now think red lipstick is tacky”.

Studies

Research firms exist in every industry, and they publish interesting data all the time. Spend some time finding reliable sources of research in your industry, and read their reports. Sometimes you’ll have to pay to have access to the full report, but it’s generally worth it.

Derek Halpern, founder of SocialTriggers.com, has made millions of dollars by reading psychological studies, and turning that data into interesting blog posts.

The media

Right now, the public has a lot of doubts about the media’s honesty. But for the most part, the people working in these jobs are honest in their work. There are usually multiple people working on a given story too.

In some cases, the journalists working for major media publications have picked apart scientific research to find an angle for a story. In those instances, they’ve done the hard work for you.

Subscribing to publishers in your industry can give you access to virtually endless data and inspiration. This is also a fantastic way to learn how great headlines are written.

Format

The format of your blog post is extremely important. Unlike traditional magazines, you don’t have the luxury of designing and interesting layout with giant high resolution images on each page. Blog posts are mostly words, so you have to be smart about how you format them if you want people to read them.

General formatting

People don’t want to read your articles

But wait. . . why are we writing for them?

Because they do want information.

Listicles (an ugly buzzword for “list articles”) are the most popular written content type for a reason. They’re skimmable.

A list has the advantage of telling people exactly how much value they’re going to get right in the title. And people can easily skip past anything that they already know.

But not all of your articles have to (or should be) lists. Despite being data-heavy, listicles do have the perception of being… well… kind of cheap. Most of your articles should be in a more normal format. They should still be skimmable though.

Use general formatting options within your CMS (Content Management System) to your advantage. All of them will provide options for headlines (H1, H2, etc.), bold/italics/underline, bulleted lists, and indenting.

Use headlines to separate main subjects, use bullet points to create short lists of important points, and use bold/italics/underline to make important words or sentences stand out.

People read bold text, quotes and headings more than anything else on the page.

The above sentence will probably be read ten times for every time this sentence is read once.

Paragraph length

You probably haven’t noticed, but this article’s paragraphs are carefully formatted. It’s habit for us since we’ve been doing it for years, but many writers (especially professionals) are accustomed to writing paragraphs that are several lines deep. This is normal in books, for example, but it doesn’t work too great for online readers.

Don’t be afraid to give important sentences space to breath.

Your 3rd grade teacher might slap us on the hand for leaving the above sentence up there all by itself, but it works. Important sentences, those that summarize the key points, deserve to have their own vertical space.

Of course, a lot of content marketers have experimented with paragraph length to back up this claim.

Images

Images are supremely important in blog posts. You need a lot of them, but there are some rules and theories you should be aware of.

First off, Derek Halpern, mention above, published his research on content width, and found that by decreasing the width of the first few lines, he could increase blog post engagement drastically.

In practice, this involves using a small portrait image on the top right side of the blog post. This decreases the width of the first 3 or 4 paragraphs, making them easier to read.

Second, make sure that you have rights to use any images you place in your blogs posts. While a lot does fall under fair use, if you use the wrong image, you could end up in a world of hurt. It’s a good idea to get yourself a subscription to a stock image provider such as iStockPhoto. Adobe Stock is good alternative if your creative team already uses Adobe products.

We like to use at an images often, but you shouldn’t just throw images in between every paragraph. Use an image any time it will help you to tell the story, or illustrate an important point.

Every blog post needs a featured image (or thumbnail). The purpose of these images is to communicate the primary subject, but also to draw the reader’s attention to the post. This is especially important when sharing on social. While we usually create a separate image for social sharing, if you don’t have the time or creative energy for this, use an image with a face. These get significantly more engagement on social channels.

Style

Style is personal, but it takes time to develop, and it can always be improved. Especially when writing blog posts, one rule supersedes all others:

Use simple language.

What’s most important is that you are easily understood. As was mentioned earlier, the people that are reading your articles don’t care about you or your business. They aren’t interested in how smart you are, or how edgy your business is. They went to your article for information. Make it easy for them to find it and understand it.

Content Length

The length of content is statistically important. Longer articles, around 1500 words, typically rank higher on Google.

But we can’t confuse correlation with causation. Google doesn’t provide their search algorithm to publishers, so we can’t be sure if they’re prioritizing longer content, or if longer articles are ranked higher for other reasons. Could it be that these longer articles are just more valuable?

However, it should be said that it’s hard to write a valuable, data-rich article that’s less than 1,000 words. Most of your articles should be at least that long, but don’t artificially inflate articles just to hit some magical word count you’ve heard about from some marketing guru.

Concentrate on value, and length will come naturally.

Chapter 5: SEO for Content and Ecommerce

SEO is one of the most difficult parts about online business. It’s always changing. For that reason, we won’t get into deep and impractical SEO strategies that work great today, but might not in a few weeks.

The most important thing to know about SEO is that Google doesn’t want people to be able to cheat. In the early days, search engines could be fooled into directing traffic to sites with nothing more than ads and keywords. These days, however, manipulating your search ranking is much more complicated.

Value is the only true SEO metric.

Even if you get all of the technical stuff right, if your ecommerce content marketing isn’t offering value to the reader, nothing else matters. That’s not to say that keywords, meta tags, descriptions, and site speed aren’t important factors. They absolutely are. But none of that will matter if you don’t write stuff that people want to read.

But what about the other stuff? What’s important now, and likely to stay important for a long time?

Speed

Getting to your site should be fast. Google has been increasing the weighting of desktop and mobile speeds for a few years. The amount of time it takes for one of your articles and all of its contents to load is extremely important at the moment.

To improve page speed, here are a few crucial tips.

• Compress images. Keep them as small as possible.
• Compress CSS, HTML, and Javascript files
• Minify CSS, HTML, and Javascript files
• Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Use browser caching

Once you’ve published a blog post, you can use a page speed analysis tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to find out how fast the page is, and what exactly is slowing it down. From there, you can show your web developer and fix those problems if necessary.

Keyword targeting

Keyword targeting is really the heart and soul of SEO. From the very beginning of SEO, it has been an important factor. After all, when people type words into Google’s magical white box, they are telling Google that they want to land on a page that is relevant to those keywords.

But keyword targeting isn’t what it used to be. In the past, the goal was to have the keyword placed on a page as many times as possible. But these days, Google isn’t so concerned with quantity. Quality is far more important. So how should you go about targeting specific keywords?

• Article title
  The article title is still one of the strongest relevancy signals to Google. Make sure your keyword is in the title (naturally). Having the target keyword or phrase closer to the beginning of the title works best.

• Article length
  Length is important, but there isn’t a magic number that will put you in the number one slot. As we discussed above, having superior content to your competitors is more important. Sometimes that means it’s longer, sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t artificially inflate your article with irrelevant information as this will likely decrease engagement and thus negatively affect SEO.

• Natural use of keywords
  Within the article, you should have natural uses of the keyword and variations of it. Ranking for a couple dozen long-tail variations of the keyword will help a lot in the long run.

• Meta tags & descriptions
  Proper use of meta tags and descriptions will help to signal to Google the purpose of your article. This article, for example, uses the H1, H2, and H3 (headline text) meta tags to break up the article into segments. This tells Google how the article is organized, and what the main topics are. Writing short descriptions for the included images is also crucial.

• Backlinks & Anchor text
  Backlinks (links that point back to this article) will help to build natural SEO if they are placed in relevant places. Ultimately, you’ll want links on other publisher’s websites within articles that are related to your keyword. If you were targeting the keyword “how to wear a scarf”, you might want to get placement in articles about fall or winter fashion that mention the use of scarfs.

The anchor text (the text that the link is placed in) should be tied to your keyword. In other words, don’t anchor “click here to learn more”. This tells Google nothing about what the link points to. Something like “how to wear a scarf” would be much better anchor text.

Beyond technical optimization, engagement is extremely important to Google. If you want Google to direct more people to your articles, they’ll need to know that visitors are engaging with your content.

In chapter 3, we discussed formatting. This is extremely important to making your content enjoyable. The quality of your content is very important too. As we’ve gone into detail on these things, we won’t rehash them in this chapter.

However, there are other things you can do to increase your engagement scores. But first, what are the engagement metrics we’re talking about for your blog posts?

• Time on site
• Time on page
• Page views
• Bounce rate

Time on site is largely influenced by the number of pages a single visitor views. Even if they land on a 10,000 word article, they’re not going to spend more than a few minutes on that page. So it’s important to have other relevant content, that’s easy to find. This is where internal linking comes in. In other words, your articles should link to each other when relevant.

Time on page is affected by the relevancy of the article they land on. This is Google’s responsibility (with organic traffic), but you can help yourself by ensuring that your articles don’t branch out to obscure subjects unrelated to your article’s title. And again, make sure that your content is interesting and easy to read.

To get a lot of traffic, you’re going to need a lot of content. This is also tied to your internal linking strategy, and is also affected by external links to your site. Social is also very helpful. Page views tend to snowball once Google starts to send traffic to you, which then improves your SEO score.

Your bounce rate is tied to content relevance, quality, format, and length. If your content is bad, people won’t read it. If it’s ugly, people won’t read it. If it’s irrelevant, too short, or too long, people won’t read it.

Hopefully these points are coming across loud and clear by now.

Chapter 6: Displaying Your Content

Exposing your ecommerce content marketing to your shoppers can be tricky. You don’t want content to distract your users from shopping, but you do want it to be easy for them to find content that will help them. User reviews, videos, or blog articles about the item(s) they’re viewing can help them make purchase decisions, for example. What are some creative ways to bring them to this content?

| Example: Small Pet Select

Small Pet Select places badges below item images and descriptions to show shoppers information about each product. There are badges to indicate whether or not a product is organic, whether it is a top seller, and whether it has a video.

This same concept could be used to indicate when there are relevant articles, tutorials, user Q&As and much more.

| Example 2: True Protein

True Protein exposes relevant blog posts inside of search results, but they do it in a way that doesn’t distract shoppers that aren’t interested in content. After a search query is completed, if that query has relevant blog posts, a “posts” tab appears in the navigation bar, allowing users to find articles that may help them make a purchase decision.

| Example 3: Purl Soho

Purl Soho sells fabrics, and publishes detailed project information for people that want to knit or crochet various items. Instead of a tabbed interface, or completely separating searches for products and articles, they combine both on the same search results page. This works for them because they publish so much relevant content.