Creating an SEO content marketing strategy is one of the most crucial aspects of running a successful eCommerce website. Content is the single most important factor in driving targeted organic traffic to your website and building a consistent stream of visitors who are more likely to perform a desired action. Whether it’s buying products and services, or submitting online contact forms, a solid SEO content strategy can help you grow your eCommerce business.
Oftentimes, eCommerce operators chaotically attempt to create content without a cohesive content strategy in place with the hopes of creating content that is “good enough” to cause noticeable and attributable gains in organic traffic. But, this rarely happens without having a concentrated content strategy for your website.
Keep reading to learn how you can create an effective content strategy that will help you get more business on your website, as long as you’re willing to put in some time and effort to do it right. We will be using a fictional business that sells handcrafted vegan leather luxury handbags for women as an example.
Before You Get Started: Cover Your SEO Basics
Before you get started on developing a content strategy, make sure you have Google Analytics properly installed on your website. This is critical to measuring your website traffic and the success of any content strategy you implement. Also, see that you have a functioning sitemap and robots.txt file to ensure Google can crawl and index your site with maximum efficacy.
If you don’t have these SEO basics covered, you’re going to have a tough time measuring how well your content strategy is working and you may even handicap your organic traffic potential because it will hurt Google’s ability to crawl your site.
Set-Up Your Blog on a Subdirectory of Your Domain
We suggest setting up your blog on a subdirectory on your main website. It is best to avoid placing your blog on a subdomain or completely separate domain, because this can dilute your authority and make it more difficult to attribute your traffic. By placing your blog on a subdirectory of your main website, it simplifies tracking traffic to your blog and allows you to easily see what content is driving traffic. This may not always be simple depending on the platform you are using, but it’s something we suggest everyone does.
Example:
Homepage—veganbags.com
Main Blog Page—veganbags.com/blog
Blog Entry Page—veganbags.com/blog/how-our-handcrafted-vegan-leather-handbags-are-made
If you are using Bigcommerce, Shopify, Volusion or Magento, you can create a category page and add your blog posts there. Make sure that the blog titles are targeted and include the “money terms”. Furthermore, always make sure that you have related products displayed somewhere on the blog post.
Step One: Identify the Top 100 Keywords for Your Industry / Niche
The first step to creating a cohesive content strategy is to create a list of the top 100 keywords that describe your product, service, and/or business. It’s important to avoid adding too many generic or broad keywords to your list. If you run a business selling luxury handbags, then luxury handbags may seem like a good keyword (and it is) but there are thousands of people and companies already competing for that same term.
Think about your unique selling or value propositions and trying to develop more targeted and niche keywords to describe your product, service, and/or business. For instance, ”handcrafted vegan leather luxury handbags” is better than “luxury handbags” because it’s more specific to your niche and will be easier to rank for than the broader search term.
Keywords should be a minimum of two or three words long, or longer. Here’s a list of keywords that would be good to focus on for our fictional handbag business:
- Handcrafted vegan handbags
- Vegan leather luxury handbags
- Handcrafted vegan leather luxury handbags
- Fake leather luxury handbags
- Faux leather luxury handbags
- Handcrafted faux leather handbags
Step Two: Create Topics That Will Drive Traffic
Once you have your list of seed keywords, make sure the keywords are sufficiently target and specific to your business. Then, sort them in order of most generic to most specific. This will give you a better idea of how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword.
Google wants to see content on your website the gives value to the user who is searching for something online. The more valuable Google thinks your content is, the more likely you’re going to show up higher on the search results page for a particular search query.
Content is all about answering the user’s question when they run a search on Google. Think about why you go online and Google something. Chances are you’re looking for an answer to a question or you need some more information about whatever you’re looking for. Google wants your websites’ content to fill this void that users experience when they search for something.
So, go the extra mile and add an extra little bit of essential detail or multimedia content that explains something thoroughly to a potential visitor. Something like this could make the difference between amazing content and other content that is a little lackluster.
Here are a few examples of targeted content topics that may interest a user who is interested in purchasing a handcrafted vegan leather luxury handbag:
- How Our Handcrafted Vegan Leather Luxury Handbags Are Made
- 10 Reasons Why Vegan Leather Handbags Are a Great Alternative to Real Leather
- Here’s Why You Should Be Purchasing Handbags Made of Vegan Leather
- Can 100% All Natural Vegan Leather Replace Real Leather for Luxury Handbags?
- How We Turned the Leather Handbag Industry Upside Down With Our Luxe Vegan Leather Handbags!
- 6 Vegan Leather Fashion Accessories to Transform Your Outfits in 2017
- Sustainable and Responsible Animal-Friendly Faux Leather Handbags
All of these topics contain strategic keyword phrases that someone who might buy a vegan leather handbag might search for on Google. They also appeal to the sensibilities of interested users and provide additional information and answer questions users might have. Half of the struggle is creating the content. The other half is getting the right users to click on the content when it pops up on their Google search results page.
Step Three: Creating Content That Provides Value
Creating targeted content topics that answer the questions your potential customers have is just the beginning. Next, you must actually create the content for each topic and the content needs to provide value for readers.
To get started with this, create an outline for every topic before you write and make sure the outline stays within the bounds of the article topic. As a business owner, you are an expert in your field. Use your expertise to flesh out these articles with immersive details and examples.
If you’ve ever clicked on a link for an article only to find the content was thin and lacking real value, then you know what kind of content avoid creating for your website. I bet you hit your back button really fast when you landed on a page with anemic content that you knew was a waste of time to read.
Make a concentrated effort to make sure your content is grammatically correct and doesn’t contain spelling errors. Your content should be easy to read and interpret and not look like it was written by a third grader.
Step Four: Optimizing Your Content
Once you’ve written and edited your content pieces, you can start optimizing the content to your website. We really like WordPress, because it’s optimized for search engines, but even if you don’t have WordPress, then you should still be able to follow these basic guidelines for optimizing your content:
- Make sure your article topic is surrounded by <h1> html tags & your subheadings are surrounded by <h2> tags.
- The URL you publish your article with should contain the topic within it.
- Example: veganbags.com/blog/how-our-handcrafted-vegan-leather-handbags-are-made
- Make sure you sprinkle a few synonymous keywords in your article to account for terms or keywords similar to the one you’re targeting in your article.
- Add photos, videos and other graphics to spruce up your content and make it more engaging to read. Remember, most users nowadays have much shorter attention spans and are more likely to engage with content that is visually stimulating. Make sure you incorporate accurate <title> and <alt> tags for all non-text content.
If you’re an eCommerce website selling a specific type of kind of products. You need to ensure that your blog content is created around those products. You should also include links to those products and talk about why you’re recommending them.
Use your expertise to review and recommend products and incorporate them into your article content. Don’t merely promote products without explaining yourself because doing so is just going to set you up as a creator of thin content with little value.
Step Five: Promoting Your Content
Once you’ve published your edited and optimized content, it’s time to take it to social media and promote it. You can do this by sharing your content on social networks, like: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Let your followers know you’ve got a new content piece up. Traffic hits from these kinds of sources can provide positive social signals to Google that your content piece is hot and trending. This makes it more likely that your content will rank higher on search engine results pages. Another strategy is to post excerpts of these articles on places like Linkedin Pulse and Medium.com with a backlink to the original article / blog post on your site. This will do wonders for your rankings.
We also love creating buying guides. Create detailed buying guides for 5-10 products in specific niche categories. Diversify that content by creating pdfs, specific articles and even presentations and publishing it on Slidershare.com with a link back to the products and/or the article.
Let’s Get to Work
If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. It takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to implement a successful and fruitful content strategy for any eCommerce site. If there’s one thing you should be focusing on above all else in digital marketing efforts, it’s your content strategy.
Contact Optimum7 to learn more about how we can help you implement a successful content strategy for your website that will help drive targeted traffic to your site for years to come.
Keep in mind: You don’t want drive just any traffic to your website, you want traffic that will potentially lead to conversions. Engaging and quality content is King and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
