Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Getting Content Writing and SEO Practices Aligned for E-commerce Website Success

SEO Practices Aligned for E-commerce Website Success

With the development of the e-commerce market and so much competition online, businesses are required to perfect their digital marketing practice and implement the most powerful strategies. If you want to boost traffic, increase conversion rates and make your platform an influential one in the e-commerce scene, the areas you will need to target first are content
writing and SEO.

The content you post on your site, starting from product descriptions and up to “About Us” pages and even FAQs should be optimized for both site visitors and search engines. Without aligning your content writing and SEO practices, and making sure your actions in both departments are headed in the right direction, you won’t be able to achieve your desired results.

So what should you focus on here? How can you organically grow your site’s traffic? What’s the right approach to writing SEO-friendly content? While the subject is quite vast, here are the main aspects to look into:

Set your goals straight

One of the first things you need to do, whether you are writing SEO-friendly content from scratch, or trying to optimize existing content on your platform is setting your goals straight. This will allow you to stay organized, adopt the right digital marketing practices and maintain your actions in accordance with your ultimate e-commerce business’ objectives.

Usually, online businesses with this profile set goals for the following metrics when optimizing or writing content with SEO in mind:
  • Illustrating product benefits
  • Raising brand awareness
  • Attracting potential buyers to the site
  • Increasing conversion rates
  • Diving content engagement
  • Improving social media presence.
Are your SEO and content writing strategies currently helping you achieve these goals? If not, it’s time for a few changes.

Know your target audience


One of the key rules in e-commerce content writing is relevance. Search engines prioritize websites that provide valuable content for their target audience, and in order to do that, you should identify that specific group and be aware of their particular interests.

What are their gender an age?

  • Why would they want to purchase your products?
  • What are their needs?
  • What are their usual purchase interests? 

Collect as much data as you can on your target audience by compiling multiple customer personas. You need to know who your prospects are in order to create content that is actually relevant to them. This is an SEO-related principle that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Make SEO informed choices on topics for your site’s blog section


Having a blog section on your site can truly boost your traffic rankings. If you know a little something about SEO, you’re probably already aware that the more frequently you public new posts, the higher your odds of increasing your number of visitors.

Maintain a strategic position when you are deciding on post topics. Use adequate tools that help you discover the highest searched titles for your niche. Whether it’s a “how-to” article or a listicle, you need to combine SEO knowledge with reader engagement considerations.

Content quality – relevant to search engines and critical for user engagement


Turning a simple site visitor into a customer depends on more factors than you’ve initially anticipated. Although your e-commerce deals might be appealing, if your product descriptions are full of grammar and spelling errors, for example, you will be losing users’ trust in your brand. Content quality is vital for search engine optimization and for user engagement as well.

The quality of your blog posts, product descriptions, “About Us” page and so on can impact how much time visitors spend on your platform, your conversion rates and your position in the digital market in general.

Luckily, nowadays, you can perfect your writing practices, and ensure full content quality by relying on different resources. Work with some writing services and tools, such as BestEssay.Education, Grammarly, Hemingway or Readability Score, and your content will raise up to higher standard.

Include relevant keywords
Keyword research


Keyword research stands at the base of any successful SEO campaign. This means, if you want to optimize your content for SEO purposes, including the right set of keywords and phrases is critical. Keywords will help search engines understand what you’re writing about, and will help web searchers find the products you are selling.

There are three main aspects to remember when you are researching and choosing keywords for your main pages and product descriptions:
  • Relevancy
  • Search volume
  • Ranking difficulty.
Use a keyword finder tool that helps you discover the keywords with the highest relevancy to your products or brand. Google’s AdWords tool is a great option here, coming free of charge and being used by many e-commerce content writers and SEO strategists.

Remember that you shouldn’t go for terms that are either too broad or too competitive, because you won’t be able to rank against your larger competitors, competitors who’ve already mastered SEO, content marketing, affiliate marketing, and other digital approaches. Long-tail keywords will be the preferred choice for a niched search – the longer a search query is, the higher will be the buyer’s intent of purchase.

Keyword placement


Besides handling keyword research correctly, you also have to pursue the right course of action in terms of keyword placement. Keyword stuffing is one of the mistakes to avoid here – while it used to work back in the day for boosted SEO rankings, now it will only affect your position in search results. Use your primary keyword no more than a few times:
  • Once in the product description title
  • Once in the URL of the page
  • A couple of times in the body copy
  • Once in alt image tags
  • Once in the meta title and meta description.

Be informative

Nowadays, search engines are trying to be informative rather than descriptive. This means you should make each one of your product pages informative, without praising a certain item or another. Phrases such as “best-selling” or “most demanding” should be avoided here.

Keep your description concise, by highlighting only the core benefits or features of the product, without sounding promotional.

Write distinct and unique content


Content uniqueness has always been and still remains a core element of SEO. Whether you are writing an article for your blog, or you are creating product descriptions for your pages, focus on original, quality content. Even having content duplicates on your own site pages can harm your rankings. Copying the descriptions from one of your competitor’s sites, and only changing a few phrases and terms can lead to a plagiarism penalty. Google’s algorithms have advanced along the years, so you shouldn’t try beating the system, because it can drag your website down.

“E-commerce content writers need to create distinct and unique product descriptions, originality playing a key role in SEO campaigns. Description duplicates can affect a site’s search engine rankings. Originality, quality, and relevancy stand at the base of SEO-friendly e-commerce content” – explains Teresa Freeman, a content marketing specialist at SupremeDissertations, and The Guardian contributor.

Track results 

Are you actually doing everything right? To conclude whether you’ve started to implements the right SEO and content strategies, you should measure results. Find out what exactly has been working and what hasn’t exactly positively influenced your rankings or conversion rates. The easiest way you can do that is by using Google Analytics. Compare your metrics with the goals that we’ve discussed above. If you notice an increase, it means you are heading in the right direction.

Conclusion


Aligning your content writing and SEO practices should become a habit for your marketing team. The success of your e-commerce business can actually depend on it. Remember these few important suggestions and use them to your advantage when you are aiming to create an effective digital marketing campaign.

Estelle Liotard is a seasoned content writer and a blogger, with years of experience in different fields of marketing. Currently, she is a senior writer at Trust My Paper and content editor at IsAccurate. Her passion is teaching people how to overcome digital marketing obstacles and help businesses communicate their messages to their customers.

No comments:

Post a Comment