The internet is now so full of blogs that starting to build and develop one can be an intimidating prospect. It can even seem pointless. What good will having a blog do when thousands of others are already out there? Would anyone bother to read it?
You may think this, but creating a blog for your business has many advantages and is more than worth the time and effort involved. Building a blog for your e-commerce site can affect your brand in ways paid advertising cannot. Choosing not to develop a blog may put you at a disadvantage in the online world. It may actually impede your business’s growth. If you still have your doubts about creating a blog for your e-commerce site, this article will give you 7 convincing reasons why you should do so.
So, without further ado, let’s find out more.
You need to answer customers’ questions
One of the main reasons people create content is to give themselves the ability to help customers, either by answering questions or helping them to complete tasks and solve problems. This is why most people use search engines, after all. All of us, consumers included, are looking for answers. That includes your potential customers.
If you provide people with a place where they can find answers to their queries and solutions to their problems by creating a blog, it can give your business a significant boost. This is because a blog helps build people’s confidence in your brand and the products you sell if the answers given are accurate. It is also important that you don’t use the answers or content on your blog just to try to sell your products. The content itself needs to be high-quality, detailed and relevant to peoples’ searches.
If you can increase peoples’ confidence in your e-commerce business, customers will trust you more and be more likely to buy from you. Thus, having a blog that provides people with a range of answers to questions which can ultimately help you to boost sales. As time passes, a great blog can bring in more targeted traffic and generate quality leads which will, in turn, make sales inevitable. What better reason do you need to start developing your own blog? So get blogging about the answers to customers’ questions and you’ll be well on your way to success.
A blog builds trust in your brand and helps you retain visitors
You know the feeling right? You have found a website selling products and services but there is no sign of a real human presence anywhere? Doesn’t that put you off?
Making your business an impersonal, faceless entity in the online marketplace can be especially damaging for an e-commerce website. Having no personal touch means a buyer’s experience with your business is stripped back to the bare essentials. Having a blog is a great way to capture customers’ interest and build trust because it provides you with somewhere you can add a personal touch and make it easier for people to relate to both you and your brand. You can fill your blog with hints, tips and tricks as well as with relevant information about products to encourage people to trust you more, too.
Writing a blog also helps you retain visitors and customers. It’s good if your site has many first-time visitors, but there is no guarantee that this fact alone will lead to sales. Did you know that the typical conversion rate for many e-commerce sites is between just 1% and 3%? For this reason, you need to give your visitors a good reason to keep returning to your site. A blog presents you with an opportunity to do so. Once someone has found engaging, useful information on your website they are likely to come back to you in the future. The majority of first-time visitors to your site are there simply to research and find out more about the products you offer. Having a great blog is a fantastic way to give yourself the best chance of ensuring that most of those visitors return later to buy from you.
A blog is important for SEO and keyword rankings
On many e-commerce websites, there is no place suitable for long-form content. It is useful to have a place for long-form content, as it allows you to use keywords which can, in turn, help your site rank more highly in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and thus attract more visitors. Having a blog as a constituent part of your site can help with this. You can use all the keywords and phrases you want to rank for in your blog. You can also include internal links which search engines can identify, crawl and respond to.
From the point of view of SEO, a blog is one of the best ways in which you can outstrip your competition. It’s a great way to get more external and internal links. By generating quality links through blogging, you show search engines that you are active and attracting significant traffic to your e-commerce website. If people share your blog on social media, you will get more external links. If you add to or update your content frequently, it will lead to acquiring more customers, because search engines reward people who often upload more content. If that was not enough, blogging helps you invite more people to your site who may not be actively searching for your particular product, but get directed to your blog as the result of a query or search.
Therefore, having a blog can be considered as crucial to doing great SEO and driving more targeted traffic to your e-commerce website.
Visitors read blogs before they buy
On many e-commerce websites, there is no place suitable for long-form content. It is useful to have a place for long-form content, as it allows you to use keywords which can, in turn, help your site rank more highly in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and thus attract more visitors. Having a blog as a constituent part of your site can help with this. You can use all the keywords and phrases you want to rank for in your blog. You can also include internal links which search engines can identify, crawl and respond to.
From the point of view of SEO, a blog is one of the best ways in which you can outstrip your competition. It’s a great way to get more external and internal links. By generating quality links through blogging, you show search engines that you are active and attracting significant traffic to your e-commerce website. If people share your blog on social media, you will get more external links. If you add to or update your content frequently, it will lead to acquiring more customers, because search engines reward people who often upload more content. If that was not enough, blogging helps you invite more people to your site who may not be actively searching for your particular product, but get directed to your blog as the result of a query or search.
Therefore, having a blog can be considered as crucial to doing great SEO and driving more targeted traffic to your e-commerce website.
E-commerce blogging has proven to be successful
Are you wondering what evidence there is that blogging is great for e-commerce?
Take Shopify as an example. By using just their blogging strategy, Shopify has increased the number of paying customers by 55%. They have managed this by finding very profitable keywords to use in their blog content. These are often terms which people are actively looking for in search engines.
Each post they add to their blog serves to cement their position of trust and authority with both Google and their customers, helping them to outperform their competitors. Therefore, this is another huge reason for an e-commerce website to create good quality content and derive the manifold benefits from it through building an excellent blog for your business.
The ROI (return on investment) from blogging accumulates over time
Blogging is an investment which accumulates over time. It takes time to feel the benefit of your blog and see the positive impact it will have on your e-commerce business. It may even take as long as long as a year for you to see the full benefit from the work you have put into content creation.
To illustrate this point, imagine you have just posted an entry on your blog. That day you may get a few views or new subscribers. A week later you might notice that someone has shared that blog post on social media, or that people have been finding it through a Google search. In other words, your blog carries on working to attract visitors to your blog long after you hit publish.
A suburb blog will keep climbing the SERPs and will continue to bring traffic in for you. The more effort you put into your blog, the more benefit you will get out of it.
Internal linking for SEO is one of the most underutilised techniques for increasing exposure
Internal link building is one of the most underrated and effective on-site SEO techniques you can implement. Many people work hard to get links from external sources, which can take a lot of time and effort. However, people tend to overlook the ways they can improve their SEO visibility by making changes on their own site. Namely, by generating internal links for your key pages. To generate internal links, it’s vital to have a blog because this is the only way you can produce enough content to create internal links. You won’t derive benefit from internal links unless you have a blog, so get writing and producing the necessary content. If you do this, generating internal links will become an in-house asset of your business.
You can massively increase your traffic in a short time by using on-site SEO strategies. People are much more likely to want to link to a useful, informative article on your blog than directly to products on the product pages of your e-store. Links give you blog posts more authority. You can direct readers to your product pages by linking to them in your blog posts.
Conclusion
So, now that we’ve given you 7 compelling reasons to start blogging, why on earth would you wait? Blogging is a good way for any e-commerce business to get some long term benefits. At first glance, there seems to be no link between e-commerce and blogging. However, when you think about how you can use blogging to grow your business as we have in this article, it is clear that e-commerce and blogging are a marriage made in heaven. Blogging is a fabulous way to give your website a boost and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. You can use it to help create a loyal following of customers who will buy from you time and time again.
The longer you wait to start blogging, though, the longer it will take to see the results. What better reason do you need to begin blogging today? There is no better way to get your e-commerce business off to a flying start and give yourself an edge over your competitors.