Boost your sales by integrating content marketing and SEO ranking techniques following the tips of Jill Kocher, recognized expert in search engine optimization.
- 1. Answer consumers’ questions
Consumers are constantly looking for valuable information related to specific topics, products or services in which they are interested. Identifying them is key to effective content marketing applied to eCommerce. By doing so, you generate content around those questions and satisfy the audience’s expectations. This translates into a better positioning, since you give responses to what the user is looking for on the web and, in turn and with the necessary time, your ecommerce site gains relevance.
SEO keyword research provides you with free and quick tools to discover the needs of your customers while generating ideas about the content that really matters to your target audience. Research and provide answers to those questions people ask the search engines, as well as to those trend topics that generate a great demand for information at any given time.
If you have a fishing material retail online store, and you focus on generating great product descriptions, it is very likely that such sort of content will manage to attract new traffic to your site and also improve your position in the results page when anyone types in the search engine the specific name of what you are promoting. However, it will be much more effective if you integrate it into an article that answers the question “How to choose a good chest wader” and how thanks to this garment you will be able to practice the sport of fishing in places that would otherwise be inaccessible, or achieve better distances or “touch” less worked areas? You can also write about how to choose the best fishing boots; where you can also provide valuable information about it and, why not, take this opportunity to highlight one of your bestselling fishing boots.
To correctly identify such information needs or the questions the consumer asks, you may use any of the available keyword search tools. But, if you have one, don’t forget, to also meet your own customer service staff and ask them about those topics. They are on the frontline handling your customers’ questions and complaints. In addition to providing a wealth of content ideas, doing so you will be able to identify and organize those most in-demand topics, that may help greatly reduce the workload of your call center or consumer response system.
Finally, don’t forget to develop your digital presence on sites frequently visited by your target audience to interact with other users, including specialized forums, social networks and, most importantly, your competitors’ sites.
- 2. Choose the right formats for the content you publish.
A long article format, which responds well to the questions and searches your target audience frequently performs, will be good in achieving a good ranking on the results page; but only if they are written in the language that those audiences use when conducting their searches. However, sometimes it may be advisable to provide information in the form of a guide or a step-by-step video. That way, the public will find it easier to understand the topic they are interested in and will be much more likely to share it, thus your ecommerce will have more chances to get a better position in search engines. As we already know, the best content type depends on what is interpreted as most beneficial to your customers. This is why a quality video format increases the time spent in your online store and the referral traffic (audience share it in their social networks). Google’s algorithm takes into account these factors for the ranking, since it basically will interpret that your site is offering valuable content and optimizing the user’s experience.
To determine if a keyword needs one or another type of format (written, video, etc.), research those phrases you want to classify and take note of the formats that are already ranked. Of course, whatever it is, when using any format, you will need it to be optimized by applying SEO positioning techniques. At Data Digitalis we can help you make sure that your content and videos are SEO oriented and easily ranked by search engines.
- 3. Include descriptive texts to your content.
Connected to the previous paragraph, the algorithms of the search engines are in continuous evolution and their skills improve, however, we can facilitate their understanding of the content and context of an image or video using optimized meta tags containing the keywords that describe their relevant features.
Even if the content is visually easy to understand by your online store shoppers, search engines still need those meta tags (descriptive texts). Without them, they will find it difficult to assess the relevance of the content and will not be able to properly rank it; which might mean that there will be no traffic or sales to your store coming from organic traffic.
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4. Do not forget that you are selling or what you are selling.
It is important that the information in each ad or content you publish is closely related to the products or services you offer in your online store. Do not forget to show their features and their differentiation properties. Have in mind your ads and web content are not meant to be aesthetically appealing, to be proud of how they look or to enjoy how fun or interesting they are. Remember that content represents an important effort for you, has a significant cost and is there exclusively to generate sales. Otherwise, the natural traffic, leads and customers that will come to you from search engines will be scarce (and probably of poor quality); which means that number of conversions will tend to be very few. It’s amazing how easily this point is forgotten.
Looking back at the example of fishing online store, if while you sell fishing articles you offer a fantastic, relevant and superb content on the latest blood donation campaigns (by the way, very necessary now due to the COVID 19 pandemic), you might even get some visitors, but the conversions in sales coming from such traffic will be rare; the reason is that the users who demand this type of information and are also interested in fishing are scarce in percentage terms, in other words, they are not your target audience.
- 5. Write for your audience
Do not use overly technical language, abandon the jargon (except in very specific cases). Write in a simple and descriptive way, in the same way that users would look for information about your product or service. Use your keyword research, previously discussed, to verify which are the most common search terms used by those visitors who have already found you. Those same terms describe how your potential customers think and speak. Address them in those same terms.
- 6. Don’t forget to sell “gently”
Content with valuable information is one of the best tools to capture the attention of an audience. In fact, it is often precisely the content that is ranked in search engines above your e-commerce category or your product pages. That means that you also need to sell your content. So, at the same time that your business needs to sell products and services, one of your goals should be making sure that potential buyers land on your site when they are searching for information, as well as getting them attracted by the great content you’ve prepared for them. For free?. No, this does not mean that the content should be “free”, that is, without receiving any kind of conversion. A soft call to action, a link to a specific text, to your store or to your product/service aimed at convincing the customer is essential to increase your sales and to position your brand. But such a CTA or link must be designed in a “soft” way. Once your content has brought value to your visitors, whether in the form of knowledge, promotions, user guides or anything else appreciated by those browsing your site, those visitors will be more open to purchasing those products or services for their benefit.
The key is not to be too obvious or overly pushy, not to appear (even though it really is) as if your goal is only to sell. Nor should we use a merely advertising tone; search engine algorithms do not like heartless advertising.
Remember that your objective is to attract information seekers, among other shoppers, and that those “seeking web surfers” will not know your brand or will not be sufficiently acquainted with your range of products or services; for those who already know will not “waste” their time reading your ads. At Data Digitalis we help you in facilitating your potential clients in the search for your product and, to that end, we help you design useful and non-aggressive content that will fulfill that purpose.
- 7. InterLink your store
If you have both, a store and a blog, for example, a proper internal linking within your website can offer you two types of benefits. On the one hand, it facilitates the work of search engine algorithms in understanding the context and relative importance of the various areas of the site, and on the other hand, it improves the chances that your visitors will find the information they are looking for and properly understand what your offer is. The latter is important for potential buyers of your online store to correctly assess the characteristics of the products or services offered.
All links must be arranged in an orderly manner. If it is done well, linking product information with truly relevant content will help improve your sales instead of harming them.
- 8. Publish your Content on your own main website.
In order to be well ranked, promotional content and advertising campaigns must be published in your own URL. That is, in the same place from which you sell your products or services. When posting content, advertising or selling a certain listing, never use the so-called “microsites” linked to your main website.
Even if you might get some additional traffic, these visits are not adding value in the form of external links (popularly called link equity or link juice). Search engine algorithms will detect that such microsite is actually related to your main website, so you will lose the effort you have done to position the microsite, as well as the benefits of an external link equity to your own online store.
- 9. Send your content to external third-party sites.
When posting on your own site does not attract enough audience, or not as much as you intend, you may consider giving more exposure to your content on sites that already enjoy such an audience. The idea is to find popular sites that, aimed at your own market sector, enjoy that authority which your e-commerce store does not currently possess. Once identified, you can offer your content, always both original and valuable, to those popular sites to be published and disseminated by them.
In case you decide to use this form of content distribution, you need to maintain the SEO benefits you generated through your original content. For this to happen, you will be publishing that same content on your own site and, in addition, you will not forget to establish agreements that require those third-party sites to use canonical tags to refer to your site as the original source of the content. A canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that allows you to specify which version is the main one and, therefore, the one that should be indexed by search engines. In other words, if you have the same or similar content published in different URL’s the canonical tags will tell the algorithms which version to index and rank.
- 10. Never copy content posted by third parties.
If you do not have the resources to create your own content, you may have considered publishing content from another source. This is not a good idea. While it is possible to get more traffic that way, it will not be adequate from a SEO perspective. On the one hand, as we have explained in the previous point, if you publish third party content in your online store using canonical tags, you are effectively helping to rank the party who generated that content; so, you will not get real SEO benefit to your digital business. On the other hand, if you don’t use such tags, when the same (or similar) content is published in several places, that duplicate content will lose SEO value in all those sites. In addition, the algorithm’s ability to consider the content as a duplicate may result in penalties being imposed on your ranking.
