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5 SEO-Friendly eCommerce Blog Posts That Require Little or No Time
If you don’t already have a blog for your eCommerce site, there are phenomenal benefits to having one. But one of the biggest challenges for online retailers is creating and/or posting useful content to their blogs. We’d like to help! Here are some time-saving ideas for blog posts that will help your SEO rankings and your sales.
1. Customer Profiles/Stories
Think about it: When you see a fellow customer featured on an online store, aren’t you interested in reading about them? As social creatures by nature, we like learning about other people. In your posts, make sure to include a nice image and a link back to the website or social media account of the customer being profiled. You’ll probably be rewarded with a stronger connection with your customer and maybe even some social media love.
The best part? You can make this content very easy to create by developing a fixed set of questions that you can email to a customer with a request for an image to be sent as well. Or you could even create a button that links to a form on your website for folks who are interested in being profiled. Either way, the information comes to you and you spend only a small amount of time putting together content.
By glancing at our blog’s home page, you should notice that we’re a big proponent of this particular type of blog post.
2. User-Generated Videos
Videos are great content for you, your customers, and for SEO. But who has the time to make them? The answer: your customers do, if you motivate them enough. One easy way to do that is to provide a contest with prizes.
For example, if you give a prize for the top video—maybe even the top 3 videos submitted each month—you should have many videos from which to choose and use in your blog posts. Go Pro offers a prize for the video of the day:
3. Product Reviews
You are probably already collecting product reviews on your website. After all, customer reviews create a 74% increase in product conversion. Since reviews are so important to sales, use them in your blog, which increases the SEO value of this information. Including links to your customers’ websites helps them, as well.
Remember, you won’t want to include the reviews exactly as they show up on your site. Google’s new algorithm doesn’t like exact duplicate content. You can include excerpts from several reviews or links to the reviews themselves, similar to a post that Green Virgin Products created on their blog:
4. Helping Your Community
In addition to making a living, many online retailers are working to help their community and the world at large. Sharing this information on your blog not only furthers your cause, but it helps customers connect with you on a deeper level. Writing a short post from your heart, and including a photo or video from your efforts, takes only a few minutes and is definitely worth it.
Here’s an example from Kutoa, a maker of food bars:
5. Publicity and Media Mentions
Everyone likes to hear good news; especially your blog readers! If you or your company are featured in the media, write a blog post about it. You can include a link to the publicity placement, or you can embed a video or PDF in your post. Knowing that a media outlet, especially a major one, has given you a thumbs up also helps your current and potential customers feel more confident about buying from you. See how Cutting Edge Stencils shared their good news in this post:
With these 5 tips, you should be well on your way to boosting blog and beating the clock in the process. Let us know if you have any other ideas to help your fellow ShipStation community members!
