How to Develop a Strong Content Strategy For Your eCommerce Store

A strong content strategy is essential for any successful eCommerce store. Content quality is a major factor when it comes to Google’s ranking algorithm, so without it there’s little chance your potential customers will ever find you. Assuming they do, useful content is your means of winning a sale, by answering any questions a user wants to know and enabling them to buy with confidence.

Our guide will help you develop a strong content strategy and build a foundation for your online sales.

Create customer personas

Everything content-wise starts with your customers. You’ll need to know their age, gender, marital status, wealth, whether they have children, when they shop, and how they shop.

Are your customers local or do you need a multi-language site? Do they use social media, and if so, which channels do they prefer? The more information you can gather at this stage, the more accurate your content will be, and personalized eCommerce makes for better sales.

Do in-depth competitor research

Identify four or five competitors to help inform your content. What are your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses? How can you improve on their content? Are there gaps within their content that your own site can include? Learn from your competitors, and check out these eCommerce business examples for further inspiration.

Keyword research

Effective keyword research should form the backbone of your content offering. The best performing pages contain a group of relevant keywords. When conducting your research, you’ll need a range of high- to low-volume terms that cover all stages of the sales funnel.

View content on the whole as providing a solution to customer queries. Say your eCommerce site provides business solutions and one of your products is an online fax tool. It’s preferable to structure your content around “How to Fax without a Fax Machine” rather than using a simple keyword such as “Online Fax Tool”.

Structure and create your content

Appearance matters, and choosing a great design or theme for your store is just as important as choosing the right eCommerce for enterprise platform to help organize your business.

Although content comes in many forms, it can loosely be separated into two distinct categories – “evergreen” content and blog content. The former will take up the bulk of your main category pages, and should remain relevant for some time. Think of them as in-depth product guides, and use your customer personas to make them as personalized as possible.

Blog content serves a different purpose. You can use blogs to complement your evergreen pages, by covering more niche information relevant to a specific product.

Let’s say you’re a telecoms provider and a specific VoIP you’re selling has been photographed being used by a celebrity businessperson. It’s not relevant to include this information on an evergreen page, but it’s perfect for a short blog post. Whereas your evergreen page can be dedicated to the main topic of “How to Use VoIP”.

Blogs can also be used to cover brand and industry news that your customers will want to read. You could also include a testimonial or review section which can be great for earning customer trust and loyalty. Regular blogging sends a positive message through to Google that your site is alive and relevant.

Don’t look to rely purely on text for any type of content. The best performing content contains images and videos. Consider using a group collaboration app to ask your team for innovative ideas on how to visually represent crucial information. Remember, if the information can’t be found on your site – or if it’s not presented in an efficient way – users will simply look elsewhere.

Plan for outreach

When it comes to organic search, one of the top three factors to determine SEO-rating comes from your link profile. The key is to make content that is shareable and unique. Your newsworthy blogs can sometimes fit this bill, as long as you’re breaking the news first or have a unique spin on it.

Creating very visual content can also help to earn shares. Unique diagrams, helpful infographics, and expert videos are likely to do much better in the share-stakes than plain old content.

Monitor

A content strategy needs to evolve over time. It’s a good idea to use analytics’ tools to keep track of how your content is performing on a weekly basis, and set targets in the same way that you’d measure customer service KPIs.

What are your organic traffic figures? Which pages are performing the best? How are your customers finding your site? How many pages are they visiting when they land on your site?

All this information and more can help you see where your content is winning and losing. Adopt a high velocity marketing approach to making quick fixes, and use your data to improve the customer journey.