A strong content strategy is the foundation for any successful SEO strategy. However, it is crucial for eCommerce to distinguish yourself from your competitors, aligns with customers, and rank well on search engines. Content marketing strategy is the future for SEO.

It is essential to clearly define your goals when creating content for eCommerce brands. Many topics could be covered, making it difficult to show value and ROI.

It is crucial to develop a long-term, killer content strategy. This will help you achieve significant results and position your brand in your niche.

Contents

• It is centered on the user and your product/service portfolio.
  • Prioritizing content topics and pillars that are relevant to your audience is key.
    • Questions about your target market
    • Questions regarding your products, services, and USPs
  • Each content piece should be created individually
    • It answers the questions of your target audience
    • It fulfills the user’s search intention

• This is expert content (E–A-T) that covers all stages of the marketing funnel

• It aligns with your business priorities

• It’s data-led content

• This is designed to increase your non-brand SEO

• It is organized into topic clusters

• It focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on evergreen content
  • Typical formats and evergreen topics

• It does not forget seasonal and reactive content.

• It’s designed to improve the user experience on your web pages

• It is optimized for conversion rate (and it converts!) )

Continue reading to learn how an effective SEO strategy should look. One that not only generates quality organic traffic but also converts your users and adds value to their lives.

Your customer journey and your product range should be the focus of your content strategy

Contrary to what many people still believe, SEO content does not just revolve around keywords. It’s about providing as much value as possible. Search engines are becoming extremely smart. They can not only identify which piece of content best fulfills users’ search intent but also determine which brands are more influential in specific market niches. This allows them to provide high-quality information about specific content areas.

Prioritize Content Pillars and Topics Relevant To Your Audience

You must create a user-centric content strategy. This means you should prioritize topics that are 1) relevant to your target audience 2) and can offer helpful information and solutions. It would be actual expert advice about the product’s targeted search terms for eCommerce businesses.

This will help you to do it effectively:

To define your target audience, ask these questions

• What are the main personas of our target audience? (age, gender, occupation, lifestyle, culture, etc)
• What are the needs, concerns, and interests of our target audience?
• What are the top questions we get from customers?
• What triggers our customers’ purchases?
• What can we draw from the reviews of our customers?

Questions to ask about your products, services, and USPs

• What is the full range of our product categories and services offered? (eg. corner sofas, L-shaped sofas, armchairs, footstools, etc)

• What are the specifications and attributes of our products? (eg. fabric, color, material, shape, size, etc).

• What are our USPs (eg? Quick delivery, easy assembly and financing options are all possible

• What are the main purposes of our products/services (eg? Decoration, sitting, sleeping or watching TV,

• What products and services can help customers solve their problems? Easy assembly, stain-resistant, easy-cleaning fabrics, sofa-removal service, etc.

• How can we distinguish ourselves from our competitors? (eg. Sofas that are affordable and high-quality,

• What are our major areas of expertise and sub-areas? (decoration, home comfort, and furniture design knowledge).

These questions should be answered in detail to help you create a list of content pillars. You can also identify the topics that each pillar might contain. This will help you do keyword research and uncover relevant topics to gauge your level of interest.

Instead of Google, create each content piece for the user

After identifying your key content areas and topic areas, you must ensure that each article or page is written with the user’s needs in mind. What does this mean?

Answer the questions of your target audience

To create your content pillars and topics, you should use the questions of your target audience to determine your topics and organize the information for each piece. Google’s Search Engine Passages algorithm can direct searchers to the section of a page that has the most relevant answer for their search query. Google now overrides meta descriptions of pages by using the answer to the query.

Fulfill the user’s search intent

The value it offers, depending on the search intent, is one of the key factors that will help a page rank well in SERP results. 

If a page’s content is not complete, it will be a matter of time before another page ranks higher than yours. If you rank well, your potential customers will probably leave the page and go to other pages for more information. Search intent and SERP analysis are crucial. You need to create the best content that meets the visitor’s needs.

Expert Content (E–A-T) and Covering Every Stage Of the Marketing Funnel

Expertise. Authoritativeness. Trustworthiness. These are the 3 magic words that make up Google’s search quality ranking guidelines (also known as the E-A-T ranking element). It improves the E.A.T of a website and tells search engines that it is highly relevant by answering every step of the customer’s journey. This includes:

• Educational content (buying and caring guides and other how-to content)

• Inspirational content (ideas and tips).

• Commercial content (PLPs and PDPs, homepage sales, USP’s landing page, etc.)

Marketers often underestimate the importance and cost of creating content that targets post-conversion keywords.

If you want your target audience to trust, discover and engage with your brand, then no SEO content strategy can be complete without considering every stage of their journey. Post-conversion content is also available for other marketing channels to keep customers engaged.

Align your business priorities

There are many reasons you might want to prioritize or deprive of a particular type of content, such as:

1. It could be a new service or product launch, or a removal 
2. New consumer behavior has led to a spike in interest in certain categories
3. To reach your quarter’s sales goals, your content strategy must support or complement any business priority.

Data-Led Content Creation (AKA Valuable, Realistic)

It is very time-consuming to produce content. There are many steps involved in content production, from opportunity research to uploading the content into your CMS. It is important to create real content and valuable content.

To assess the topic’s SEO value, here are some key keyword data:

• Keyword volume (interest and online need)

• Keyword difficulty (how difficult it is to rank well).

• CPS = ratio of keyword search volume to clicks (how many search results are clicked on average when someone searches for the target keyword).

• A return rate is a relative number that shows how many times the same person searches for a keyword in 30 days.

Tailor Your Non-Brand SEO

Your brand SEO is an important aspect of any SEO strategy. For many brands, such as Nike and BMW, the best opportunity is in generic searches, which users perform without any particular brand in mind.

These keywords are usually more popular than others, and therefore more valuable for your search results. Your brand’s awareness and online demand will increase if you focus your efforts on non-branded SEO. This will indirectly improve your brand’s SEO.

Organize in Topic Clusters 

To create a solid content strategy, you need to define big content areas (pillars based upon priority keyword clusters) that revolve around the products and USPs you want to be the brand’s leader online. It should align with your commercial priorities to increase organic traffic to your top-priority product categories that have the highest SEO potential.

Focusing on specific keywords or isolated topics will lead to topic dilution, content duplication, and even thin content. It is much harder to create a blog architecture and implement an internal linking strategy. By focusing on the key content pillars, you can achieve high levels of semantic cohesion among topics. This allows you to become an authority in broad content areas relevant to your brand, product range, and target audience.

Evergreen Content is the focus (Mainly, but not only).

Every eCommerce business must have a variety of content types to suit different purposes. But not all content types are equal in SEO value. Evergreen content (content that doesn’t expire) should be on top of your priority lists.

These topics are those that have a high level of search volume and interest over time. Topics that have the potential to generate regular and consistent organic traffic because of their high interest. Because it does not rely on temporary interest and requires fewer updates, evergreen content is more likely to get more backlinks over the long term.

The Most Common Evergreen Topics and Formats

• 7 Everyday Handbag Types (listicle).

• How to make the perfect Negroni Cocktail (how-to articles).

• Indoor plant care: educational guides

Remember to include seasonal and reactive content

Understanding your target audience means being aware of consumer behavior and identifying times and occasions when sales are most likely to be triggered by the nature of your products or services.

Many eCommerce companies have big sales dates like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Mother’s Day. Content relevancy for certain industries, such as fashion, is heavily influenced by seasonal products and services.

Flower companies may see a spike in sales around Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, so it is important to research what topics can be created around these dates. It is possible that a year-round event like a birthday or other romantic occasion would bring in more organic traffic and sales.

Improve your web page experience

Content is not only about the information. It is important to structure and format your content in a way that keeps your users engaged and minimizes the chance of them leaving the page.

These are some key points to help you create content that improves user experience and website performance.

• A concise, descriptive, and meaningful URL should be created

• Use descriptive and meaningful headings

• Use hierarchical heading HTML tags

• Each idea is covered in a few sentences.

• Use bullet points and an ordered list

• Use optimized images and infographics to illustrate your ideas

• Use fonts that will be easily readable on the computer of your user

• Do not set a minimum or maximum word count before the topic is discussed. Give it the length the topic demands.

• Do not add details that don’t add value

• A structure should be clear and follow a purpose

• You can use a template that is compatible with both desktop and mobile.

• Use different CTAs on the same webpage.

Optimize for Conversion Rate (And It Does Convert!)

Conversion is a common challenge in content marketing. This is especially true for blog content and articles on the awareness and research stages of the marketing funnel.

Analyzing your bounce rate and conversion rates by topic will help to understand why blogs aren’t converting and which topics are more successful.

To increase conversion, there are a few strategies eCommerce websites can use:

• Use simple and clear call-to-action buttons. One CTA button per product listing, or the most relevant commercial page.

• Highlight your products in your articles. You can use product carousels, or simply add a link to the images of your products. Place them strategically throughout your text.

• Get the opinions of people your audience is connected to. You can include images of influencers wearing your products as well as quotes from their reviews. Interview them to get their complete opinion on the product.

• Be honest about the benefits of your products. You must understand the needs and interests of the user and give clear and honest information regarding the benefits of your products and services.