By Nigel Percy
If you own an eCommerce store, your goal is to drive traffic, convert users and increase revenue. Many eCommerce stores jump straight into paid ads, which isn’t a bad thing, but you are missing one essential strategy that could not only help your paid ads, but also increase traffic to your eCommerce store and build more trust with your audience. This missing strategy is a blog.
Here are 5 reasons why you need a blog to drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
#1 Find new customers
By writing valuable, shareable content, not only are you providing extra value to your customers, but you are also increasing your chances of being found by new ideal customers. If your content is well optimised and shares value, it is likely to be shared more on social media, as well as rank higher in the search engines. This means that if your ideal customer hangs out on social media in their spare time, or hits up Google to search for a problem, you are the brand they will find.
#2 Put yourself above your competitors
Producing regular content on your blog enables you to develop your own brand voice and set yourself apart from your competitors. Think about what you can share that your competitors are not, what extra value and help can you give to your audience or potential customers that will make them choose you over their competitors? Make your brand stand out, show off your personality and give VALUE. This will really help build trust!
#3 Help build your email list
Writing regular content will give your email list something more valuable and insightful than just constant sales pitches. If they have already agreed to be on your mailing list, this is an opportunity to nurture that list even further with value by providing solutions to their problems (even the ones they didn’t know they had!) You can also use this to gain more email subscribers, offer some freebies, discounts or exclusive access to the content before everyone else.
#4 Help SEO efforts
SEO is made up of a wide range of elements including: site relevance, site hierarchy, domain authority and much more. Having a blog will help enhance your SEO, in particular the areas mentioned above. Content that contains internal links to other blogs and high level pages create a hierarchy. Well optimised, high value content is more likely to be shared not only on social media channels, but has a good chance of being referenced in other blogs (aka, winning backlinks) which all contribute to building your Domain Authority, which will help your overall site and all its page rank better.
#5 Increase organic social shares
There’s not much reason for people to continually share your products, unless of course you have a good offer on! If you are trying to leverage a social media strategy for your business, writing blogs can level up your game! Not only is it providing MORE value that the character limit of various social media channels, but it also means users will be clicking through to your website to read the full article, rather than reading your post and moving onto the next. Having a blog also means you are creating more relatable and shareable content, that will solve your audiences problems. If it is good enough, you’ll see that social traffic grow and grow, as more people share the post. The more shares it gets, the more traffic that comes back directly through to your site!
