Blogs can be a great way to rank information searches that might be difficult for an ecommerce site. But online marketers who set up a blog sometimes conclude early that it does not work.
Where is the disconnect? Implementing a strong blog strategy is more difficult than it may seem. Problems with blogging as a search engine optimization tactic usually come from seven areas.
Say something interesting
The first obstacle is to have something interesting to say. Give your blog a voice, a personality. Do you want to be useful, playful, provocative? Your voice should suit your brand, but also offer something of interest to the reader in the style that it is written.
Put the reader's hat on for a moment: What is his incentive to read your blog or share it? Your content is informative or beautiful?
Whatever the voice, your blog posts should be relevant to your business or industry. Your business is probably full of experts. Use this energy to fuel the blog.
If you are promoting products, try to offer relevant and informative content in addition to promotion, like Nordstrom, below.
Associating a promotion with strong content has the added benefit of increasing the sharing potential.
Include Shoppers Care Topics About
Keyword search provides an excellent overview of topics that real researchers and buyers want to explore. For merchants who say, "I do not know what to write," I say, "Then you did not do your research on keywords."
Look especially at the questions you can answer. The five W's (and one H's) make a good entry into current research: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Find these questions and answer them.
To learn more about keyword research, read "SEO How-To, Part 5: Searching for Keywords in Action."
Interlink with product pages
A blog is like other content: to be successful, it must have an influx of link authority. The most logical way to do this is to create a link to the home page of the blog in the header or footer, on every page of a site.
Also, link sparingly to the products and categories of the text of the blog articles. "Sparingly" means one to three links in a post, like what The Hanger Project does.
The Hanger Project blog establishes a controlled link to the relevant product categories.
You do not need to link the same product multiple times – it does not pass over authority and is annoying for readers. In addition, adding too many links from a blog post could be considered an over-optimization and devaluing the entire page, or even the entire blog if a sufficient number of publications are too frequently associated with products.
It is more difficult to establish links between product pages and blog posts. Most ecommerce managers understand the concept of linking from blog posts to relevant individual products, to fuel the relevance and authority of the blog to the product. However, this will probably not be effective if the blog itself has no authority.
Expand the authority of the blog and increase its visibility to customers by associating product pages with specific and relevant blog posts. This will be most easily accomplished by connecting in a disciplined manner – not too many links and always formatted in the same style – of the product description. A more elegant solution automatically creates links to similar blog posts, similar to links to related products.
I heard some merchants say, "I do not want customers to see my blog. I just want the SEO benefits. "My answer is," You miss the point. "First, if you do not want it to be seen, you need not have anything valuable or relevant to say.
Moreover, for a blog to convey any authority to the product pages, it needs sufficient authority to rank itself. If that's the ranking, consumers will see it. If you do not want consumers to read your blog posts, choose another SEO strategy.
Maximizing Navigation
Browsing your blog is just as important as browsing your blog. Think of navigation as a way to provide a relevant contextual path to blog posts.
If your navigation is entirely based on a calendar, such as the November content or the 2017 content, you miss a chance to associate the relevance to different groups of publications.
If your browsing is too thin – too few categories for blog posts to be cataloged – then use pagination to provide a link to old blog posts.
Nordstrom does a great job providing an extensive categorization system with subcategories.
Nordstrom's blog categories are both broad and deep.
Depending on the platform and design, the marking could be an alternative navigation system. Once upon a time, tagging was a largely overused method of increasing content pages. Nowadays, search engines are devaluing themselves as pages of fine content tags with one or two blog posts linked to them.
However, tagging can still be used effectively if the taxonomy is tightly controlled to a chosen number of tags. If another cataloging system is useful for clients and provides additional contextual relevance for natural search, it can be a good way to increase the number of useful pages that expose older but still valuable content.
Host on your e-commerce domain
Host your blog as a subdirectory of your e-commerce domain: for example, www.site.com/blog . This will allow search engines to assign any authority that your blog reports to the same domain that hosts your ecommerce site, thus reinforcing both.
If a subdirectory is not possible, shoot for a subdomain, for example blog.site.com . If this is not possible and that an external domain is the only way to launch a blog in your organization, then an external domain like www.siteblog.com will have to do it.
Promote your content
If no one reads or links to a blog post, it will not improve SEO performance.
Use the power of content marketing to promote your publications. Work with teams that manage social networks, email marketing, paid media, press relations, and any other team that influences the content your customers are exposed to. For example, REI promotes its blog on Facebook, as shown below.
REI's Facebook channel promotes its content.
Facebook will not create authority directly because search engines will not see the links. However, it will expose your content to more people. These people can share it with other bloggers, news agencies or other sites that create links that search engines can track and use to report the authority of your content.
Give it time
Blog early and often, at least several times a week. It's much easier if you can manage an editorial calendar where others contribute to specific content in addition to what you write.
A new blog will take time to complete. Give him six months to a year before starting to doubt his effectiveness, and even then, look for reasons in the above points that the blog might be weaker than expected. A poorly designed or sparsely populated blog will not work, no matter how much time you give it.