A good blog for an online store: how to do it and why you need it

If you are interested in this topic, most likely there is already a site where you sell something, and you are looking for new opportunities to raise these very sales. Seeing successful e-commerce leading the article section, you wonder if this affects the number of orders and whether it is worth implementing it yourself.

We will answer right away what affects. Practice shows an increase in site conversion by 40-50% with competent and regular blogging, which is available in almost any CMS for an online store . Comprehensive information on the blog can even push a doubting customer to buy, because people still do not trust the Internet. Or maybe you have such a section, but you do not see results while competitors are successfully promoting articles.

Let's try to reveal how this is done.

Why a blog is useful to your site

1. Traffic Growth - There is no special SEO for blogs. Rules-optimized articles that are relevant to your keywords will bring people to you from search.
2. Increasing expertise - a lot of materials that can answer the questions of visitors, explain to them what they do not know, present you in their eyes as a professional in their field.
3. Increased trust - the freshness of the posts shows how often the site is looked after - just like a good gardener. By the frequency of blog updates and the date of the last publication, people can find out that the resource is supported and can be safely ordered.
4. Delivering information about yourself - you get more mentions, in fact, you advertise yourself, and audience loyalty grows in direct proportion.
5. Natural development of the project - additional content appears on the site, materials become more diverse, engagement grows and behavioral factors improve. All this is loved by search engines.
6. Feedback is a good way to get feedback from your customers. A blog without comments is a bad blog. A good block is able to unite visitors in a community.
7. Maneuvers for promotion - by developing the articles section on the site, you can add additional keys, attract new external links, redistribute the page weight ...
8. A good way to gain a foothold with a client is to penetrate his bookmarks and social networks, for example.
9. Increase your base - the blog attracts leads, offer a subscription and they will be yours.
10. Saving on paid advertising - reducing the cost of attracting visitors. More people from search = less spending. Remarketing has not been canceled either, because the cost of target audience will pay off faster than sowing money on everyone in a row.

What articles to write for an online store

• News specifically for your business

Are you working on the upcoming holidays (and congratulations), delivery conditions have changed, an exclusive product has been delivered, pre-order is open, a promotion is taking place, you have moved to a new location or opened a branch, you are 10 years old ... For some unknown reason, people will be interested to see how you spent the New Year corporate party or kayak team building. Although everything is the same - they see that the business is alive and developing, that the same real people are behind it.

• Expert materials

Express your opinion on typical issues in the industry, share life hacks, interesting cases, unusual practices, even funny situations and how you solved them. Give some of your statistics and developments, publish interviews with your own and invited specialists. So you will show that you are not lagging behind and are worth your money, that people can turn to you with difficult wishes. This works especially well for service sites.

• Industry news

If you are already applying for expertise, then you can not help but follow what is happening in your field. Cover these events. Give your comments, but in moderation - no one likes subjectivity and the imposition of their opinion. It will be good to add extracts from the reviews of new products, especially if you have them.

• Multimedia

Yes Yes. Not only articles can be used. Share your experience of using goods, unpacking. Do text reviews and sometimes allocate money for a good video. Ask customers for their opinion. In some areas, presentations, pdfs, gifs, and more are successfully used.

• Information materials

Here you can describe the benefits of what you are selling, give recommendations on the choice. If the product is complex, publish instructions and training materials. You can talk about how to use the product correctly or unexpectedly and what not to do with it. Publish comparisons of specific products or product groups from different manufacturers that are of interest to your customer.

• Digests and affiliate posts

Pick up everything that fits well, cobble together into collections and give out usefulness in intense portions. Sometimes it's helpful to have someone else on board. For example, service shops, with an article on how the warranty repairs are going. In response, they can post your article on their resource or share this on their social networks. As a bonus, you will receive a high-quality link.

In general, anything that does not fit into the product card format can be submitted in a blog. Most importantly, make sure it's useful to your readers. And there you can even reuse good materials: update, make retrospectives and re-comprehend the most interesting things.

How to maintain a section with articles correctly

• Start by analyzing the leaders. And competitors who entered the TOP with their materials. See what they write about, how often, how long the texts are, how they are structured, whether media content is used, how they capture visitors. Find what they have that you don't.

For example, here's our small survey of the largest online stores last year. As it turned out, one way or another, everyone maintains a content section: blog, news, reviews, etc. There is where to get inspired:

• Get to know your audience. In an amicable way, you should already know it inside and out. Here, you need to pay attention to other interests of customers, this is especially important for narrow niches. When the information about the product runs out, they will just help expand the topic.
• Make a strategy. Ideally, the blog should be kept autonomous - it should be handled by specially trained people who are not busy with the call center, making coffee for the director, batch processing photos and running advertising campaigns at the same time. Trust me, work will be enough if you take it seriously. With a good division of labor, everyone does their own thing: someone writes, someone selects and processes images / videos, creates infographics, someone edits, someone does layout, and someone sets tasks and manages these processes. It's not scary if there is no content department, for a small project one or two people will be enough at a moderate pace of work. But these people need to be identified, as well as a budget and a plan.

Regularly updated sections are more credible. A visitor who visits such a blog sees that work is underway on it. You may not be able to write daily, but it's a good idea to define a specific day of the week and not skip posts. Surely you have come across some "traditional Thursday digests". Such things also make interested people wait and visit your project more often. They work great in conjunction with the newsletter, you can make announcements or send a fragment of the article and intrigue the recipient for the transition. It is also better to make an announcement in the networks, rather than post the entire material, because they are indexed faster. You can install a special module for deferred publications, which will make a post on the site, even if you go on vacation.

• Deliver the content you want and strike a balance. Don't overload your blog with any kind of adverts. Coercing purchases all the time is also a bad strategy. We advise you to focus on the classic formula for filling the article section: 50% informational content + 30% commercial + 20% entertainment . A blog should work for the buyer first, and for you second.

Analyze search demand and use these queries in your materials. Do not take high-frequency ones - there are more chances to get into the TOP for medium- and low-frequency queries. Use the services to find the questions your customers ask in their search. The most famous are Wordstat from Yandex, AdWords Keyword Planner , Search questions in Serpstat , tips in the search engines themselves and this block:

It will be effective to involve managers in this process and analyze feedback (not only from home).

Work with Wordstat operators to speed up: to find questions, ask! and a question word before the query, and to find exact matches, enclose the query in quotes

We'll have to work on the semantic core and adhere to the general optimization rules. But always prioritize the natural and useful text. Therefore, it is better to write it first, and then check how many keywords you are using. Their density should be in the range of 1.5-4%. Use services to check this indicator, for example, SEO-analysis from Advego .

• Feedback. Give an opportunity to comment on your publications, arrange polls, make contests for shares in social networks. Everything is clear here.
• Structure. Create a rubricator or filter so that the visitor can find what he is interested in faster. For example, separate company news from reviews. Don't make him look for the information he needs in the blog. Terms of order, return, delivery and warranty must be posted according to the rules.

Be sure to insert links into articles , but do not forget that important sections, products should be in direct access, and not just somewhere in the texts.

So does an online store need an article section?

Accept that blogging is an ongoing job and requires an investment of time and money. You also won't see tangible results, like from context. But what you get will not be transient, some materials may remain relevant for years. We'll have to work hard until an adequate team is selected, the strategy is settled and the core is formed, some forces will be spent on organizing the blog itself on the site.

It is best to blog in a separate section of your store. You can, of course, and on a specialized site, but we want to attract traffic to our site. Modern content management systems have excellent tools for creating an article section. OkayCMS supports blogging , here are a couple of examples of actively developing projects: http://newsmoke.com.ua/blog , http://superpuff.ru/blog .

The content of the article section needs to be analyzed and experimented with separately. And of course, the more usefulness, and the more often it is updated, the better. It will be great to stick to a consistent style in posting and writing. Be sure to illustrate the longreads so that you can read them. And don't forget to make the section visible and accessible to visitors.

Since we did not find any negative points, we recommend that you start developing your blog now, especially since OkayCMS has a very advanced Blog functionality.

- It is possible to create as many categories and subcategories as you like. the ability to add an article to several categories at once.

- Made a section for authors. Made it possible to assign authors to an article. We display the author's photo, title, description and links to social media. networks. At the same time, if you turn off the author, then the article will not link to him, but the author himself will be indicated.

- Made a table of contents for the article. The table of contents is generated automatically from the H1-H6 tags that are in the article.

- Made it possible to indicate the time of reading the article and the date of the article update.

- Made a rating for the article

- Added the ability to indicate in the article a photo that will enlarge to full screen when clicked on it.

- Made it possible to add several photos to an article and organize a slider from these photos directly according to the text of the article.

- Made it possible to add a video to an article so that it looks beautiful and does not affect the responsiveness of the page.

- Completely redesigned the pages of the list of articles and a specific article, make a beautiful display of numbered and unnumbered lists and other elements.

- Changed TinyMCE throughout the site, moved more used elements to the panel, and removed less popular ones. Made it more convenient to work with content in the admin. panels.

- Made it so that the opened in the admin is remembered. tab panels after refreshing the page, so that if the content manager wrote a full description and saved the page, then after reloading the page, he immediately opens a tab with a full description.

Now the blog section is a full-fledged marketing tool, which has no analogues among other e-commerce systems.