Increasing traffic to your e-commerce store with targeted content writing
In this blog post you will learn how to use quality content writing to drive targeted traffic to your e-commerce website.
Driving traffic to your e-commerce website or e-commerce store ideally shouldn’t be a problem.
The content management systems are built in such a way that they are anyway quite search engine friendly.
If you are doing everything to make it easier for Google to crawl and index your catalog, getting targeted traffic from search engines shouldn’t be a problem.
The main problem comes from your competition.
For practically every commodity being sold on the Internet, there are hundreds of e-commerce websites offering the same thing.
If you’re looking for shoes, there are hundreds of websites selling the same variety of those shows.
Even if there are not “hundreds of websites”, searchers rarely go beyond the second page of the search results.
Hence, if your website is not featuring on the first page, there is a remote chance that people will come to your e-commerce website.
What are the main sources of targeted traffic to your e-commerce website?
Sources of inbound traffic to your e-commerce website
The main sources of targeted traffic to your e-commerce store are
- Search engines
- Internet advertising
- PPC marketing on search engines and social media websites
- In-app advertising
- Direct traffic from incoming links
- Email marketing
I provide content writing services for search engine optimization, for accumulating incoming links from other websites and social media and social networking websites, and of course, for email marketing.
How does quality content writing help you get targeted traffic to your e-commerce store?
There are multiple ways content writing can help you. Here are a few things that can be done.
Write highly unique titles and descriptions for your products
There must be something unique in your products that you can highlight. Something that may be very few people are searching for, but they are searching for it.
For example, many running shoes are Velcro shoes, without laces. Hence, if you have “running shoes” or, “jogging shoes” in your catalogue, maybe you can also highlight the Velcro feature and use in the title “jogging shoes with Velcro” or “running shoes with Velcro”.
The basic idea is to stand out and write something that is not being used by other e-commerce store managers.
Similarly, in the description, mention attributes that are important, attributes for which people search, but that are not being covered by other sellers.
This will immediately improve your targeted traffic.
Write and publish engaging content to build long-term traffic
Content writing for e-commerce stores doesn’t just mean writing titles and descriptions for your products.
You can write blog posts and articles talking about various aspects of the products that you are selling.
An e-commerce website selling gadgets can publish gadget reviews and can even invite customers to leave reviews.
Remember that these reviews are different from the usual reviews that appear under every category.
I’m talking about full-fledged blog posts and articles.
An e-commerce website selling garments and accessories can publish advice on how to select the right garment for the right occasion.
Many people are looking for such information.
Recently I wrote a blog post on top 10 evening wear disasters to avoid, for an apparels website.
You may wonder if big stores like Amazon aren’t publishing such blog posts and articles, why should you?
Well, they are very big websites with a very strong brand presence.
They are the preferred choice of all search engines.
These e-commerce stores have already spent years and invested millions in building their brands.
Since your brand is not well known, you have to compensate this lack of brand presence with high-quality content.
This Forbes blog post says that 90% of today’s data has been created since 2016.
This post was written in 2018 but you can easily guess how much information is being published on the Internet and how important it is to get noticed amidst this deluge of information.
Get traffic from social media through engaging content
You may like to read 5 ways to make your content social media friendly
All sort of information is constantly being shared on social media and social networking websites.
This information doesn’t always have to be informative.
But it must provide some value to those who are sharing it (look, I’m sharing this) and to those with whom the information is being shared.
You will have to decide which type of information your target customers and clients like to share on their social media timelines and then write and publish content accordingly.
But make sure that you don’t just simply create noise.
Creating noise doesn’t help your e-commerce business.
Your content must be meaningful, and people should be able to relate to it.
It should definitely represent the voice of your brand.
Doesn’t matter if it is funny.
Doesn’t matter if it is highly useful (some tips on the Covid-19 outbreak).
It doesn’t matter if it is full of tips and tricks (better ways of working from home).
Make it share worthy.
The importance of content writing for email marketing
Then comes email marketing.
This Nielson study says that 66% of online buyers buy their products from the brands they are familiar with.
Nothing nurtures familiarity better than email marketing.
You may also like to read Importance of email marketing for content marketing success
Email marketing is one of the strongest Internet marketing tools but just like any strong tool, it takes effort to build it.
It is of no use if you haven’t invested time in building your own mailing list.
Only high-quality content writing and publishing helps you build a quality mailing list – a healthy subscriber base that responds to your messages.
Remember that people subscribe to your mailing list when they expect something good out of it.
When they find glimpses of quality in your content, upon visiting your website or blog, they don’t want to miss your content and hence, they subscribe to your mailing list.
The good thing about running an e-commerce website is people already expect to hear updates about your products.
But they simply don’t want to buy.
Something must be there for them to attract them.
They want to get better bargains.
They want to receive discounts.
They want to be notified of lucrative offers.
They are also looking for information they can use for making better buying decisions.
I suggest maintaining a balance of 60-40: if you’re an e-commerce store, make 60% of your email campaigns helpful (useful information) and 40% about different product offers people would like to miss.
The main benefits of writing and publishing quality content for your e-commerce website
Before you talk about benefits, here is an interesting quote by Bruce Springsteen, used to clarify a point in a McKinsey article on the importance of consistently publishing high-quality content:
Sustaining an audience is hard,” Bruce Springsteen once said. “It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.
Writing and publishing content focuses on generating and maintaining an audience that pays attention to you.
Hence, I constantly say on my blog that don’t create noise, develop a voice.
If your audience cannot distinguish you from other websites and blogs, it’s no use publishing content.
Even if they want to do business with you, since they cannot distinguish you from the others, it becomes difficult for them to buy from you.
If you go and publishing the same sort of stuff being published on other websites, your content won’t deliver and then you will think content writing and content marketing are useless.
The problem is with the approach, not with this type of marketing.
With this out of the way, here are the main benefits of writing and publishing quality content for your e-commerce website to generate targeted traffic:
1. You build audience retention
Why is audience retention important?
You want people to remember you, right?
With most people wanting to buy from brands they are familiar with, it is very important that people can immediately recall in what business you are when they come across your name.
2. More social media sharing
People share your content if they find it useful.
When they share it, you get traffic from social media and social networking websites.
3. Quality content writing builds trust
Trust is very important on the Internet.
Although e-commerce has gone mainstream, a lot depends on how much people trust your website when they decide to buy.
When you regularly publish quality content that people like, they begin to trust you and your judgement and consequently, your business proposition.
4. You improve your search engine rankings
The SEO mechanism works in a very convoluted manner.
To make Google crawl your website regularly, you need to offer something worth crawling regularly.
If your content writing and publishing frequency is very low, Google learns that you are not a frequent publisher and hence, stops visiting your website or blog regularly.
It leaves everything on randomness.
On the other hand, if there is a pattern and you publish content with greater frequency, it begins to crawl and index your website regularly.
Once I experienced that one of my technology blogs was indexed within seconds when I published new content.
Back then, I was publishing six updates every day.
Even the way you readers react to your content has a direct impact on your SEO.
Hence, it is very important you write and publish engaging content that solves real problems for your readers so that Google can pick positive indicators and further improve your rankings.
You may like to read 5 content writing tips to improve SEO
In conclusion, if you want to experience the power of high-quality content, just look at an average newspaper or magazine.
Even if you don’t trust journalism nowadays, try to remember those days when you trusted the newspaper that you got in the morning.
Whether it was New York Times or Washington Post or the Times of India, you trusted the editors and columnists and based your political and ideological opinions based on their opinions.
These publications had built their platforms, their presence, among our lives.
In the same manner, good quality content writing and publishing, helps us build our own platform, no matter how small it is (even if you have an audience of two people).
It makes people trust you and then buy from your e-commerce store.