As an online store owner you have to tackle many tasks and eCommerce content optimization is one of them to ensure you are always ahead of the competition and to maximize your revenue. This detailed guide will help you along the way, to make sure you don’t forget anything, and keep you eyes on the prize. This of course requires a lot of work and time. In case you don’t want to go through all the hassle and just need results, click here to schedule a meeting to discuss your needs.
As an eCommerce store owner, your primary focus is customer acquisition and retention. There are many angles you can approach to reach your goal, i.e. do paid advertising, optimize your online store for search engines, retain your customers through bonus systems, free stuff for returning customers, email campaigns, and many more.
However, there is one thing that can be certain – if your customers don’t like what they read, no matter on your website, email or ad, they will leave.
How to remedy this, you say?
To make sure your success is continuous and stable, you need to have the right funnel.
Well, through eCommerce content optimization!
It plays a massive role in making sure you are well seen by search engines and climbing up those ranks in SERPs, that your conversion rate is high and only getting higher.
In this world of insane competition with giants like Amazon, eBay, and so on, you need to build trust in your store, make sure you have what people are looking for and offer them a great experience while shopping in your online store.
Content is a great tool to achieve all that!
In this article, you will read about what is content optimization, why it’s so important and which exact steps you need to take to optimize your content.
In order to have the right funnel and understand very well all the nuances and distinctions of each offer and audience, you need to have an eCommerce SEO strategy.
So let’s start from the beginning – what is content optimization?
Well, guess what, they are all right, and there is data to prove it.
You might have heard the gurus of marketing talking for a while now about the importance of great content and customer-driven content, which is especially true for eCommerce content marketing.
Here are stats when it comes to content marketing strategy for eCommerce:
As you can see, data shows the importance of eCommerce content marketing, but somehow so many online stores don’t bother with that and instead focus on other aspects of the business. Thus, creating great content for your website will give you a huge competitive advantage.
Content optimization is a process, where you optimize all the copy of your site in a specific way so that it can reach your target audience on the largest possible scale.
From the above definition and stats, we can see that your eCommerce content should be crafted with your target audience in mind and make sure you speak directly to them, about their issues and how you can help them.
Nothing generic! Only highly targeted content!
In reality, this rarely happens, since, in order for you to write an audience-specific content, you need to know them very very well, which takes time.
Don’t feel bad; no one opens their online store with a perfect understanding of who their target audience is and how to speak to them. Another important thing to remember is that even if you did your homework and know your audience from A-to-Z, they are constantly changing.
Their habits are changing, their preferences, even the language they use.
For this particular reason, content optimization is very important and needs to be done from time to time, to make sure you are on the right track and didn’t fall behind the latest changes in your target audience’s tastes.
It is worth mentioning that content optimization is a small but vital part of overall SEO optimization, that you should be performing quarterly.
So we have established and proven that content for eCommerce business is the key and needs to be highly targeted. Now let’s see how you can make sure that your content is talking to your audience, in the way it should and bringing the needed results.
On-Site SEO audit will give you a picture of what current state your website is in to help you better understand which direction your eCommerce SEO strategy needs to go.
The main parts of the on-site SEO Audit include Technical and Content Audit.
Content Audit is the process of collecting and analyzing data from the website, like product descriptions, blog posts, landing pages, and so on.
As mentioned before, the content needs to be highly targeted and talk to your buyer persona. In case you were in a rush, and your buyer persona exists only in your head, put it to paper, revisit it, rethink it, compare it with past sales.
In order to create targeted content, you need to know your audience. So make sure that your existing clients are in line with your buyer persona and the content speaks to them.
If there is any inconsistency between your existing clients and ones you wish to attract, choose one, make them your buyer persona, and target your content marketing efforts towards them.
Keep in mind that not only your webstore content needs to be audited, but also your ads, emails, banners, social media content, and so on. Pretty much anything that can be used to attract or interact with your buyer persona needs to be targeted specifically to it.
Know what kind of content you need, what you want to keep, what you need to get rid of. Here we are talking about the types of content, i.e. blog article, landing page, product description, category content, customer-driven content – reviews, and marketing content, as in ad copy, email copy, social media post copy, and so on.
When you structure everything and know what you want to have, it’s much easier to make a decision on how you need to optimize it.
Inbound marketing is a huge deal, and content marketing is growing in popularity. For example, 55% of marketers use blogging as their primary source of inbound marketing. Promotional and storytelling videos are the most commonly used ones in marketing today, and nowadays, video is the most widely used medium for content strategy for eCommerce.
So make sure to structure your content in a way to reach the largest audience and repurpose your content to fit all kinds of media – forums, youtube, social media, podcasts, and so on.
A great blog post on the latest trends in shoes can become an infographic, or a snippet of it a social media post; it can be the topic of a podcast and an inspiration for a great video.
We all know that mobile phones have already taken the eCommerce market by storm and their popularity is growing by the minute.
Just take a look at numbers:
These stats speak for themselves; it is obvious that we need to pay huge attention to the mobile version of our websites in the eCommerce industry especially, however, do not forget about the desktop versions as well.
Mobile might be that attracts and directs leads to your webstore, but the desktop is the one that closes deals and brings sales. Desktop CR is still higher and is not surprising since spending anything over $50 requires some research, and you need to make sure you checked the item and that you actually want and need it.
Don’t forget about tablets, they have higher CR rates than mobile, but lower than desktop, but are still very important. Optimize your website across all the devices, and the results won’t disappoint you.
When it comes to SEO, content strategy for eCommerce is very important and needs a profound understanding of the matter and careful planning.
SEO is what helps search engine algorithms see you as a relevant source of information for a keyword or a phrase people punched in their search bars. It will help you rank on top of the search engine pages, thus building credibility among your potential customers.
SEO is the source of virtually free, long term traffic to your online store that only requires an initial investment. When you are done optimizing your eCommerce content for SEO, you will need to revisit your actions quarterly, to make sure everything is in order.
When we say SEO optimization, there is a lot that goes into the process and, actually, a lot can get lost. Make sure you use an SEO Checklist to help you through it or just hire a specialist to do it for you.
Here are the examples of some of the things you will need to do regarding SEO and your eCommerce content:
SEO has far more than just content optimization, that requires both on-site and off-site attention from you, that includes all the technical parameters, site speed, code bugs, link building and much more.
If you are interested in gaining a profound understanding of SEO and how you can optimize your online store accordingly, check out our article on eCommerce SEO Strategy creation and implementation.
eCommerce content is hard to generate sometimes. There are only so many ways you can describe a red leather bag with short handles. However, do not be tempted to just write a couple of words about it and use the simplest language possible.
Remember that you are describing a product that people can’t see or touch before they buy it, so you need to talk about it in a way that they understand how it’s made, materials used, the style, the use, the dimensions.
Adding a good amount of descriptive text only strengthens your chances of gaining customer trust and credibility, and also ranking on SERPs.
Nothing gives confidence in the quality of a product as much as customer experience. We have already mentioned the statistical data saying how much reviews affect the purchasing decision of potential customers.
Thus, make sure you include as many real customer reviews as you can. Also, make a habit of answering each one of them, especially the bad ones. And remember the golden rule of marketing – the client is always right.
Do not be bitter or defensive answering the bad reviews, rather be apologetic and nice.
As much as all of us read reviews before booking a hotel or a rental apartment, we also make sure to read reviews on products we can’t see or touch. The photo displayed on your website might not be clear on the size of the bag, for example.
But trust the fact that another customer will let everyone know if the size in the picture is not true to the real one.
By customer-generated content, we also mean pictures, not just reviews. Make sure people can attach their images along with their reviews of the product since it builds more trust among your visitors than your pictures.
We have already talked about this, but it’s worth mentioning again – repurpose and adapt your content for each medium and make sure to present your product in as many ways as possible.
If you are selling a necklace, for example, you can post pictures of it in your product description, add a video of someone wearing it, add a lengthy description of it, saying the exact specifications and so on.
By this one we mean not the core content of your online store of course, but everything in between – the landing pages, the CTAs, the ad copies, email campaigns your thank you page, the subscription pop-ups on your website and so on.
It’s hard to anticipate what your audience will respond to; it’s pretty much a guessing game. In this case, a/b testing helps understand your audience better, what they like, and what not and in the process will increase your CTA and AOV.
We can’t stress it hard enough – nothing generic, only targeted content!
And what’s more targeted than personalized content?
Since you are not a physical store, where you can remember the faces of your repeating customers, and don’t have salespeople greeting them by name and asking how their daughter that lives in France is doing, you need to get creative.
When you write them emails, sending coupons, offering discounts make them feel special, make them feel like you know them, that they matter to you and that you go the extra mile for them.
Brand loyalty is what makes successful businesses stand out from the crowd of similar stores offering the same exact product. And personalization of content is one step towards building such loyalty among your customers.
And last but not least, stay relevant!
Never use outdated content, information or react to recent events two months later.
Make sure you update your eCommerce content regularly. For example, updating and reusing or repurposing your old content can come in very handy in this situation. You can turn your old blog post into a short video, using the updated information, you can turn your old video into an infographic and so on.
Scheduling your content review into your overall content marketing strategy for eCommerce will help a great deal in staying on top of things and keeping your relevance, hence staying in sight of the search engine radar and getting new customers.
As you can see, eCommerce content optimization has immense benefits and, hopefully, you are convinced that you need to adopt one or more of these tactics to be successful in our world of harsh competition.
Be sure to try them all, and you will see that it will bring great results and put you on the map of search engines as well as build trust between you and your potential as well as existing customers.
No doubt, that eCommerce content marketing is a professional knowledge field that needs the investment of both finance and time.
In case you think it’s too much for you to handle as an online store owner, you can always seek the help of professionals and trust them to shape and construct your content strategy for eCommerce.
In case the letter sounds more appealing to you, click on the link below to schedule a one-on-one meeting and let’s discuss how we can help you grow your CR in particular, and online store in general through targeted eCommerce content marketing.
Margarita is the content manager at Smarketa and has been putting words to paper for over 5 years now. She is a bit of a grammar nazi, and believes that the right punctuation can save lives. 
