10 Ways to SEO-Optimise Your eCommerce Store Blog
The best way to get your search engine rankings chugging along is to provide your site with regular SEO content.
Google loves regularly updated websites and will reward the ones with genuinely useful content by improving online visibility.
Tips To SEO-Boost Your eCommerce Store Blog
A blog is not an easy thing to master, and it can’t always be about what your latest deals are.
That will quickly bore people.
To get a regular readership, and to rank higher than your competitors, you need to have constant useful posts – useful in Google’s eyes at least.
This is why you need to up your content marketing for eCommerce SEO. A blog for your online store can provide you with prime online real estate – and you need to fight for your place.
Want to skip ahead? Click any tip below to jump straight to it.
- Keyword-Optimise Your Posts
- Optimise Your Images
- Build Backlinks
- Interview Experts
- Syndicate Your Posts To Other Blogs
- Enable Comments
- Add Internal Links
- Start An Email Newsletter
- Add a Related Articles Section
- Add a Table of Contents & An FAG
So, how do you turn your blog into a high-performing SEO machine?
Below, we break down the strategies that actually move the needle...
1. Keyword-Optimise Your Posts
A blog rises and falls on its keywords (or lack of them). This means every post has to have very precise and detailed keywords for Google to rank them properly.
Depending on what your eCommerce store sells, think of a relevant topic and begin writing articles on it. If you sell books, for example, write about books. If you sell clothes, then write about fashion tips. Make infographics with industry stats. Become an expert.
You first need to find topics that everybody is looking for, however. What’s the point in writing something that nobody cares about? This is possible through keyword research. Luckily, there are plenty of tools.
One tool you can use, which is very specialised, is Ahrefs. This is more for full-time marketers or teams.
Reference: Keyword data from Ahrefs on “What is the best dry dog food on the market”
A free option for researching keywords and topics is Google Keyword Planner.
You can even use Google Auto-Complete to find trending search terms.
Reference: Google’s Auto-Complete Search Feature
Whichever method you choose, the trick is to choose a highly searched-for topic, but with little competition (otherwise known as KD or keyword difficulty). Typically, these are long-tail keywords.
Starting a blog opens the door to other things like a podcast, expert interviews, funny videos ... .basically stuff that people will share and link to. The meat and potatoes of eCommerce blog SEO.
If you’re not a writer, then don’t worry. There are lots of freelance copywriters out there you can hire. Look at places like Upwork or ask people for recommendations.
2. Optimise Your Images
Images are something which can make your store visible or consign it to oblivion. You obviously have to show what you’re selling, but how can you perform image SEO?
Apart from making really good pictures (which is a given), they also need to be in the right file format. WEBP is the preferred format as it makes images really small, although WEBP is now starting to be slowly retired in favour of AVIF.
Don’t ever upload pictures in PNG format. They will end up becoming absolutely enormous and a nightmare to load. Slow-loading pages will increase your bounce rate.
You also need to reduce the pixel size of the photo. Use TinyPNG to shrink them. Usually, shrinking the pixel size doesn’t affect the picture quality in the slightest.
Next, resize them to a size of around 1,000px width. Any bigger and it affects page loading time, which affects your Google ranking. You can usually specify default image sizes in your website admin panel.
Finally, don’t forget your alt tags and title tags. This is how your images will show up in Google Images. This on its own can be a big driver of online traffic to your site.
3. Build Backlinks
The next step in your eCommerce SEO strategy is to build backlinks to the blog. Quality backlinks build your domain authority, which will help to maintain a high ranking.
How do you get backlinks? For a start, contact people that you mention in the blog post. Link to them and ask for a link back. Most people will be delighted at being mentioned and will usually reciprocate.
But usually, writing a well-written, well-researched post will have readers backlinking to you. These are the best links, especially if they’re set at ‘dofollow’.
Google Search Console will give you a list of your backlinks, along with a “spam level”. You should disavow those links if you can, but doing so over the long-term may prove to be the equivalent of trying to push back the sea with your hands.
4. Interview Experts
Another way to bring readers in – and build backlinks and domain authority – is to interview experts in your field. These written interviews can then be repurposed into podcast clips and various other things like infographics.
Everybody wants to hear an expert’s opinion, and experts love being asked. This makes it very likely that they will give you a backlink, and also a social media mention.
The more well-known the expert, the more traffic you’ll get. Period. Never underestimate the power of name recognition. An interview with Bill Gates is going to trump an interview on Google, compared to Mrs Gertrude Bloggs any day.
Note, also, if you’re an expert, you can be the person who gets interviewed or provides guidance. This is another link-building technique for eCommerce websites. Connectively is the most popular website to find these gigs.
5. Syndicate Your Posts To Other Blogs
This would come under the heading of “advanced SEO for eCommerce blogs.”
While building up your own blog is obviously the priority, you can also look for other sites looking for guest posts and write an article for them.
Not only does this open your site up to a new readership, but you’ll get a backlink to the original article on your site.
Just look on Google for “your area of expertise” + “guest post” + “write for us.” You likely won’t get money for a guest post. These posts are done for the backlinks and the exposure to new audiences.
6. Enable Comments
Comments on a blog post are a bit hit-and-miss. On the one hand, Google loves them as they can see website interaction and activity. On the other hand, you’ll need to keep on top of the inevitable spam comments that Google doesn’t like so much.
Reference: Good and Bad blog comments
If you use WordPress, you can use Askimet, which does an excellent job of keeping on top of the worst of it.
7. Add Internal Links
One of the secrets of looking good in the eyes of Google is what’s called the ‘bounce rate.’ This is how long it takes for the reader to leave – or ‘bounce’ from your page.
The longer the bounce rate, the better. This indicates to Google that the reader is finding your content really interesting, and you’ve got them hooked.
The best way to increase the bounce rate – apart from writing a spanking good article, of course – is to add links to other posts and pages on your website. Then, when they’ve finished reading your post, they’ll hopefully click through to the next article.
8. Start An Email Newsletter
Starting a newsletter in itself is not going to make your blog rank higher. But to get increased traffic and loyalty, an email newsletter is an important part of SEO optimisation for online stores.
Why? Because you can send out a frequent newsletter to your subscribers with links to your recent blog articles. Not everybody has time to check your blog for what’s new, so a little polite shove in the right direction never goes amiss.
9. Add a Related Articles Section
This directly ties into the internal linking to keep people on your site longer. At the end of blog articles, you’ll most likely have seen a Related Articles section.
This is when your site algorithmically chooses other articles on your blog, closely related to the one that has just been read. This will obviously encourage readthrough and a longer bounce rate.
10. Add a Table of Contents & An FAQ
Finally, you can’t go wrong with a table of contents and an FAQ. A table of contents would have each section heading along with a ‘jump link’ to take the reader to that particular section. A table of contents also provides a handy indexing tool to Google.
Reference: Table of Contents Example
Google seems to have cooled their stance on FAQ sections lately, but it’s still worth doing one. When you search for something on Google, you’ll see a People Also Ask section. Adding questions to a FAQ section increases your chances of getting in there.
Reference: People also ask section on Google
Final Word
Search engine ranking for eCommerce blogs is something that a lot of site owners will avoid, as it may feel tedious and time-consuming.
But since you would pretty much owe your livelihood to Google, optimising eCommerce blog posts is something you really need to allocate time to.
If you don’t want to do it, hire a professional to do it. But you need to make sure that these 10 tips are followed, at least, to improve the blog’s online visibility. We can handle SEO content for you.
