Top e-Commerce Blogging Dos and Don’ts – the 2023 list

Most e-commerce stores have a blog section yet see little ROI from it.

We’ve helped grow dozens of e-commerce businesses using our blogging strategy services and there’s a set of do’s and don’ts that you need to be aware of –

…provided that you want to have sustainable, long-term organic traffic from Google of course.

Here’s our practice-based list that will help you turn your e-Commerce blogging into a reliable sales channel –

E-commerce blogging strategy do’s:

• Put your customers’ interests and challenges into the center of your blogging efforts.

Create a customer persona and build a list of their interests and challenges. Expand the list towards tangential topics they would be interested in, and think of angles to use to tie these topics to your product line.

• Leverage competitor brands and product names

No need to bash them, just overview the publicly available features and present your products as alternatives. “PRODUCT alternative” is one of the best converting keyword patterns out there.

• Produce non-commercial lists of tools/methods/techniques

If you try to sell in every blog post, that is off-putting. Think of your blog as a magazine for a group of people, and you will evoke more trust. Top retailer blogs are actually mags.

• No more than 20% of product-based blog posts, and ONLY based on keywords you will NOT use in your listings and categories

Some product-based blog posts are fine. But as you put together a list of your eCommerce blog topics, don’t make product lists the cornerstone of your strategy.

[box type=”info”] An example: if you publish articles like “7 Mountain bike helmets for girls under $50” every once in a while that’s totally fine, since you don’t directly compete with your “girl helmets” and “mountain bike helmets” product categories.[/box]

E-commerce blogging strategy don’ts:

• Repeating commercial intent keywords over and over in blog posts

Don’t make your blog posts compete with your product pages – if you do that, neither will perform well on Google.

Google’s logic is that the most relevant page for a query performs best, and if there are several pages dedicated to the same query, all of them get devalued rather than figuring out which one is the “main” one.

• Only using product lists as blog post titles (“top X varieties”/”top PRODUCTS for X/GROUP/ACTIVITY/BUDGET)

Blogs that are 100% made of such titles are boring and risk penalization, just like affiliate sites do.

• Buying e-commerce blog posts and SEO content

“SEO content” is kind of a red flag. Work with writers that focus on audiences and their needs.

• Letting your writers determine your blog strategy

99% of new e-Commerce entrepreneurs do it, because it’s intuitive.

No matter how professional your writers are, they will default to picking e-Commerce blog topics that are fun and easy to write. Instead, have someone business-minded evaluate the relevance of the topics for your customer audience.

Ideally you need professional content strategy help, so consider getting a content plan from us. Saving on content is another great effect of proper content planning – our clients start saving over 40% on content on average within 6 months after working with us.

• Ignoring your past content

A lot of e-commerce stores are running for years, and the number of their indexed pages grows. As you decide on what to blog about next, you absolutely need to inspect the traffic stats of your older posts. That data is the gateway to new blog posts perfectly relevant to your target audience, and no third-party tools will get you that. We offer a state-of-the art Google Search Console audit service, – and every e-commerce website with 500+ indexed pages sees a lot of value from an annual audit.