Ecommerce content strategy: 5 clear tactics proven to work

Ecommerce content strategy: 5 clear tactics proven to work

From understanding your target audience intimately to nailing your content structure and execution, our complete guide will help you pull people in and close them.

Creating an ecommerce content strategy that works well is no easy task. Get it right however and you’ll be pulling in valuable visitors each and every month, spending money because they found you in the search results for things they’re interested in.

How can you achieve this? By creating unique, structured, and engaging content for your online store! But before hitting the keyboard, you need to answer some fundamental questions. In this article, I’ve mapped out 5 clear tactics that will ensure you’re ready to start winning the ecommerce content game.

And if you want a primer on how to find your most important informational, navigational, and transactional keywords, check out our complete guide to ecommerce keyword research.

1. Understand your store’s audience, inside and out

The best product descriptions and blog articles are not written for everyone. They’re written with a specific audience in mind: your main customers. Now, these are not automatically the people following you on social media. They’re the folks who actually buy your stuff!

Finding out who they are is a high art, so use all transactional data and customer intel you can get. Your analytics tools (like Google Analytics) will already have basic demographic data on your website visitors, so you can try to build personas based on their ages, genders, interests and so on to help your strategies even more.

I also recommend setting up survey forms (using a tool like Hotjar or TypeForm), or even organizing real feedback chats with your customers. This will give you tons of brilliant insights into their needs and expectations.

Once you know your audience, try to speak their language while maintaining your own brand voice. Feel free to address readers directly by saying you. Use humor – or not, if your audience is rather fact-minded. Whatever you do, keep your voice consistent across your entire site.

Search engines use content to understand a page’s purpose and context, but these days they’re far too elegant to require keyword-stuffed nonsense. You should always create pages with your human visitors in mind. As search engines work to evaluate and rank content like a human would, they’ll appreciate the effort too!

The above example has a rather strange product description, but I guess it works in their favor, as the audience will resonate with such memeable content!

Nailing the perfect voice for your audience is key. But customers also search for products by specific attributes like size, color, model number, year, make, and more. Include these when relevant in your product detail pages and technical attributes (such as title tags, descriptions, and structured data).

2. Use a clear structure for product listings and URLs

Customers appreciate a clear and consistent product presentation, offline and online. This calls for a structured approach to listing and organizing your products:

Product name structure

Start by adopting a consistent structure for product names, also known as ‘product titles’, in your inventory. These are prime SEO real estate because they’re prioritized by crawlers and serve as the headlines on individual product pages.

Here are some keys to implementing an efficient product name structure:

Product description structure

Similar to product titles, the product descriptions for items in your store should follow a set format. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a retail store, with similar products displayed in a neat, recognizable style.

Avoid using different fonts or switching up your paragraph structure and frequency of subheads/bullets. Amazon makes this easy by automatically displaying up to five bullet points above-the-fold next to your product images, followed by the actual description below. On your site, try to settle into a format that works for your audience in terms of density, length, and style.

Tip: Advertising on marketplaces? Enhance product listings with metadata! There’s more than meets the eye to a good product listing. Behind the scenes, Amazon lets you specify tons of criteria for products, like ‘target audience’, ‘intended use’, ‘occasion’, and several ‘search terms’. These are totally invisible to customers, but heavily affect search results.

Other platforms, like Shopify, allow for adding tags and grouping products into collections for a clearly structured presentation. Also, if your products have barcodes, include the barcode number somewhere (you’ll be surprised by the impact).

URL structure

Top-notch content sparkles when it’s supported by a consistent website structure. Aim for a clear URL format to help visitors navigate around the site. Ideally, the URL structure reflects your category architecture as well as your breadcrumb navigation.

Simpler is better – figuring out your game plan before creating your product listings will avoid tons of issues down the line (duplicate pages, 404s… yikes!). Work with something like mydomain.com/category/product-name/ and deviate at your own risk.

Tip: Create category names according to top keywords. For maximum winnings, create category pages according to the most highly searched keywords used by your customers.

3. Write engaging ecommerce content that boosts conversions

With your product offering on a solid structural foundation, let’s add some oomph by creating useful and engaging content for your transactional pages. And while we’re at it, let’s spruce up some existing content with a few quick fixes.

Ramp up your product descriptions

At face value, product descriptions are meant to make a compelling case for purchasing your products by showcasing all the important features and benefits. Beneath the surface, they can also help you climb to the top of SERPs by incorporating topics and keywords.

There’s no clear-cut recipe for putting the perfect description together, but at this point you have all the ingredients in place, and you can begin testing.

By now you should have identified your best-performing keywords, the perfect voice for your audience, and a consistent structure for product titles and descriptions. Now it’s time to shake and bake them into winning content while keeping these pointers in mind:

Customers make up their mind within seconds. Are your product descriptions easy to ‘scan’? Is your font size large enough (on mobile)? Are you overwhelming customers with too much text?

If you need to provide more details, guides, use cases, and so on – link to informational content hubs! More on that further down 😎

Think of content beyond text, and incorporate more visuals

A picture is worth a thousand words. Supplement your product pages by adding unique product photos, replete with descriptive alt text that assists with visual image search and accessibility.

Think about including educational videos and buying guide infographics that compare several products, which increase the helpfulness of your pages as well as your authenticity.

Include social proof where possible

Benefit from word-of-mouth buzz by including customer testimonials and reviews in your listings. Sure, you will definitely need to monitor and moderate to keep things clean (user-generated spam is a real threat to your reputation).

Test for success

You can rely on A/B split tests via tools like Google Optimize to see what kind of product descriptions, call-to-actions, images work best for your audience.

4. Extend your reach with content hubs

Content is king! Because without context and background information, your products are just… stuff. When you maintain informational content hubs on your site, you’re not only adding storytelling and cultural relevance around your listings – you’re also attracting organic search results with magnetic pull.

Host an engaging blog on your website

Instead of waiting for media outlets to feature your company or products, control the conversation by adding a blog to your website.

Some tips for writing killer blog posts:

Answer customer questions proactively in optimized FAQ pages

Search engines prioritize pages that answer common questions about a product in the most helpful way.

Publish guides and explainer content

Customers are especially receptive to helpful, actionable content during the consideration stages of their journey.

5. Pursue content creation beyond your own website

Consumers prefer brands that are responsive, knowledgeable and helpful.

So there you have it, our guide to ecommerce content strategy. I’m sure it got your creative juices flowing, but don’t worry just yet if you haven’t figured out that devastatingly brilliant strategy. These things take time! I suggest you investigate each of these points one day at a time during your discovery phase, and you’ll have a much better idea of what your website needs.