With eCommerce businesses booming due to the rise of online shopping, the importance of content writing has grown significantly. Content is essential for eCommerce businesses as it serves as a tool to connect with customers and improve conversions. It is vastly different from other forms of content because its goal is to encourage purchase.
As an eCommerce agency, here is what we can tell you about content writing for eCommerce businesses from our years of experience.
Why do I need content for my eCommerce business? Aren’t products enough?
To stand out from the crowd, it is crucial for eCommerce businesses to have a strong online presence, and one of the most effective ways to achieve this is through content marketing. You need content on your eCommerce website to help people make informed buying decisions. The more information they get from you, the more likely are they to buy from you.
To attract potential customers
One of the main reasons why you need content for an eCommerce business is to attract potential customers. By creating valuable, informative, and engaging content, you can increase your website traffic, generate leads, and ultimately, drive sales.
For example, creating blog posts that provide useful tips and insights related to your products can attract potential customers who are looking for information related to your products. This can help build trust and credibility with potential customers, and ultimately, lead to more sales.
To educate and inform customers
As mentioned before, content that explains the features and benefits of your products allows customers to make informed purchase decisions.
For instance, you can create product descriptions, which provide detailed information about the product’s features, specifications, and usage, to help customers understand the product better before buying it.
To improve search engine visibility
Creating content can also help improve your eCommerce business’s search engine visibility. Optimizing your content for search engines can improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), which can lead to increased website traffic and more sales.
A good example of this is writing blog posts that include relevant keywords related to your products so that your website can rank for those keywords, making it easier for potential customers to find your business online.
To build brand awareness
Valuable, informative, and engaging content can resonate with your target audience and help you build trust and credibility with potential customers to increase brand awareness. Blog posts sharing your brand’s story, values, and mission can connect with your customers and build brand loyalty.
To encourage social sharing
Finally, creating content can also encourage social sharing. If your content is valuable enough, customers are more likely to share it on social media platforms and forums, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which can help increase your brand’s reach and drive more website traffic as well as sales.
Rules for writing for an eCommerce website
If you think it is time to start investing in content marketing for your eCommerce business, here is what you need to do.
The importance of product descriptions
Product descriptions are crucial for eCommerce businesses as they are the primary source of information that customers rely on when making a purchase decision. Unlike a physical store, customers cannot touch and feel the product. So, it is essential to provide detailed and accurate descriptions that convey the features and benefits of the product.
Your product descriptions should be clear, concise, and easy to understand. They should also include information, such as product dimensions, materials used, and care instructions.
Optimizing content for search engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical for eCommerce businesses, as it helps improve visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Make sure you use relevant keywords in your content, including in the product descriptions, category pages, and blog posts.
As an eCommerce business, you must conduct keyword research to identify the most relevant and valuable keywords for your business so that you can leverage them in your meta descriptions, alt tags, and title tags in product pages to improve search engine visibility.
Writing product reviews and testimonials
Product reviews and testimonials are powerful tools for eCommerce businesses because they can help build trust and credibility with customers.
Since people buy from people, reviews and testimonials provide social proof that the product is of good quality, which can nudge potential customers to take action.
To ensure your reviews and testimonials are genuine, you should encourage customers to leave feedback as much as possible and even consider offering incentives, such as discounts or free shipping, to collect more user opinions for your site.
Creating engaging blog content
Blogging is an effective way for eCommerce businesses to engage with customers and build brand awareness. Blogs can include product reviews, how-to guides, industry news, product comparisons, think pieces, and more.
Since blogs have a high chance of attracting traffic through SEO, not only should your blog content be informative, engaging, and relevant to the target audience but it should also be optimized for SEO.
Using social media to drive sales
Social media is an essential tool for eCommerce businesses, as it provides an opportunity to connect with customers and drive sales. As an eCommerce business, your social media content should be designed to encourage sales by redirecting the audience to your website and ensuring that they easily find what they saw on social media.
Creating content for email marketing campaigns
Email marketing allows eCommerce businesses to reach out to customers and drive sales using personalized content. Since emails are fundamental to every eCommerce business, your email content should be diverse and appealing.
It must include product promotions, new product announcements, and exclusive discounts to grab the audience’s attention and persuade them to take action. You must also segment the email list based on customer preferences and behavior to ensure that the content is relevant and engaging for each recipient.
Don’t forget the FAQs
FAQs are the best way to answer your customers’ questions and provide them with the information they need. They are short, easy to write, and answer a lot of your customer’s most commonly asked questions.
The best way to do this is by creating a FAQ page on your website, which contains all relevant information about your products and services. For example, here’s a question that is often asked on eCommerce sites: “How much does shipping cost?”
Instead of answering the question every time it is asked, creating a short FAQs section on each product page can speed up the purchase process for your consumers.
Create product guides
A product guide could be considered similar to an FAQ but with more information included in it. It is an easy way to give customers more information about products and services, especially if you sell multiple products or offer different types of services to different customers.
Product guides are often used by eCommerce websites as a way of promoting their brands, so it is important that they are written in an engaging way that appeals to potential customers.
Product guides can be used in two ways: they can help customers find products they might not know about or they can be used as a promotional tool for your brand/company/product line at its highest level (ex. “This Product is Perfect for Gift Giving”).
Your guide should include all of the information necessary for your customer to make an informed decision (including price, features, reviews, etc.) and act as a one-stop shop for all queries related to it.
Create product comparison pages
Product comparison pages are a great way of showing off the features of different products without letting your customers waste their time reading through each individual product page. You can also use this type of page as an opportunity to explain why one product is better than another to influence your bottom line.
In essence, content writing is indeed different for eCommerce businesses compared to other businesses. It is more detail-oriented, designed around increasing sales, and used to create a strong online presence and drive sales. Since it has to be done right, make sure you partner with a professional eCommerce agency to write yours!