Want to know the secret to success? It’s creating great SEO content.
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. While you can implement all the technical SEO optimisations to your site and even buy the best quality backlinks, without content, or with low-quality content, that doesn’t serve much purpose for the audience, you’re still unlikely to rank highly and could potentially gain a negative reputation.
On the other hand, creating content without implementing SEO best practices, will also get you nowhere, as good SEO will help push your content to the top spots and show the audience that you’re a reliable and trustworthy site.
So, when it comes to creating a solid content marketing strategy, you’ll need to ensure that the two are integrated in order to enable your eCommerce business to:
- Increase website engagement
- Drive more traffic
- Improve brand awareness
- Build trust and authority
- Generate leads
- Increase sales
Here, we’ll be sharing our top tips on how to generate more sales from SEO content that you can implement today!
Different Types of Content
It’s important to remember that content comes in many different forms. And so, creating a variety of content can be used to reach new audiences and convert them into customers. Here are some of the most popular types of content to create:
Blogs
When you go to a search engine to learn how to do something or look for a review or comparison between products, chances are you’ll come across a well-written, optimised blog in the top results that matches your query as closely as possible.
Video
Video content is extremely popular, from YouTube to TikTok, this type of content is perfect for grabbing someone’s attention and piquing their interest in a short amount of time. According to the Hubspot marketing statistics for 2022, 80% of video marketers said that video content has directly increased their sales.
Podcasts
There’s never been a better time to start a podcast for your business as they’ve been steadily growing in popularity over the last decade. And, as of 2021, 19.1 million people in the UK listened to podcasts. Engaging, informative and entertaining, a podcast can help to increase sales and build brand awareness.
1. Know your Customer and Who You’re Selling To
While you might already have a target audience in mind, dig a little deeper to find out more about them. What do they need? What kind of problems do they face? How can your product make a difference in their life?
By learning more about your customer and what they’re searching for, you’ll be able to assess your current blog and content strategy and make any necessary adjustments. This should then make it easier to plan out topics for future blogs that will be genuinely helpful to your audience and likely result in more transactions.
Some points you may want to consider when researching your customer include:
- Demographics
- Customer behaviour and buying patterns
- Interests and goals
- Motivations
2. Research and Implement Relevant Keywords
Researching and implementing relevant keywords into your copy will help your content rank highly and be seen by more people. You should be targeting keywords in line with your objectives, products and your customer needs.
For example, if you have a business that sells dining tables, research keywords around dining table styling, dining table cleaning tips, seasonal tablescapes, dinner party tips etc to attract customers and lead them to your products.
It’s important to keep in mind that if you’re choosing keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches per month, it’s going to be very difficult to rank highly and for anyone to see your content.
However, if you refine your keywords or choose a longer tail keyword that gets a couple of thousand searches a month, your site is more likely to rank higher and, therefore, get more clicks, which can result in transactions.
Remember to also not overstuff your content with keywords as this can come across as spammy, which is the last thing you want. Include a primary keyword in your title and heading, and use secondary keywords in your meta description and as questions throughout the blog for the best, most authentic results.
3. Consistently Produce Content
Writing one mammoth blog and not producing any more content for months and months just isn’t going to cut it. You need to be consistent.
Publishing 1-2 blogs a week is perfectly sufficient and will keep your existing users engaged and coming back for more if they can expect a regular posting schedule from you.
Of course, writing more content on a regular basis also improves your chances of featuring highly in the search engines too, which will ultimately lead to new customers reaching your site. Plus, being consistent with your content will show users that you’re trustworthy, experts in your field and reliable.
Ideally, you’ll want to start producing evergreen content, rather than very specific niche content, to begin with, that’s valuable and memorable and will not only bring old customers back but encourage new customers to visit too.
For example, writing a piece around ‘how to clean a stone table’ will always be useful to anyone who’s owned a stone table for years and need extra tips for specific spillages, those who have recently bought a stone table and have no idea where to start with cleaning it, or someone who’s thinking about buying a stone table and want to learn how hard or easy it is to maintain.
4. Improve On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is crucial when it comes to boosting sales from content. Badly written or formatted content with no headings, keywords or user-friendly on-page techniques, will make a potential customer click off faster than they arrived.
Putting in the extra time and improving your on-page SEO will make your site more user-friendly, will increase your search rankings, make it easier for search engines to index your pages and help you create better content overall.
Here are some of the essential on-page SEO steps you should implement right away:
- Writing compelling and descriptive meta titles within the character limit.
- Write keyword-optimised alternative text for any images used.
- Use short, simple and easy to read URLs
- Optimise headings with keywords
- Write captivating meta descriptions, within the character limit, to improve visibility and relevance in search engines, and encourage users to click.
- Increase your page load speed to reduce bounce rates (this could be as simple as lazy loading your images).
5. Utilise Internal Linking
So, you’ve spent a few hours creating a stellar piece of content, but didn’t include any internal links for readers to follow? Why?! Internal linking is a great way to keep users on your site for as long as possible and direct them to products they may be interested in based on the blog post they’re reading.
Just like with your keywords, you don’t want to spam the content by linking to something in every other word. Instead, keep it natural and pick out a few relevant articles or products to link to. For example, for an article titled ‘how to clean a stone table,’ you could link to your range of stone tables or specific cleaning products for the table that you might supply.
Try not to duplicate links, you don’t need to link to stone tables every time you mention it and avoid linking words such as ‘click here’. Use short but relevant anchor text that’s more user-friendly and allows the blog to flow better.
Without utilising these links, anyone unfamiliar with your site, but has clicked onto your article, will be unaware that you also sell exactly what they’re looking for. Including them could very well be a quick and easy sale for you!
6. Have a Strong and Compelling CTA
Lastly, don’t end an article abruptly without a CTA (call to action), otherwise, users won’t know what they should do next and are more likely to just click off without browsing the rest of your site. A strong and compelling CTA link or button acts almost like a signpost, directing users where to go, what product to buy or what service to sign up to.
For example, after reading an article on how to clean a stone table, adding a simple CTA that reads ‘shop our range of stone table cleaning products now’ will encourage users to click through and buy what they need based on your recommendations within the article.
Content is a fantastic and very achievable way to convert leads to sales, just take a look at our recent case study about how NIO Cocktails increased their transactions by 205.94% purely through SEO content. By implementing these strategies, you’ll be well on your way to generating more sales!