When looking at how to improve your customer’s overall engagement with your store, along with their buying experience, always ask yourself the following questions; what stage of the store ‘funnel’, that is from the general landing page to the specific purchase, are your customers sitting at? What are they thinking or asking about at the different stages along the way, and how can you make sure the pages they are on at those stages serve their questions and needs, rather than interrupting the purchase flow and diverting them away from the final checkout?

If these details or questions raised stick in your mind, then they will stick in your customer’s mind as well. Blogging is a very important and powerful tool for taking advantage of and being present in those stages at much as possible with your customer, offering internal answers to product/service questions they would naturally be having at that moment in the process. Blogging can give your e-commerce store a sense of personality, familiarity and community, drawing your consumers closer as they identify less with your product, and  provide a culture of involvement, exclusivity and membership, speaking to the innovators and taste makers about products, hyping either the next season’s fashions, or other key seasonal SEO temporarily hot search terms, from a more human perspective, linking your brand to a sense of modernity and flare. 

They can also serve as helpful and sometimes necessary how-to guides for more complicated products; if you know that a customer is going to have to look up how to use an item, provide that information for them before they reach the checkout, or at least let them know that you can provide assistance with that. They will eventually have to go looking for the answers somewhere, so providing them before they even know there may be a problem will create a sense of trust and openness between your consumers and your store.

• Tip for determining what content you should include in your blog to promote your e-commerce shop: search for an item you sell in the Google search bar, then erase that search. Now start asking “how to/where to/where can/when to etc”, Google will remember your first item search, connect the dots, and start producing for you questions that people interested in those items previously looked up. Provide the answers to those questions asked on your own internal blog; this will not only provide the answer for your customers, but result in your blog-answer coming up in future like searches.

Blogging can also draw in and convert random searchers, that is people not visiting your shop to expressly buy your products, but out of interest in the activities or lifestyles those products are associated with. Suddenly you’re drawing in potential customers with relevant interests in what you offer, giving you access to even more high-value consumers. They can offer various types of additional content and value to your store, as well as act as  lifestyle draws, talking about the hottest new products and innovations coming out (and available from your store). 

Finally, blogs are simply excellent chances to prime your search engine optimization, giving you the opportunity to frequently repeat keywords and search terms that will inevitably drive traffic to you. What’s more, with repeat-use seasonal pages such as the winter shopping holidays, every return to your seasonal page will compound the traffic it will have the next year, giving it more weight with search engines when that seasonal SEO kicks in, searching for terms like ”holiday” or “stocking stuffers”. 

• Tip for seasonal and repeat content; don’t restart your process every time you return to a topic, holiday or annual sales special such as Black Friday. Instead always build on what you’ve built before, by reusing the previous pages from the years before (energizing the reused url) and as much of your previous copy-content, cementing it in the search outcomes.

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