Should I have a blog on my e-commerce website?
The simple answer to this is yes.
Although blogs may be seen as a little old school, they do still provide some really good benefits for your website, especially an e-commerce website.
A blog serves a few purposes:
- The first reason to have a regularly updated blog is to keep your website fresh. Google loves fresh content. You will often see that the higher ranking pages are the most recently updated pages. A blog allows you to keep your website content fresh and keep Google coming back to visit your website.
- The second reason is that e-commerce websites are usually pretty heavy on products and product descriptions and a bit lighter on text and video and stuff that Google loves. Google loves that text and the video. It explains to them what your website’s about. Having a blog that is regularly updated gives Google the information they need to be able to assess and classify your website.
- Having a blog also allows you to target what we call long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are ones that you may not be currently targeting on your website, but they are often questions people ask about your product or niche. The how, what, who, why, & when. A blog post gives you the opportunity to answers those questions really well. By answering those questions, you can usually rank fairly easily without too much effort for some extra keywords. An example of this is, let’s say you’re selling coffee on your website and your main keywords were based around coffee – ‘buy coffee’, ‘coffee supplier’, those sorts of fairly large search terms. You could create a blog post that says ‘how to make coffee with a coffee maker’, and it could rank fairly easily for that sort of thing, and then you could direct people to your sales page from that blog post.
Having those regularly updated blog posts can really make a difference in the long term and the medium term to the amount of visitors you’re getting to your website and therefore to the amount of sales you’re making from your website. The extra effort of keeping a blog updated on your website will translate to more sales for your business!