Nick Eubanks
Nick is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of From The Future. When he's not elbow deep in data, he's spending time with his wife, his dogs, or his cars.
Content might be the most innocuous word on the internet today, even more so within SEO.
It seemingly has no definition; it’s everything.
We all know we need it, most folks are confused about what it actually is – and it’s even harder to create the elusive, but more desired variation of “great content.”
With all that said, crafting content to serve all the different needs of an Ecommerce website might be the most difficult.
Since we work with Ecommerce sites of all sizes, in a wide variety of niches, on all sorts of platforms, we see an amazing level of variability in content production…
The good news is this puts me in a unique position to share some specific, actionable insights with you when it comes to creating content for Ecommerce.
My aim for this post is to run through all of the types of content you should be creating to leverage SEO for driving traffic and sales.
A Note on Creating Content for Ecommerce
The content examples contained in this post are going to represent content to support:
- Your product architecture (and converting visitors into customers)
- Naturally attracting links without outreach
- Earning links with outreach
- Identifying the best opportunities to scale link building at an efficient cost per link
- Attract shares on social media and organic press mentions
So let’s get started first with #1, the most important content on your ecommerce website:
Category Content
Category content is what enables you to rank for the highest volume keywords with commercial intent outside of your information architecture and URL-level link profile.
These pages are often built to target 2 and 3 word keywords that represent search intent at the beginning of the customer journey.
The baseline requirements for these pages has evolved significantly since the advent of the mobile-first index, and subsequently RankBrain’s ability to better match user intent at the query level to the most ideal experience. For these reasons, the former category page bests practices like;
- Having a keyword-optimized H1
- Displaying a short, contextually focused textual description
- Including a contextually relevant image
- Containing links only to SubCategory pages (versus mixing links to SubCats and Featured Products)
are no longer table-stakes, and instead we’re seeing high performing pages breaking all of these rules, and continuing to dominate.
So keep these points in mind as you browse my selection of high performing SEO category pages.
CCS Skate Shoes
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
Best Buy Appliances
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
Men’s Warehouse Sport Coats
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
SubCategory Content
SubCat content is the first born child of it’s parent; category content. Ranking SubCategories is almost as important as Categories in that the search volume opportunities are likely less, but the commercial intent will be greater.
Costco King Mattresses
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
Antique Furniture on Ebay
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
Product Content
Product content is critical in a different way; it needs to build confidence and trust while also selling your target audience on the value of the product.
For the purposes of this post though, we’re going to focus on product page experiences where the content is designed and integrated in a way that drives organic rankings for product-related keywords.
Home Depot Whirlpool French Door Refrigerator
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
Walmart Sceptre 32″ Class HD LED TV
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
Beats by Dre Beats Pill+
Link Profile
Keyword Footprint
Content-Based Resources
Content-based resources may sound a bit redundant, and it probably is, but I needed a way to represent that these kinds of resources contain more than just lists of stats, or historical timeline type stuff (think Wikipedia) and instead are more representative of higher-end production, both in terms of research but also aesthetics.
For the purposes of content for Ecommerce, there are 2 flavors of content-based resources:
Content-Based Resources for Outreach
Content-based resources for outreach are those that are unlikely to rank on their own; think infographics and big interactive web experiences. The nuance here is these kinds of resources exist to build links, but those links must be built by pitching and promoting the underlying asset.
The Impact of Plastic on Earth
Link Building Results
Internet of Evil Things Report [2018]
Link Building Results
Basketball Basics for New Players and Coaches
Link Building Results
Content-Based Resources for SEO
Content-based resources for SEO are pages built to acquire traffic (and links) organically, i.e. they don’t require outreach to begin performing both in search engines but also in terms of link acquisition.
The best way to think about this style of ecommerce content is to think about how many people do research for resources and use Google to find references to cite and link to (to back up their claims).
Paintball Safety
Keyword Footprint
Dog Crate Sizes – A Complete Guide
Keyword Footprint
How Many Drinks Does it Take to Reach 0.08 BAC?
Keyword Footprint
Solution-Focused Blog Posts
Solution-focused posts deliver recommendations or provide answers to common problems or frustrations within your niche. These are the true definition of “funnel content” as they often represent keyword targeting at a specific stage in the funnel.
What’s important to remember here is that your customers problems can arise as any stage in the conversion funnel, top (no commercial consideration), middle (awareness and decision phase), and the bottom (price shopping and ready to purchase).
When this type of content is being designed, the focus should be on blowing out your on-page SEO to get these pages to rank for as many relevant and related terms as possible.
5 Top Plugins to Turn WordPress into a Mobile App
Keyword Footprint
Install a Window Air Conditioner
Keyword Footprint
How To Tie a Tie
Keyword Footprint
Trending News Topics
Trending news is not something you usually think about when it comes to creating strategic content for your ecommerce website, however, it can be a great source of short term rankings and traffic and lead to a significant bump in links if syndicated or mentioned in press outlets piggybacking off your research.
What is The Internet of Things
Passive Link Results
5 Trends in 3D Printing for 2018
Keyword Footprint
The Future of Virtual Reality
Keyword Footprint
Scholarship-Based Resources
Scholarships are a popular way to get high trust .EDU links. Now scholarship link building is not what it once was.. and we have even seen some Google Search Console warnings for “unnatural links” for sites going to hard with their .EDU link building campaigns, but if your brand is big enough – this can still be a great way to land links from the thousands of pages on the internet that link to scholarship offers.
Discover’s Scholarship Page
Link Profile
Chegg Student Scholarships
Link Profile
Topical Guest Posts
After Google publicly slammed guest posting via Matt Cutts in January of 2014 many SEO’s abandoned the practice immediately.
To offer some insight from real world, in the trenches experience; it’s not dead – thin, craptastic guest posting is dead.
Guest posting, i.e. publishing posts on 3rd party websites, when done using hyper-relevant content for hyper-focused audiences not only is still a wonderfully effective way of building links, but of acquiring qualified traffic.
Below are some examples of putting in the time to write relevant content for the publishers audience, and linking to resources that are also relevant to the topic.
The Ecommerce Guide to Shipping Boxes
Link Profile
Why Electric Auto’s Newest Player SF Motors Hasn’t Said Much
Link Profile
The True Cost of Cybercrime
Link Profile
A Special Thank You
To our smart SEO Intern Kurtis Nysmith for providing much of the research for this post.
COMMENTS (9)
Ecommerce was always a facinating topic. Thanks for all the hard work you put into this article. It was very fun to read. And very informativ also.
I felt a bit dissapointed by the content of this article. The title states that you’ll find content strategies, yet I’ve only seen examples not strategies.
Even tho, thanks for putting it out, every bit helps
I’m honestly pretty confused as to what you were expecting…
This is content strategies; it’s the specific types of content that you need to be creating as an ecommerce website, including links to all the examples in the wild with screenshots showing their results.
Any digital marketer should be able to look at a web page and distill it down into what’s making it work and how to replicate it. I did all the legwork to find best in class examples of all the types of content you need to consider when designing an ecommerce content strategy and put them all in once place.
Hey Nick. First of all, let me say THANKS once again, I understand the effort you put into this and I really appreciate it as well as many others who didn’t comment but I’m sure they appreciate it as much.
Probably the fact that I’m not a digital marketer is the problem here. I will take a deeper look, study it and try to distill it into what’s making it work as you said
Awesome post Nick! I love how cohesive and insightful this article is. I would like to ask though. Are there any key differences between creating content for Ecommerce and normal blogs?
Thank you very much! Your article showed that I’m on the right way.
The hardest thing for me is to create content for the Main Category Content. You need to be very careful, understand all the details and nuances of the product, not to miss anything. It is more convenient to work with SubCategory or Product Content. Moreover, there are many tools that help in this task. Personally I start with collection of Amazon suggestions that show the popularity of the product (it finds the most popular users’ requests). And after I have meticulously worked on each category and product, I turn to create content for the main page. A long journey begins with a small step. This is my recipe. Thanks again for your great work! This will undoubtedly become my work tutorial!
Writing a blog for an eCommerce website is the best way to get traffic and Quality Backlinks.
Thanks for sharing with us.
Thanks for the info men, good job.
Content creation is very much important for someone who sets up eCommerce website to attract some traffic. Nice article. I learnt something new. thanks