Is it Important to Create a Blog for Your Online Store?

Undoubtedly, blogging in 2023 has become one of the most effective ways to grow your small business. It's a form of content marketing that offers tremendous value to potential customers when everything is done right. Posting quality content regularly across multiple channels will make your brand a leading influencer in the print on demand world. Moreover, it'll attract more traffic and strengthen your reputation as a thought leader. 

Creating an eCommerce website blog requires a lot of preparation and work that doesn't give quick results. It's tough to sell, especially to companies with small marketing budgets and low margins. Even so, these tactics are critical to print on demand services, and here's why. 

Table of contents

Make more people aware of your brand

Improve your SEO rankings

Refine the sales funnel

Let visitors share your content

Build up your customer base

Conclusion

Make more people aware of your brand

Statistics show that companies with 401-1000 pages get six times more potential customers than those with 51-100 pages. After all, incoming leads turn into business generators. But how do you make your brand being heard? 

The key to developing your audience is creating high-quality and varied content in your Shopify blog regularly. It'll make visitors come back and follow the news digest by email. The most important proof of this is Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines with EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) concepts. The first one indicates that high-quality web pages are experts and have a high level of knowledge. The second one talks about incompetent and unauthorized content that can negatively reflect the reader's health and well-being. Mostly this concerns eCommerce websites of financial and medical blog topics. Thus, Google lowers the ranking of such pages. 

A blog helps you communicate with your potential customers: answer questions or prevent fears. You can assess your users' interests and change the subject depending on wishes on an indirect level.

In addition, infographics, videos, pictures, statistics can meet the needs of different audience segments. For example, a video on the site significantly raises the conversion rate by more than 80%. The inclusion of colored visuals increases the readiness to read further, and the content itself gets 94% more views than regular text, even expert. 

Improve your SEO rankings

The blog you write provides Google with another page for indexing. In turn, your prospects will be able to find you faster on the Internet. According to statistics, sites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages. In addition, take into account the positions in the SERP - the higher your online store is in organic search, the more likely it will be visited by more people. 

By creating a link on social media, you drive traffic to your website. But before you publish the material, optimize your blog because it’s a way to increase the visibility of your website in search engines and thereby raise traffic to prospects.

Let's analyze the best SEO practices for the POD website blog!

Easy SEO Strategies for Your Print on Demand Business Website

• Find one keyword for the post so that the crawler can assess the content and its relevance to the same topic. We recommend focusing on long-tail keywords - they’re not very competitive. Considering that most people express their thoughts in a few words in the search box, they account for most organic traffic.

NOTE: with the growing popularity of voice search, long-tail keywords are closely related to such search queries.

• Optimize your message by filling it with key phrases.

NOTE: don’t overdo it while packing your post with keywords - you won't help these rankings but only make it worse.

• Take care of the title, its tag, and subheadings H1, H2, H3 by including the key phrases. By the way, there is a correlation between the headline with keywords and the page rank in Google.
• Mention keywords in the introduction and conclusion.
• Take care of the technical side: create an XML sitemap, compress images for speed, put your blog in a Subfolder.
• Don't neglect meta descriptions - a form of HTML tag that will help your future visitors determine the value of a site. Good snippets improve the CTR and thus indirectly affect the rating.
• Create an “Evergreen URL”.
• Take care of increasing the link weight of the text: e.g., if you made a publication about a product, mention an older online shopping blog post.

NOTE: don't forget about backlinks: the more URLs to quality websites you use, the higher your rankings are.

You can monitor SEO changes utilizing Search Console - it has everything you need: performance and indexing reports.

Refine the sales funnel

Think about how you’re attracting people to your sales funnel. For some reason, many SEO specialists neglect to send an email, but it should be at the top of the list in the print on demand business. To find your future subscribers:

1. Create incentives to attract (e.g., CTA buttons).
2. Implement a newsletter strategy to keep your potential buyers informed.
3. Remember to include a link to the content you create in every email.

Track negative comments online: responsiveness is an essential and visible step for every brand. Also, consider positive commentary as a factor of user trust and brand loyalty. Therefore, collect reviews about your brand in a separate customer experience blog. After all, before buying, 93% of users read reviews. 

No doubt everyone loves gifts. Reward your clients with them: give free subscriptions, bonus points, discounts, special offers. As soon as your audience knows about the rewards, more people will follow the blog updates.

Let visitors share your content

Think about the distribution channels for your posts to increase your readership. For example, social networks significantly increase the reach of a new audience because most of the published material is links to website content. That’s why it’ll be easier to promote a blog than product pages, landing pages, or unlinked posts. Remember, every blog post is an opportunity to share it as a link to social media platforms. Read more about how a print on demand business can blow up social media with its presence here.

The core of blogging for eCommerce is getting users to share your messages to gain a bigger reach, brand awareness, and conversion rates. And the only reason to share or otherwise interact with your online store is to get interesting, relevant information.

Build up your customer base

We’ve already talked about the fact that you shouldn’t neglect email newsletters. That’ll create a contact list for the interacting users. Remember, email marketing never gets old. 

It’s a great idea to create a customer engagement blog, which will be your website community. By giving people the freedom to express themselves, you’ll only fuel interest in a store. So all positive reviews can absorb any negative but also become a source of inspiration for improvement. 

Immerse yourself in strategic conversation with your visitors - find out how they discovered your brand. List their expectations for the future and ensure to implement them. And once you do, you’ll become even more valuable to your customers.

Conclusion

In 2023, blogging has become the most effective way to build authority in the market. Now, what you perceive as potential publication material is your experience, which can be helpful to educational material for site visitors. Soon, sharing this information will help you gain leadership and brand awareness.

A blog that lives on a website should be made public on other channels as well. This tactic will drive organic traffic - the most excellent value for any entrepreneur. But for users and crawlers to adequately evaluate your content, ensure to implement SEO. 

Blogging is irreplaceable in modern business. That's a serious investment of time and money, but it'll pay off as long as you keep doing it.