This year I’ve found myself talking a lot about blogging in an ecommerce context. It seems that it’s one of the most often misused tactics, and is often a good measure of whether you are working with a specialist ecommerce SEO or a generalist SEO.

So what’s the difference?

Broadly speaking an ecommerce specialist SEO understands marketing in the context of a transactional website, and as such they value customer acquisition numbers and revenue over traffic. A generalist will generally be focussed on clicks and traffic.

But surely you need traffic in order to sell?

True, but not all traffic is equal. Intent is important. Unfortunately, all too often I’ll review an ecommerce website with a well structured blog that is attracting clicks, the blog topics appear to be related to the products that are being sold, but the ecommerce metrics aren’t tracking with traffic increases. So what’s going on?

First we need to consider how we want our website to be categorised. Is it an ecommerce website or is it an informational/blog site? Search engines make these distinctions and if you do too good a job with your content you can be perceived by the robot overlords as an informational site, you’ll serve for informational queries but when people are looking to actually purchase the products you sell (known as “in market” searchers) they will be shown sites that Google believes better meet their needs, i.e. sites it categorises as ecommerce websites.

Let me give you a concrete example. I worked with a business selling baking supplies. It seemed really logical that they put recipes on their blog, and they did a great job with them. The problem was when I looked into their visibility profile they were only really appearing for recipe related terms, and when you searched for the actual products they sold they were rarely seen.

Why?

Because Google felt that they were primarily a recipe site, their recipes were getting clicks, they were performing well in an incredibly competitive niche. But there were hundreds of other sites that were sending strong signals to Google that they existed to sell bread tins, knives, yeast, rolling pins etc.

If someone asks you where to buy a food mixer you won’t point them to a recipe book would you? Neither will Google.

After running the client through all this they finally allowed me to make some de-optimisation refinements to their blog content, and guess what? They had record sales the next year, with organic driving a major part of that success.

Now, that’s not to say all ecommerce blog content is worthless, just the majority of it. In the right context it is really important, especially if you have a complex product things like buyers guides can be invaluable. But you need to be an experienced ecommerce SEO to know the difference.

So, here’s my pitch to you. If you have an ecommerce website AND are investing in blogging for SEO reach out to me via my contact form and I’ll give you a free, no obligation assessment as to whether your content is working for you or not.