Mastering an Ecommerce Content Strategy: A Comprehensive Guide

Is your online site struggling to convert visitors into buyers?

Then maybe you need to revisit your content strategy.

I was recently looking for a bread-baking pan that my son had told me about. I knew it was made of cast-iron, although I didn’t know the manufacturer and I didn’t know what it was called.

I tried searching on

• “dutch oven”
• “bread baking pan”
• “cast-iron domed skillet”
• “loaf pan with lid”

There were at least 20 different ways of describing “cast-iron artisan loaf baker.” And thus, you have one of several friction points customers have when trying to engage with an ecommerce company. It’s no wonder that more and more ecommerce companies are embracing content marketing.

They know that great content can create a smooth glide path for customers, help them in the decision-making process, generate sales, and even help set expectations to avoid returns.

To take full advantage, you need to have a strong content strategy that’s aligned with your business goals. Here’s what you need to consider.

Understanding Ecommerce Content Strategy and Its Benefits

In general, a content strategy is a roadmap for planning, creating, managing, promoting, and optimizing content for your customers. Unfortunately, a lot of what is written about content strategy is geared toward B2B marketers. In B2B selling, there are multiple personas involved and a need to sell your brand’s authority as much as a product or service. Typically, your goal is to warm up the sale for a human to close.

As a content strategist for an ecommerce site, your goal is to help each customer navigate your site and answer any questions they may have. You should do this from the time they start shopping to the time they buy something. Purchases are often impulse buys, so you want to create need and urgency, erase any doubts, and get them to put their payment information in.

The content you write, the words you choose, the articles you create, can all make an impact on your company’s top and bottom lines.

Importance of a content strategy in ecommerce

Shoppers want to find what they are looking for — at the quality and price points they deem reasonable. And they want that experience to be as frictionless as possible. That means being able to self-serve.

A recent Gartner report detailed how a content management system can be the jet fuel for a digital commerce platform. Companies can gain a competitive advantage by integrating the two systems.

The analyst firm defines digital commerce as the technology that enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience. The platform provides necessary information for customers to make their buying decisions and uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment.

A digital content management system is the content delivery system that provides your visitors with product descriptions, spec sheets, articles, videos, instruction manuals, and customer reviews.

When you effectively combine them, you can use high-quality content to:

• Boost brand visibility and customer trust
• Drive organic traffic through optimized content
• Enhance user experiences with personalized and relevant content.

High-quality content plays an important role in driving sales and improving customer loyalty.

Understanding your audience

One of the advantages of a digital storefront in ecommerce is that you can analyze your audience’s behaviors. You can see what they are clicking on — and what they aren’t, and this can help inform your strategy.

If you see that an article about sustainability is making more people add products to their cart, you might think about creating more content about that topic. You could also let a potential customer filter by that term.

If you see reviews that say that the product is hard to use, consider creating tutorials to make it easier. By tailoring and targeting content to your audience’s points, you can increase engagement.

Remember too, that MarketMuse’s topic clustering allows you to create a content map that aligns with audience search behaviors and buyer intent.

Driving Traffic to Your Site

One of the best returns on a content marketing investment is in creating quality content that drives traffic and conversions for ecommerce websites.

Most ecommerce content marketing plans tend to focus on digital marketing by buying keywords, email marketing, and social media advertising. Unfortunately, those aren’t the mechanisms that tend to make the sale. If you aren’t writing blog posts for your ecommerce site, you might want to think again. According to Google Think, 59% of shoppers surveyed say they use Google to research a purchase they plan to make in-store or online. And further, this is 1,000 times more effective than organic social media.

Social media is great for brand awareness, but it isn’t as effective as driving traffic to products that your customers are looking to buy. I spoke with Tom Ceconi, CEO for the ecommerce website Fine Linen & Bath, the ecommerce brand Mulberry Park Silks, and the ecommerce business Heritage Park Laundry.

When he first took over in 2019, the company only had a couple of blogs, and the site was only getting a couple hundred people a day through organic traffic. He switched the content strategy to create well-optimized blog posts and Product Display Pages (PDP) and now sees thousands of people a day.

“Organic traffic is extremely important to us,” he said.

Mapping Content to the Ecommerce Funnel

Increasing your organic traffic means creating content around each stage of the buyer journey — around a variety of your products.

The shopper’s journey, also called the buyer journey, consists of roughly three funnel stages:

• Awareness: Leverage educational content to attract new visitors.
• Consideration: Use case studies, tutorials, and product guides to build trust.
• Decision/Purchase: Create high-converting content like product demos, reviews, and live shopping events.

I like to include two more stages that are post-sale: loyalty and advocacy.

When I was looking for a bread-baking pan. I had no idea what to call it — nor what I should be looking for.

Part of your strategy then is to understand the vernacular of shoppers: What are they actually looking for – versus what your company wants to call it. This is a much bigger problem in B2B than B2C – nonetheless, still very important.

With MarketMuse I can research “cast iron pot for bread” and find a list of terms people use. By clicking on the heatmap button, I can see what words competing sites are using — and look to fill the gaps.

Use these words to create engaging content in product descriptions. Remember, use the different words that are appearing in the list.

I love this heatmap feature, as it allows you and your content creation team to see what is working for your competitors — that you might never have considered. Remember, if the search engine ranks your product description ahead of your competitor, you are in essence potentially claiming dollars that were earmarked for a competitor.

As a content strategist, you can inform your team to work these different words into both product display pages and articles.

“We use a combination of optimization and research to create our PDP,” said Ceconi. With a little bit of tweaking, he was able to get Mulberry Silks’ product description page for silk collections to rank first on Google for “Best Silk Sheets.”

Ranking first is harder than ever, but Mulberry Park Silks continues to maintain the top spot by regularly optimizing its page with MarketMuse.

For his laundry detergent ecommerce brand, his team saw that How to Care for Lululemon products was coming up as a question on MarketMuse. They started creating valuable content on topics around brand-specific cleaning.

This type of adjacent content can be for both the top of the funnel and for the loyalty stages. As people are looking to care for their expensive athleisure, the site uses product placements to suggestive sell. For people who are already buying, this type of content reinforces their decision-making to stay with the brand.

MarketMuse Insight: Use the platform’s content scoring to optimize content for each stage, ensuring it aligns with the buyer’s journey.

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High-Converting Content Types for Ecommerce

So, what kinds of content tend to drive engagement and conversions? In general, you want to create content that educates and builds trust with your shoppers — as well as signals to search engines that you are authoritative.

In Ceconi’s case, silk is a natural fiber and therefore more expensive than synthetic fibers. His ecommerce website uses content to explain why it is so good for your skin and hair, and what it takes to make it.

• Product Description Pages (PDP): You’ll want to make sure your Product Description Pages use a variety of relevant keywords and semantic associations that people are actually looking for.
• How-To Guides, Tutorials, and Blogs: Identify instructional topics that drive organic traffic – such as “How to Care for Your Lululemon Clothes,” or “Best Way to Care for Silk Sheets.”
• How-to Videos, Demonstrations: Again, for the bottom of funnel, consider creating content that shows before and after, how to make something work. For the loyalty stage, consider showing how a customer can get more from the product they purchased. This is the perfect opportunity to follow up with them to write a review!

Your goal as an ecommerce content strategist is to offer guidance to your content creators that their goals are to reassure buyers, especially those hesitant to purchase. By carefully setting the right expectations, high quality content can help in lowering return rates and encouraging favorable product reviews.

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Advanced SEO Strategies for Ecommerce Content

I spoke above about what topics you want to write about to attract visitors. But one of the reasons companies like MarketMuse is that it helps content creators optimize their content to attract search engines. Here’s how you can impact search engine optimization (SEO).

Enhancing SEO with Authoritative Content:

Even though Google has been messing with its algorithms, one thing stands out — it wants to create a great customer experience by directing visitors to pages that offer authoritative content. For instance, if you’re writing about ‘silk sheet care,’ you’ll need to include related terms like ‘washing silk,’ ‘gentle detergent,’ and “handwashing tips.’ MarketMuse’s AI-driven platform takes the guesswork out of this process, offering a content score that guides you toward achieving top-ranking content.”

To take the guesswork out of the process, MarketMuse’s AI helps you optimize content by calculating a content score. It tells you that to win a certain phrase, you need to hit a score of N — and then offers a distribution of keywords and phrases that you should consider using to earn the top rank.

Consider using these topical words in your URLs and title tags. Creating content that Google sees as authoritative requires more than just sprinkling in a few keywords. It means understanding the semantic associations that search engines recognize.

Building Topic Clusters for SEO

Similar to the section above on authority, Google looks to direct visitors to ecommerce brands that offer a breadth of content for the user. This means you can’t have one article on silk to be authoritative — you need many.

MarketMuse offers you a guide on topics you should consider authoritative. Better still, it gives you a roadmap of low-hanging fruit! This means you can concentrate your finite content creation resources on topics that you should easily win.

Content clusters are only effective if there is a tremendous amount of internal linking between related topics. Again, MarketMuse provides a list of internal pages that are relevant to the topic — and that should be linked.

Using Metadata and Title Tags

One of the things most content creators forget about — and you need to be vigilant of, is to create your own unique title tags and metadata. The title tag is what appears on the search engine results page (SERP). If you are using MarketMuse, you know the most pressing questions being asked. Use that in your title tag — even if the headline is different! When people are looking at the search results, they are glancing through the title tags to see what best matches their intent.

The next big thing is metadata. Make sure you write descriptions that tease people into wanting to click through. Not sure what to write? Look at the ads on the page for ideas.

Content Distribution Strategy

As noted, your primary distribution will be leaning towards organic content channels. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a robust digital marketing strategy as well.

Since your content now reflects the topics you want to win — that list of topics is a perfect hand-off for the folks buying keywords. If you write your metadata and title tags properly, your digital marketing team can leverage this hard work.

Email marketing can be effective if you are sending prospective buyers and loyal customers valuable information. Neil Patel has some of the best emails — they’re short and to the point. When Ceconi saw that people were curious about how to wash expensive athleisure, he saw an opportunity. That’s the perfect time to send an email that says buying athleisure is expensive, and you want to take care of it well. Now direct them to that blog!

Summary

The luxury retail linens industry is growing, with a projected global market value of $3.4 billion by 2033. With MarketMuse, Ceconi is making sure that his companies have the competitive edge to take advantage of the industry’s growth.

But if your industry is seeing a tightening of budget, then high quality content that reassures nervous shoppers is precisely what is needed. Use tools like MarketMuse to execute a strategy that creates a competitive edge for your ecommerce store.