Starting an e-commerce store is nothing less than jumping into the battlefield. There are many online stores already out there selling exactly what you are just starting to sell on your Shopify store. But if you have already decided that it is what you want to do next. Be ready for the ferocious competition!
Don’t worry! It is not that hard to drive traffic to a Shopify store, you just need to have the right strategies and procedures in place. I have helped many of my clients to build and effectively run their Shopify stores. I will help you too through this blog post.
When we talk about blogging on Shopify, it is not the main thing that will make us the revenue. It is only a method that will allow us to tap into the right set of audiences. Setting up a Shopify store is easy. The problem arrives when no one knows about your store.
Most store Shopify store owners are of the view that there is no need for blogging as the main purpose of their store is not to blog but to drive sales. You might also have the same opinion! But it is truly wrong!
Yes, I agree with you that the main objective of your store is to sell but blogging allows your prospects to find you. How will you sell when you don’t have people who know you and trust you? It would be extremely difficult to find customers if you ignore blogging.
Why Blogging is Important for Shopify in 2022?
Blogging is like writing a keyword-targeted journal. Picking up a relevant topic, researching the right keywords, and writing to educate your audience about something is known as blogging. Today, almost every marketer is into blogging because they know how important it is for promoting their core business.
Blogging lends a voice to your company and helps you to reach out to potential customers. Even if you are ready to spend on paid advertisement, blogging will continuously help you drive traffic to your store People like to purchase things from a brand, blogging allows you to become a brand.
When you have just set up your Shopify store, except your peers, no one would know about it. Through targeted blogging, you can tell people that your store exists. And if people get any benefit from your blog, they will start buying from your Shopify store. Blogging is not a short-term game. It will grow your business exponentially over time.
In 2022, if you are not investing your time in blogging, you are making a mistake that could not be reversed. It is a fact that blogs take time to rank on search engines. If you start today, you will have a good number of loyal audiences a year after, who will also buy from your Shopify store. But if you delay blogging, you are bound to lose on sales.
Is Blogging on Shopify Worth Your Investment?
We end up investing a lot in so many things in our life that don’t give us anything back. Have we wasted our time? No, everything that we have invested so far either has taught us a good lesson or given us memories to cherish for life. But investing in a Shopify blog is slightly different.
It might take some time, but it will surely help you bring traffic to your store. Take blogging as a marketing campaign that will bring organic traffic to your business. It is not just writing for the sake of writing. A mammoth return on your investment is guaranteed in the future, provided, you are blogging the right way.
Benefits of Setting Up a Shopify Blog
The major benefits that you will be entitled to by setting up a Shopify blog are as follows:
1. Shopify Blog helps Create Awareness
Blogging is one of the easiest and most effective ways to tell your customers about what you are selling. If you have a web-based e-commerce store like that on Shopify, you will need to rank it on the search engines. However, the opportunity to insert relevant keywords on an e-commerce store is limited. Through blogging, you are filling that gap. Writing insightful articles on your Shopify site will also allow you to place the most powerful keywords on your store strategically.
For instance, you sell sneakers on your site and your primary keyword is white sneakers, which is very competitive. It won’t be possible for you to rank your site on Google and other engines for that keyword. A blog will provide you an opportunity to experiment with the primary keyword by converting it into the long tail.
You can use the primary keyword ‘white sneakers’ and make it long-tail like – how to buy white sneakers? By writing a detailed blog on this topic of 1000-1500 words you can help your store reach potential buyers on the go. It won’t be possible in absence of the Shopify blog. Also, you must create a Shopify blog strategy before actually starting out. It will help you plan your content as per your store’s requirements.
2. Shopify Blog helps Optimize the Shopify Store
This point is an addition to what I have already told you in the first point. Website optimization is driven by keywords. And for an e-commerce site, the scope for optimization is only limited to the product titles, descriptions, and technical specifications. But when you start a Shopify blog you expand the scope for optimizing your e-commerce site.
Whether you have an e-commerce site or an ordinary blog site, the first thing that Google bots do is crawl all the web pages to check the content quality. But why Google does do that? It is because Google is a search intent-based engine. When the bots find that your e-commerce site has no or very less content, the SEO of the site is compromised.
Moreover, the right set of keywords offers a site with relevancy and exactness, taking the site one step ahead. Without optimizing your e-commerce website, the dream to drive organic traffic will only remain a dream. In order to get your store rank in the SERP (search engine result pages) blogging is significant.
3. Shopify Blog Helps Building Trust
Trust is something that is hard to find in the online world, especially when you are selling something. But if you have a dedicated blog through which you are providing detailed information to your target audience, trust will prevail soon. And when people will start trusting you, they will also start swiping their cards for what you are selling in your store.
To remain on the top of the game, you need interaction and engagements coming in from your site visitors. Blogging will help you achieve both of these things. While writing on any given topic, you can add a few details about your struggle and how you overcame it. Stories like these help bloggers build a strong bond with their audience.
Also, when writing a blog, you should always try to keep it conversational. The way you speak should be the way you write. If you are just providing information, others are doing that too. If you will not sound engaging, you will never build a connection with people. Writing a Shopify blog is the same as writing some other blog on a different CMS. The fundamentals of blogging are always the same it’s just the trend that you need to follow from time to time.
4. Shopify Blog is a Cost-Efficient Marketing Campaign
As I have already discussed earlier that blogging is more of a marketing campaign that helps drive organic traffic for months and years to come. If you have a big marketing budget, it’s awesome. But most marketing campaigns involve higher costs. Your marketing budget will be consumed completely after a certain period.
However, if you keep doing SEO (search engine optimization) you can easily leverage the organic traffic in the future without spending much on it. But for doing SEO the right way you need lots of content and establishing a Shopify blog is the only way to taste fruits in the future. When you blog regularly your site is updated with freshly written quality content, which the search engine likes.
It is right to say that blogging needs SEO and a blog improves the SEO of a Shopify website. They both complement each other! If you do intense SEO-optimized blogging for the initial six months, you can leverage organic traffic for the following six months without blogging. This is how powerful blogging as a marketing tool could be.
How to Start a Shopify Blog?
If you have already set up your Shopify store all you need to do is to start publishing new blog posts on your e-commerce site. Shopify has a feature that lets you blog without relying on external platforms or plugins.
The first thing that you must do after setting up your store is to login into your Shopify admin panel. Then click on an online store in the menu and select blog posts from the drop-down. Now, you will see the ‘create blog post’ option on the screen. Click on it and you will see the Shopify editor for creating your first blog post.
You can use the editor to create content from scratch, but I would recommend keeping your blog post ready in advance. Just use the editor to edit and align the different parts of your content accordingly. Also, don’t forget to add the blog to the navigation menu of your Shopify store. Doing this will optimize your Shopify store’s site structure.
How to Plan & Write Shopify Blog?
Planning is paramount before starting anything new. No, you don’t have to waste an entire day planning your blog content, a few hours will suffice for this sort of planning. Here, I have discussed a few things in detail that will help you write a blog on your Shopify store to drive quality traffic that converts.
1. Make Shopify Blog Strategy
Making a blog strategy means deciding on the topics that you will talk about through blogging. It is important to have a strategy in place so that you won’t deviate from your main objective of setting up a blog. All your focus should be on writing keyword-specific blog posts that are either solving a problem or providing detailed information on something to people.
How many blog posts do you need to publish? What are the primary keywords? What are the secondary keywords? Do you need a mix of short and long-tail keywords? How frequently you should write blog posts? What should be the average word count of each post? How deep do you want to go while writing? These are some of the major questions that you ask yourself while making a Shopify blog strategy.
2. Optimize Blog with Right Meta Tags
Simply writing a blog will never make any sense if you are not optimizing it using the right meta tags, titles, and descriptions. The more optimized a blog post is the better the chances of it ranking on the search engines. The HTML title also known as the SEO title is the first thing that Google analyzes to know what you are talking about in a particular blog post.
After the Google bots are done analyzing the HTML title, they hop on to the meta description to know more about your blog. Later on, they go on into your post and read the headings (H1) and sub-headings (H2, H3, H4…..). Hence, it is salient to optimize your blog posts with the right meta tags. If Google finds anything irrelevant, it can go to the extent of penalizing your Shopify store.
3. Optimize & Improve Site Speed
Site speed is one of the major SEO ranking factors for all the major search engines including Google. If your Shopify website loads slowly then you will never get any customers. A slow site speed compromises the user experience and Google will never want that to happen with its users. So, it automatically lowers the ranking of such websites.
If your site is slow, it will never rank on Google and the main objective of your blog is to get your site on Google. Result? All the efforts that you will put into your blogging will fail miserably. Optimizing your site speed should be the first step after setting up your Shopify store.
4. Avoid Thin Blog Content
A piece of blog content that is less than 600 words is considered thin content. Such content will never impress Google and also will not provide complete information to the reader about a given topic. So, whenever you write a blog make sure that the length of the content does not fall short of at least 600 words.
Moreover, if you think that you have provided all the details in a post that your potential audience is searching even the word count of 600 to 1000 words would do. But in addition to that if you want to stand out in the eyes of Google try keeping the content length up to 1500 words. It would be more than enough to impress both Google and the users.
5. Create Sufficient Backlinks
Backlinking is the part of off-page SEO that is performed only after performing the on-page SEO. When you have sufficient blog posts on your Shopify store you can create quality backlinks as it helps in increasing the domain authority. Creating backlinks on high authority sites that have continuous traffic on them is one of the best practices that you must undertake after creating a few blog posts.
6. Write Content that People Like
One mistake most bloggers and marketers make is that they write what they like. But it should be the opposite to it. The blog should contain content that your potential buyers are already searching on Google. For this, you will have to run down keyword research to know which keywords are getting more searches on the search engines. After figuring out the hot selling keywords that are relevant to your Shopify store, you should create content around them.
To Conclude:
Creating and writing a Shopify blog to drive traffic to your Shopify store is not a difficult task. The difficult task is to sell your products. But if you will blog effectively addressing the problems of your potential buyers, you won’t be struggling to sell your products.
