How to write good e-commerce content

Chris Glithero // May 17, 2012

Good e-commerce content can drive sales, earn repeat business and distinguish you from the competition. Poor content, on the other hand, can cost you sales and spoil your reputation. With that in mind, here are a few key pointers for creating good e-commerce content.

Do …

Prioritise quality

High quality content reflects positively on the quality of your business and the products it sells. Not only that, search giant Google is known to place greater value on quality content in its search rankings. These are two very good reasons for making your content the best it can be. Needless to say, typos and grammatical errors can sabotage your efforts, so they must be vigorously erased.

Consider your customers

Different people react positively to different styles of content, so it’s important to know who you’re targeting. Think like your customers and use their language. Giving your e-commerce content a unique tone and personality is an important way of distinguishing yourself from the crowd.

Target specific keywords

For your site to do well, it’s vital that it ranks well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and including relevant keywords and anchor text links is an essential way of boosting your search engine optimisation efforts.

Don’t …

Waffle

Wherever possible, say what you want to say in the shortest number of required words. Keep your product descriptions short and snappy.

Over-optimise

Though keywords are important, they should appear naturally, and seldom more than 2-3 times in any one piece of content. Search engines have long punished ‘keyword stuffing’ (inserting many instances of a word within web content), and Google’s recent ‘Penguin’ update reaffirmed this approach.

Plagiarise

All content on your website, from your product descriptions to your terms and conditions, should be 100% original. Aside from potentially being in breach of copyright law, directly copying content word for word is bad business sense. Firstly, it is likely that your content will not be indexed by the search engines. Secondly, because it is generic and not specific to your website, your content will struggle to engage prospective customers and persuade them to buy your products.

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Content, SEO and social media news: weekly round-up

Eleanor Jones // May 11, 2012

e-Commerce content writingE-commerce sales surge on tablets

New data from a study, conducted by independent mobile ad network InMobi and mobile agency Mobext, has revealed that 3.9 million people in the UK now own a tablet computer, and 69% of these use their devices to make at least one online purchase each month. Amongst those surveyed, around one in ten of these customers were happy to make substantial or expensive purchases through their tablet devices, and 20% of users claim to make fewer purchases from retail stores since obtaining their tablet computers. The research offers valuable advice to e-commerce retailers, who should ensure that their online stores have a tablet-friendly version with an attractive and accessible format and good quality e-commerce content, (read our content check-list for e-commerce websites) as the amount of people using mobile devices to make purchases online inevitably continues to rise.

Facebook social reader use plummets

In March of this year, the Guardian’s director of digital development, Tanya Cordrey, predicted that social media would soon become more important than search when it came to bringing users to their articles. However, many social reader app have recently found that they have had a significant drop in users. The Guardian in particular has seen its daily active users reduce from almost 600,000 to under 100,000 in the past month alone. It seems that many users do not like the lack of privacy associated with their web browsing activity being broadcast, and are therefore returning to traditional search methods of accessing online content.

Abusive blogger escapes jail sentence

And finally, an update on a story we recently published about blogger John Kerlen, who sent a series of abusive tweets and blog posts directed at Bexley Council in South London. Faced with a court hearing over ‘improper use of a public electronic communications network’, Kerlen pleaded guilty, and whilst he has avoided jail time, he has been sentenced to 80 hours of unpaid work of the next 12 months. He will also need to pay £620 in prosecution costs and the restraining order preventing him from contacting the councillor that many of his messages were directed to will be valid for five years. Again, we repeat – be careful what you blog and tweet!

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Word Art

Emily Hill // May 9, 2012

We used a rare bit of down time the other day to create this cool piece of word art (thanks Wordle!) All the words are taken from our blog writing page. Enjoy!

Word art by Write My Site

Word art by Write My Site

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Content, SEO and social media news: weekly round-up

Eleanor Jones // May 4, 2012

The release of Google Penguin

Penguin, Google’s latest update to its algorithm, is another attempt to reduce the ranking of websites who use spam, keyword stuffing or over optimisation. The SEO forums are alight with complains that their site has unfairly gone down in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), although new websites have reportedly seen improvements. We’ve expanded on our own thoughts in a separate blog piece about Google Penguin.

Online reviews more important than word of mouth

A new survey by Eccomplished has reported that online reviews are now more important than word of mouth when it comes to making a purchase. 31% of respondents said that they had read an online review before committing to buying an item, whereas only 23% asked for advice from friends and relatives. The news highlights the importance of reviews and quality e-commerce content in customer purchasing decisions. However, the primary research method is to visit a marketplace such as Amazon, “with a huge range and associated recommendations and reviews”.

Yahoo! develops new marketing dashboard

Yahoo! may be making significant cuts to their property portfolio, but they are increasing their online repertoire with a new online dashboard specifically designed for small businesses. The Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard enabled users to keep track of their search rankings, view the traffic to their site, and monitor their reputation on 8,000 sites, including social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The basic site is free, but Yahoo! is also offering a number of premium add-ons for various fees.

SEOmoz raises funding

Seattle based SEO company SEOmoz have managed to raise $18m from Foundry Group and Ignition Partners at a $75 pre-money valuation. Despite the company’s high profile, success has not always been so easy. CEO Rand Fishkin revealed on his blog how he raised almost $24 in a second round of funding for his company, only to have the deal fall through, so their current success is encouraging to any businesses in a similar situation. Fishkin recently wrote, “The [new] money is going to help us do amazing things, and it’s going to mean we can do a lot more of them faster and at greater scale than we could have on our own.”

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How to survive Google’s Penguin update

Eleanor Jones // May 2, 2012

Google PenguinPenguin is Google’s latest update to its ranking algorithm. It was originally dubbed the ‘webspam’ or ‘over optimisation’ update, and lives up to its early names by focusing heavily on these areas, penalising sites which employed these methods to increase their position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Since Penguin’s release on 24th April, Google claims 3.1% of search queries have been affected.

To minimise the chances of your site’s ranking being affected by the Penguin update, you will need to ensure that all of your web content is original and engaging. You need to avoid keyword stuffing and duplicate content, and instead prioritise high quality copy with keywords that are relevant in their particular context.

Google also analyses how many links there are to a particular site, and the more links that there are, the more the search engine views that site as an ‘authority’. It is therefore important to build a link profile of genuinely pertinent and useful links, as this will have a clear correlation to your site’s ranking.

Penguin is a more fine-tuned version of 2011’s Panda update, which similarly aimed to lower the rank of sites with little to no original content. It is important to mention that the most recent Panda update since the original roll-out last year was 19th April 2012, so if your site’s position in the SERPs has altered, it may be difficult to decipher which update affected you.

However, if you maintain your site to the highest standards, and focus on generating high quality original content that attracts an increasing network of genuine back-links from other authority sites, you stand a good chance of benefitting, rather than suffering, from Penguin, Panda and any future algorithm updates.

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