While Google constantly tweaks their algorithm-sometimes as much as once per week-they’re usually small changes resulting in minimal impacts. The exception, however, is with core updates.

One such update was released in December of last year. Given the history of volatility with core updates, this particular change stirred plenty of controversies, dropping just in time for the holiday shopping season. And, as usual, it caused quite a few ups and downs across multiple industries.

On April 2, Google shook things up again with a product review update that’s changing how marketers and creators publish product reviews.

Google’s Product Review Shakeup

With April’s update, Google is setting its sights on “thin” content. The update makes it much more difficult to rank for pages that simply summarize a bunch of products. Instead, Google is rewarding pages with content full of quality information, in-depth analysis and excellent research.

Right now, this update only applies to English-language product reviews, but already it’s had a profound impact. Even though it’s not a core update, it’s causing the same sort of shakeup normally reserved for bigger, broader algorithm changes.

This isn’t the first time Google has taken aim at thin content. On February 23, 2011, the search engine launched its now-infamous Panda update. Panda was a significant algorithm change meant to address the increasing prevalence of thin and spammy content produced by so-called “content farms.”

The update worked, rewarding high-quality content and causing a substantial drop-off in lower quality, churned content with little substance. All in all, just under 12% of search queries were affected.

Who the April Update Affects and How

April’s update is a little more focused. Right now, the changes only apply to sites with product reviews. That’s not to say, however, that we won’t see these changes applied to content across the board in future updates. Google remains committed to rewarding great content over thin content and that’s not changing any time soon.

Overall, If you’re already producing informative, high-quality product reviews, you just might see your rankings improve. Since Google is setting out to “better reward such content,” it’s possible that pages on your site will rise up above other sites that attempt to exploit the algorithm by mashing together several product affiliate links instead of offering genuine review content.

But if your strategy has been to emulate the top Google results in hopes of outranking the competition, you may want to reconsider your process. While the change won’t necessarily penalize this kind of content, it does reward creators that put a significant amount of effort into making great content for their visitors.

Great Content Rises Up

Google is rewarding product review pages that provide users with valuable content. In other words, content that aims (and succeeds) at providing the kind of high-quality product reviews you’d expect to use to make your own purchasing decisions.

Reviews that cover the pros and cons of a product, provide a well-balanced and in-depth understanding of the use cases and provide as many details as possible are going to see their rankings rise. This includes strong images or video that supports the information, along with how well it compares to the competition. In other words, really great product reviews are getting their just deserves in rankings.

One interesting line in Google’s guide mentions content written by “experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.” Going forward, we’re likely to see original content written by expert contributors and passionate enthusiasts who truly care about their subject matter. As the old saying goes, you can’t fake passion.

While Bad Content Falls Through the Cracks

The “thin content” that simply summarizes a product will drop off in favor of reviews that share ample research and thoughtful consideration. If you’re creating or publishing sub-par content that’s made for the sole purpose of filling it with referral links, you may want to rethink your strategy.

Looking for product information, reviews and comparisons is a big part of how we use Google. People turn to the web to research a product they have an eye on or to learn about their available options in a given product category. They need good reviews to make the best decisions.

Savvy marketers know this. It’s why a lot of content on the web is built to rank well and then inundate visitors with product recommendations that aren’t necessarily backed by careful reviews and thoughtful research. They simply aren’t providing visitors with valuable insights that help them weigh options and explore the benefits and trade-offs of each product.

What About Affiliate Reviewers?

Sites that focus on creating product reviews are likely to be impacted the most by this update. Does that mean it’s time for these particular sites to pack up and move on to greener pastures of revenue generation? Not necessarily.

April’s update isn’t about targeting affiliate reviews-it’s about rewarding quality content. For those operating a review site that generates revenue through affiliate marketing, as long as they’re producing excellent content filled with in-depth product comparisons and insightful recommendations, this update is a blessing.

Sites with thin content and walls of affiliate links, however, may want to adjust their approach. Rather than seeing this update as an attack on this type of content, it’s better to see it as Google reinforcing its commitment to quality websites that provide the answers users are searching for.

The Future of Product Reviews

If you’ve been in the marketing game for a while, you may recall when Google launched its Panda update back in 2011. Like April’s update, Panda focused on rewarding sites with high-quality content. Also like April’s update, Panda moved top-tier content up through the ranks while demoting thin, overly optimized content.

A Focus on High-Quality, Engaging Content

Going forward, marketers and creators should focus on quality over quantity. And while quality is often subjective, Google isn’t without its benevolent streak. The company provided users with a set of guidelines for product review content that helps clarify what kind of content Google is looking for with the changes. Here are a few key questions from their documentation on the update (wording our own):

• Does the content convey expert knowledge about the products reviewed?
• Does it show the physical appearance of the product and how it’s used beyond the information provided by the manufacturer?
• Does the content provide actual measurements about how a product performs in various categories?
• Does it explain what differentiates a product from its competitors?
• Does the content discuss the pros and cons of a particular product based on thorough research?
• Does it describe how the product has improved over previous products and releases to address issues and help buyers make an informed purchase decision?

Of particular interest in their announcement is that Google uses the term “thin” to describe less-than-stellar content. It’s important to understand a distinction here: Thin has no bearing on word count-instead, it’s about the kind of value the words within provide. Pushing out a few thousand words of low-quality content will not move the meter for you here.

A simple way to look at creating great product reviews is to consider whether the content you have is something you would use to make your own purchasing decision. The next time you’re about to publish one, stop and ask yourself: “Would I genuinely use this article as a guide for buying this product?”

The Right Tool for the Job

As Google’s algorithms improve and its requirements for top-tier content increases in complexity, we’ll also see content optimization tools improve and evolve, providing ways for marketers to understand and address these requirements.

Already, tools like MarketMuse and Frase offer a way to optimize your content for better search rankings. These AI-powered solutions analyze content that’s already ranking in real-time and then compares it to what you have, providing real-world, actionable suggestions. This kind of live analysis of existing content gives you the insight you need to create content that answers user’s questions accurately and without any mystery.

Don’t Publish Reviews? Pay Attention, Anyway

Even if you don’t publish product reviews, there’s a lot to take away from the update, especially considering past changes to the algorithm. Google’s track record in requiring authentic content with depth and insight isn’t new. And while this particular change is focused on product reviews, there’s no reason to believe that Google won’t apply the same high bar to future content, whether it’s a product page or blog post.

Need more convincing? In the guide for April’s update, Google explicitly states that the product review changes aren’t a core update, but they then go on to link to their advice page for how sites should adapt their content for core changes.

At the end of the day, Google has always been about high-quality content. While the search giant is in the business of selling advertisements, they wouldn’t have gotten far if their core product didn’t provide users with what they want and need: Great content that answers questions, inform decisions and provides insights to the people reading it.

Quality is the New King

Way back in 1996, Microsoft founder Bill Gates penned an essay that described the future of the web as a marketplace for content. In it, he wrote a phrase that’s turned into an oft-repeated-if not cliched-mantra for content marketers: Content is king.

While it’s been decades since that essay was written, there’s no denying the importance of content, even today. But as Google continues to tweak and refine their algorithm, there’s just one thing that remains constant in their quest to return the best search results, and that’s quality content that provides real value.

Perhaps it’s time for content to descend from its throne-quality has risen to take its place. Long live the king!

The post Google’s Product Review Algo Update – What Does It Mean For Content Creation? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

What Are Service Descriptions?

Service descriptions are like product descriptions. But instead of describing tangible goods, you’re describing the services that you provide, including what you do, some basics about how you do it and why people should care about the service.

How many service pages you have on your site depends on what you offer and how you want to market it. It also might depend on your content marketing budget. You definitely want to highlight your main services with their own description pages. Check out the table below for examples of the types of service pages you might see on various business websites.

How to Write a Service Description: 7 Tips

Once you decide how many service pages you need and what services you should highlight, it’s time to create the service description content. Check out some tips below for creating service description pages that are likely to perform in SERPs and convert consumers who arrive to your pages.

1. Scope Out the Competition in SERPs

Start by checking out the competition. Search your keywords and look at the pages in the top three spots. What are they doing and how can you do it better?

(Okay, technically you start with keyword research so you know what your keywords are. TBH, we’re assuming if you know you need service descriptions, you know you need keywords and keyword research.)

Matthew Rogers, a search analyst and senior editor at Mango Matter, says he analyzes service descriptions that are ranking in SERPs before creating his own. “I work on the premise that every page Google promotes on page one is there for a reason,” says Rogers, “and success can often be reverse engineered.”

2. Focus on Your Customer

But you can’t let analytics reign over your content at the expense of the consumer. Rogers notes,”The most difficult part of writing service descriptions is balancing the need to please the user while pleasing Googlebot.”

It’s not enough to shove the ranking keywords into your service description and show up high in the page rankings. Your content must also:

• Align with searcher intent
• Provide relevant, helpful information to the user
• Persuade the user to take the next action in the sales funnel

In addition to doing your keyword research, make sure you have a target consumer and that you understand their needs and preferences. That way, you can create content for your service description that speaks specifically to the target audience.

3. Use Feature/Benefit Writing

One of the best ways to speak to the consumer’s needs and desires is via feature/benefit writing. This is common in product descriptions, and you should employ it in writing about services too.

Feature/benefit doesn’t just tell the consumer what you do. It tells them what you do for them (the feature) and why they should care (the benefit). Check out some example feature benefit pairs below to better understand this type of content.

4. Make Service Descriptions Scannable

No matter how great your feature/benefit copy is, most people will skip the entire page if you present your service description as a big block of text. It’s daunting and annoying—especially on mobile.

Instead, break your content up into scannable chunks by using subheadings, small paragraphs, bulleted and numbered lists, block quotes, call outs and images. Check out our service page on article writing for an example of friendly scannable content with plenty of white space.

5. Include Various Content and Media Formats

Remember that not everyone prefers text-based messaging, and some people engage much better with images or video. That means they’re more likely to remember your message later when it’s time to make a purchase. Incorporate various media formats by:

• Explaining services using videos and infographics
• Showing services in action in photos
• Integrating consumer reviews and testimonials to back up your claims

6. Don’t Try to Do Too Much With One Service Page

To perform in SERPs and with users, your service pages have to answer pretty specific intents and questions.

For example, someone looking for toilet repair might be interested in some basic information about new toilet installation—especially if it’s information to help them decide between a new item or repairing the existing one. But they probably aren’t going to want to read an entire page devoted to sinks.

Ensure your service page comprehensively answers the intent of the search regarding a service, but leave tangential information to its own page. You can certainly mention that you also install sinks, but instead of going into detail, link to your sink installation service page.

Plan out your service description pages ahead of time so you can ensure you cover all the most important services and that they each go on their own page.

7. Include a Relevant, Clear Call to Action

Finally, don’t leave the consumer hanging. Be specific about the action you want them to take to engage your services.

Include buy now, get a quote or contact us buttons—and do so where the consumer can see them. If they’re buried somewhere seven scrolls below the fold, they won’t do you any good.

You should also give a concise explanation of what the consumer can expect when they act. For example: They’ll call to schedule a free consultation or drop their email in a form and someone will contact them within 24 hours.

Get Professional Help Writing Service Descriptions

Service descriptions can be hard to write well as they rely on a balance of SEO and strong marketing copy. Contact Crowd Content to find out how our experienced copywriters can help you create service descriptions that perform in the search engines and convert consumers into customers.

ALSO – How to Scale Your Agency By White Labeling Content Writing

The post How to Write Service Descriptions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Benefits of Quality, Compelling Shopify Product Descriptions

Compelling product descriptions entice readers to move from consideration or early decision stages through to the final purchase. They help convince visitors that your product is the one they’re looking for.

Just as important, quality descriptions help improve the SEO of your product pages. That makes it more likely they show up in Google searches, which is where the bulk of people start when they’re looking to make an online purchase.

By improving your Shopify store’s product descriptions, you can drive increased sales. According to Guillem Hernandez, a key account manager with Crisp Studio, simply making positive changes to product descriptions has helped his clients increase conversions by up to 10% or more.

Calloway Cook, President of Illuminate Labs, says his team has seen similar results. “Taking actions such as improving product description copy and creating an interlinking strategy resulted in a 10% month-over-month increase in traffic without any additional blog content added,” says Cook. He attributes the growth solely to the improvements in product page copy.

How Do You Write Compelling Shopify Product Descriptions?

If a 10% increase in conversion rates or traffic sounds like something you want to get in line for, here’s a quick crash course on how you can create compelling Shopify product descriptions that also improve your SEO.

1. Be Concise

“Copywriting for product pages has to be concise,” says Cook. “Consumers don’t want to read huge blocks of text. The shorter you can distill the important information that separates your products from competitors, the better.”

But what’s the right content length for a perfect product description? As with all content, the answer is: It depends.

The more complex your product — typically meaning it has more features and benefits — the longer your copy might be. You might also need longer copy for certain luxury items, because you may be making a case for lifestyle benefits for them.

Ultimately, your Shopify description must be long enough to convey the important features and benefits to the reader in a concise, scannable way. If that’s 50 words, great. If it’s 500, also great, but remember to break it up with subheadings and bulleted lists to make it easier to read.

Also note that your target word count will depend on your SEO competition. Use a tool like MarketMuse, Inked, or SEMrush to determine the average word counts for the pages that are currently ranked in the top 10 results of Google for your target keyword. If your competition averages 500 words for example, you probably want to be inline with that. 

2. Don’t Leave Out Important Details

“As per my observation, around 50% of the shoppers are learned enough and have already done enough research to know the specs they need for themselves. So, saying ‘This battery is awesome and lasts for the longest time’ doesn’t serve the purpose,” says Hernandez. “I would rather replace it with something like ‘This battery lasts for 60 hours’ to incite more impression.”

He also notes that around 20% of conversions fail because the product information is missing or unclear.

Include all relevant information in your product descriptions by starting with the Voice of the Customer (VOC). Ask yourself: Who are your customers, and what do they need and want? How familiar are they with these products? How do your products provide solutions to the customer’s challenges? The answers to these questions help you determine the most important factors for your Shopify product descriptions.

3.  Highlight the Value Proposition

“A potential customer is looking for a product that satisfies his requirements. That’s why an ideal product description should focus on HOW your product is solving your audience’s needs. This is what a potential buyer is interested in,” says Hernandez.

“We find it most effective to use simple language and short sentences with descriptive language that recreates the experience of using the product in your customer’s mind,” says Jessica Rose, CEO of Copper H20. “The copy should make the customer excited about the product without over-promising.”

In short, your product description should never just be a description. You don’t need to spend the words to explain that this is a round widget with a tapered top that’s painted in a dual tone of red and black with three stripes. Pictures really are worth a thousand words, so some of that explanation is made obsolete if you include good product pictures (and you should be doing this!). Plus, a lot of basic spec information is included in your spec list; if you include that information again in a narrative format, there has to be a reason.

Focus on feature-benefit copy. Mention a feature and then explain why it’s beneficial or how the customer might use it. In the example of the round widget, you might say, “A tapered top makes this widget easy to install into your existing system, and the three black stripes provide a guide for how far the widget should be inserted for each use type.” Suddenly the color and shape of the widget aren’t just description — they’re compelling reasons someone might buy this widget instead of others.

4. Use Your Brand Voice

Even if you’re reselling products from manufacturers, your product descriptions should be in your brand voice. In fact, it’s even more important in that case, because your brand is what sets you apart from other resellers. Whether it’s funny, friendly, professional or some combination of various traits, make sure your voice shines through without diminishing the information provided in the copy.

5. Create Unique Content

Many people simply copy product descriptions from the manufacturer’s page or use the same copy on multiple pages. But this isn’t the best way to create strong optimization and performance in search results.

“We have to be careful to avoid duplicate content red flags from Google when we have the same product shared across our three sites,” says Brian Lim, the CEO and founder of iHeartRaves.

Take the time and effort to create unique copy for all your products and pages to help improve SEO. This tactic also lets you test your copy to find what works best for your audience.

6. Use the Right Keywords

“Adding in keywords to help with SEO is critical to being found in search,” says Lim.

Conduct keyword research for various products and groups of products. Then, try to work one primary keyword and at least one long-tail or secondary keyword into each product description. For best results, try to get your primary keyword into the first sentence of the description. But don’t sacrifice clarity for the sake of keywords; you can also include it in the first paragraph.

On top of that, make sure that your product images are keyword optimized. Both the file name and the alt text of each image should contain targeted keywords. It’s important that your alt text reads naturally though as it’s primarily used by visually impaired people who rely on screen readers to dictate the text of sites to them. 

If you have a lot of products to write copy for doing keyword research can be a tall task. In those cases, consider using keyword formulae. Our ebook, “The Complete Guide to Creating eCommerce Contnent at Scale” goes over this in detail. 

7. Tweak Product Descriptions Regularly

“Every site is different,” says Hernandez, “and every product requires its own approach. The best way to figure out is to do A/B testing on the product pages and gather the results to understand what works better for each store type.”

But it’s not just about what works best for each product page today. SEO and online shopping trends are constantly changing, so your product descriptions can’t be forever stagnant. “We suggest continuously revising product copy based on data to see what works best,” says Rose.

Leveraging Technology to Make Content Management Easier

One of the biggest challenges in creating content for an entire store is scaling. Most stores have large numbers of products, and doing the work to craft compelling product copy for all of them is a tall order. 

Each product likely needs:

1. Keyword research
2. Writing
3. Editing
4. SEO optimizations
5. Publishing

Your store might even need more than these steps.

Every step takes time, and the more you can leverage technology to save you time allows you to get more done and be more competitive with your store.

At Crowd Content, we’ve built a Shopify app that helps with a great deal of this process. Once installed, the app lets you connect your Shopify catalog to your Crowd Content account so you can order custom written product descriptions for any number of your products with just a few clicks. With many skilled product copywriters, you can get content back in a matter of days, have it edited, and then even publish it back to your store with just a few clicks.

To get setup, all you need to do is create your Crowd Content account.

Then, visit Shopify’s App Store to install the app in your store. 

You’ll be prompted to connect your store to your Crowd Content account.

Then, you can login to your Crowd Content account and visit the Order Product Descriptions page.

You’ll see an option to do a Shopify Import. This brings up a list of all your products, and you simply check the ones you want copy written for. Then, you can provide instructions for how the writers should tackle your project.

Within a few days you’ll start getting copy back. Once that happens, you’ll be asked if you want to publish the completed content on your store. Confirm, and the content will be posted instantly.

This can save you a lot of time in terms of writing, editing, and publishing which will let you spend more time on other areas of your business and scale up quicker. 

Scaling Shopify Product Descriptions Without Losing Quality

These seven tips are just the beginning of creating and maintaining high-quality product descriptions in your Shopify store. And if you have a lot of unique items, you might be balking at how much work you’re looking at.

But it’s work well worth doing. And you don’t have to do it all yourself!

“We have found it’s worth the investment and have hired professional copywriters,” says Lim. If you’re ready to hire professional copywriters who know how to spin compelling, concise Shopify product descriptions that convert, you can find thousands of freelance writers via Crowd Content. And if you’re not sure where to start and want help managing the entire process — from keyword research to building writing teams to editing for publish-ready content — find out more about our Enterprise content solutions.

ALSO – Using eCommerce Influencer Marketing to Drive your Brand Forward

The post 7 Shopify Product Description Writing Tips appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Whether consumers are querying Siri or typing into a desktop browser, one thing is consistent: If you’re not engaging in digital marketing and ensuring your site is search-engine optimized for every stage of the buyer’s journey by creating relevant ecommerce content, you could be missing out on these opportunities.

One way to create SEO content that helps you show up for consumers online is by publishing high-quality buying guides. Plus, this content can increase user experience on your site and help persuade someone in the middle or later parts of the funnel to click and make a purchase (or visit your local store to do so). High-quality buying guides can be planted with mid-funnel search terms that draw in consumers at that stage of their journey and help set the stage for harvesting conversions later.

Read on to find out how to write engaging SEO buyers’ guides that help land you on the first page of SERPs and guide your customers through appropriate buying decisions once they discover your brand.

What Are SEO Buyers’ Guides?

An SEO buyers’ guide is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a piece of search-engine optimized content that also guides the buyer through various aspects of shopping or making a purchase.

The concept of an SEO buying guide is based on the fact that modern shoppers tend to follow a path to purchasing that aligns with the roadmap below.

• The buying journey begins with the search engine.
• The consumer clicks your link (if you’ve done the SEO work to show up).
• Your interesting, relevant content informs the consumer’s decision.
• At this point, the consumer makes a purchase decision or continues to ponder and research, depending on where they are in the funnel. A good buying guide informs that next action, whatever it might be.

Top of the funnel: An introductory buying guide provides high-level options and helps the consumer see the brand as an expert. This increases the chance the consumer will return to the site or brand once they’re ready to take the next step.

Middle of the funnel: Typically, this is where buying guides shine the brightest. The consumer is aware of their need and may know what type of solution they want. The buying guide sets the brand or its products up as a high-quality solution, prompting the consumer to click through, sign up or call to find out more.

Bottom of the funnel: The consumer is ready to make a purchase now or nearly immediately. Some buying guides concentrate more on specific products to help the consumer make a final decision between items. But it’s important to realize that buying guides should work in conjunction with your other content. For example, product descriptions are usually the bottom of the funnel content that ultimately drives the conversion, so using your buying guides to push site visitors toward those pages is a good idea.

Need help with product copy? Connect with a skilled product description writer.

ALSO – 5 Secrets From Successful Product Copy Teams

What Are the Benefits of Publishing SEO Buying Guides?

Buying guides provide a number of simultaneous benefits, including:

• Increasing on-page SEO and rankings for valuable middle of the funnel keywords
• Providing high-quality, comprehensive content that helps increase the E-A-T value of your pages
• Delivering something of value to the consumer to increase brand loyalty, trust, and authority
• Creating a potential path via which a consumer finds the product or service they need and helps nudge them toward a purchase decision
• Providing valuable long-form content for your site

All those benefits combine to help your page perform better in SERPs and increase your conversion rate and revenue.

Josh Bluman, Co-founder of JJ Suspenders, notes that buying guides “make your site an authority on a subject, which is also good for SEO and can improve your overall website’s ranking.” That’s because buying guides are an example of comprehensive content. They naturally provide complete coverage of a topic, answering a lot of questions searchers have about products or types or solutions and incorporating a wide range of semantic keywords.

“We recently started adding a bunch of buying guides on our off-site blog MajestyCoffeeSchool.com,” says Nunzio Ross, the co-owner and ops manager of Majesty Coffee. “The results have been fantastic. We’ve noticed a pretty substantial increase in traffic and sales since we started doing it…It’s pretty safe to say our sales have increased by about 1/4 since the buyer’s guides started getting traffic.”

Common Types of Buying Guides

Buying guides actually come in a wide range of content types, and how you create yours depends on factors such as best practices for your industry, the needs and wants of your audience, and which part of the sales funnel you’re targeting. If you’re not sure where to start, consider five common types of buying guides below.

As you can see, a lot of these types of buying guides can overlap. You can have an introductory shopping guide or a technical comparison guide, for example. It’s up to you to mix and match these elements to create content that resonates with your audience.

Top Tips for Creating Compelling Buying Guides

Put some of the tips below to work to create buyers’ guide content that sets you apart from others both in the search engines and with your readers.

1. Conduct research before you write.

Don’t assume that because you’re an expert on your products that you’re also an expert on what people want to know. Ross says the entire point of a buying guide is to answer the questions customers might be asking. Do keyword research to find out what people are turning to search engines to find out, then answer those queries in your buying guides.

Why? Keyword research aligns your content with what’s performing in search results, increasing your chance of landing a top spot. Content that answers specific consumer queries gets more engagement and keeps people coming back to your page.

ALSO – Qualitative Keyword Research: How to Invest 10 Minutes into Your Content Marketing Process & See Your Content Rise to the Top of Google

2. Use conversational language that aligns with your audience.

Write as if you’re an expert speaking to a friend about the topic—but think about how you communicate with different subsets of friends. A gamer who is explaining his computer choice to a non-gaming friend uses different language than he would when explaining to another gamer. Use the right communication style for your target audience.

Why? People turn to buyers’ guides for help making a purchasing decision, but no one wants to be talked down to (or talked over).

3. Pay attention to formatting.

“Huge blocks of text,” says Ross, “are a no-no.” Break up your content with plenty of headers, bulleted lists, tables and other scannable content. Don’t skimp on design. Buying guides are typically long-form content, but the best examples are visually appealing and draw the reader in with more than a wall of text. 

Why? It helps the reader digest the information and makes content easier to glance through when seeking fast answers to a specific question.

4. Always ensure content is optimized for mobile.

Use responsive designs and write shorter paragraphs that won’t create a wall of text on mobile devices whenever possible.

Why? A huge portion of people who start their buying journey on digital channels do so via mobile devices. And users don’t just conduct research from a single device; 60% or more move from device to device as they go through the buyer journey.

5. Write with authority.

Bluman says brands should ask, “Does this content help us become an authority on the subject and build our brand?” You shouldn’t publish buying guides for the sake of taking up more pages on your website. They should come from a desire to truly assist consumers and share what you know about the products you create or sell.

Ask yourself: What will make my guide the most comprehensive content for this subject, and how do I make sure the search engines agree?

Why? First, it’s more authentic. Pages and pages of buying guides that simply try to hit an SEO keyword are lackluster, boring and, in some cases, seen as inauthentic. A few high-quality buying guides that provide expert advice and answers are valuable to your readers, which increases the value of your brand in their eyes. Second, it’s good for SEO. Google likes expert, authoritative pages readers can trust.

6. Include images and other media.

Break your buying guide text up with pictures, videos and other media.

Why? People want to see the products you’re recommending, including how to use them. Images and video also make it more likely someone will share your content on social media.

7. Include links and calls to action.

Don’t turn your informative buyers’ guide into a sales free-for-all, but do include relevant product links, buy buttons or CTAs to get a quote or schedule an appointment.

Why? Ultimately, at the end of the day, conversion is what you’re after. The best way to foster that in high-quality content is to provide specific and helpful next steps.

Where Should Buyers’ Guides Go on Your Site?

No one rule exists for the best on-site location for your buyers’ guides. You may need to test various locations to find what works for you. However, here are some starting guidelines that work for many sites.

• Buying guides aren’t landing pages. Don’t use them in place of presell, sales and landing pages to try to make conversions after funneling interested readers via ads.
• Buying guides are definitely not home page copy.
• You might publish product buying guides on category pages. Category pages list all of a similar type of product (such as women’s jeans or coffee makers), and a relevant buying guide on the bottom of the page can support SEO.
• You might publish buying guides on your blog, using those pages to drive organic traffic and link into your eCommerce pages.
• You can create a specific area of your site for consumer resources, placing buying guides there and linking to them from relevant category, brand and product pages.

What Types of Keywords Should Your Buying Guides Target?

Short version? The types of keywords that people are searching for. Do your research with tools such as SEMrush to find out what phrases consumers are using to find this type of information. 

Slightly longer version? Since most buying guides are mid-funnel content, they should incorporate mid-funnel keywords. Typically, these keywords indicate the consumer is headed toward a decision but they still need a bit of guidance. Examples of mid-funnel keywords include:

• What’s the most cost-effective phone?
• Best smart TVs
• How to choose roman blinds for my window
• Reviews for plumbers in Austin

Buying guides might also incorporate some keywords with commercial intent. These are often targeted with product descriptions, but it makes sense to pepper a few in buying guides to better support the bridge that allows mid-funnel visitors to convert to bottom-funnel customers as they engage with your content.

Commercial intent keywords are those that indicate the person has a serious plan to make a purchase immediately or soon. Phrases that include words such as buy, deal, discount, price, cost, coupon, free shipping, affordable, best, comparison and review all indicate potential commercial intent. 

Get Help Creating Buying Guides That Perform

Sold on the concept of buyers’ guides, but not sure how to string all that content together? No worries. Our team of professional copywriters bring product knowledge, SEO savvy, and wordsmithing to the table to craft buying guide copy that can wow the wariest of readers.

The post How to Write Engaging SEO Buyers’ Guides for Your Website appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

To say that marketing and advertising have been through dramatic changes during the last ten years would be a serious understatement. The fact is, the old rule book hasn’t just been revised—the pages have been torn out and tossed into the fire pit. Audiences are fragmented like never before, attention spans are shorter, and brand loyalty is tenuous. 

While we mostly create eCommerce content for our clients and connect them with product description writers for larger projects, we do get asked about different marketing tactics that work well for eCommerce companies.

One solution that many eCommerce companies have turned to as they struggle to attract and hold consumer attention: eCommerce influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is hot. Like, Arizona desert in July hot. Quite simply, it is transforming how successful eCommerce brands and stores sell online.

So what’s behind the move to influencer marketing? For starters, millennials and the generations following them have a deeply ingrained dislike of traditional advertising. In fact, 84% of them don’t trust the messages they encounter in old school media outlets like television, radio, print, and outdoor.

When they are that reluctant to believe, they are even more likely to ignore messages altogether. But by leveraging the voice of a powerful influencer with a legitimate following in the right niche for your brand, you can reach even the most advertising-resistant group. 

It makes sense. Influencers forge special connections with their audiences in ways that traditional media vehicles never have. Influencers don’t just offer viewers or listeners or readers—they deliver ardent fans.

That said, it can be daunting to anyone wading into eCommerce influencer marketing for the first time. Traditional media is a far more straightforward process—spend dollars, establish as much frequency as possible, build awareness that you hope turns into sales. 

Social media, by its very nature, is more challenging.

Choosing placement is about getting the audience numbers and the demographics you want or can afford. But the effort to secure eyeballs or clicks can seem like a never-ending chase, and finding loyal customers feels more elusive than ever before.

Enter social media. And, more specifically, social media rock stars. Influencers. 

There are influencers of all kinds, from people with mass appeal to those who have followings in very specific niches. The ones with the most clout, however, have developed passionate, dedicated audiences. These fans value the opinions of the influencers they follow and will pay close attention when brands are endorsed or reviewed.

When an eCommerce company uses influencer marketing, the metrics are different. Most importantly, frequency is less important than authority. An influencer typically won’t tout your brand hundreds of times each week. Instead, an influencer may talk about it as little as one time, but their message can carry far more weight with your audience than any 30-second commercial ever did.

Great, you think. Influencer marketing sounds like it will be amazing. I’ll connect with some Instagram or YouTube stars, get the most important ones to recommend or use my brand and, boom, my products will be flying off the shelves. I won’t be spending millions of dollars on TV ads the way brands were once forced to do, and I’ll see results faster than I do with long-term efforts like SEO.

ALSO – 12 Content Distribution Tips to Ensure Maximum Exposure in 2020

Not so fast. Yes, influencer marketing for eCommerce brands can be incredibly powerful and make an impact very quickly. The ROI can be impressive. The stories about a YouTube star endorsing a brand or an Instagram influencer posing with a product, followed by a ridiculous burst in sales and media attention are real. 

But for every eCommerce brand that has experienced that kind of success—Casper, Bonobos, Lynda—there are countless others whose efforts to leverage influencer marketing fell flat. And well-publicized colossal failures have occurred.

Let’s talk about the process of using influencer marketing for eCommerce. How does a company go about finding the people who can be most valuable for their brand? How is the ROI measured? And how can a brand have more hits than misses when it ventures in influencer marketing?

Find influencers that are right for your brand.

Step one when you start to use influencer marketing: finding the right ones for your brand. It’s harder than it might seem. The most famous—or infamous—influencers, are likely to be outside the budgets of emerging eCommerce brands. 

If you have the kind of budget that puts a famous influencer within reach, swing for the fences—the rewards can be worth the risk. But big names like the Kardashians, Cristiano Rinaldo, and Nash Grier aren’t cheap. 

The good news? Pricey influencers probably aren’t right for your brand anyway. 

What’s more, when it comes to finding influencers that move the needle, success will vary. You’ll need to be persistent and willing to endure a few duds along the way.

Steve Wimmer, brand manager at TriNova, notes, “We’ve had varying degrees of success—from total flop to home run. Our best effort to date was a collaboration with YouTube influencer Pan the Organizer. We caught him towards the middle of his growth curve so a sponsored post was very affordable, and because he kept growing and the video he produced for us had evergreen content it paid off in a major way. We had him link back to our product on Amazon, and we estimate that it continues to drive $100-$500 a day in sales.”

Wimmer advises that, with influencer marketing, it’s generally better to, “…place several smaller bets on emerging influencers, rather than one big play on someone established. This increases your chances of success—and your ROI.”

Approach your search for valuable influencers like any other media research. Which ones line up well with your market niche? Who is connecting with audiences that are likely to buy your products? Are you comfortable with the content the influencer puts out?

If your brand has its own social media channel—and it should—look for posts from your followers that tag influencers or link to the content. Research the social media channels of your audience to find influencers they follow. You can even be direct and ask in a post for suggestions to start building a list of influencers. It’s organic research, but it can be incredibly useful.

FREE EBOOK: How to Create eCommerce Content at Scale

Qualify influencers to protect your investment.

Once you start to find influencers, it’s time to separate the good and very good from the mediocre. We all know the internet still has a bit of the Wild West in it—verification isn’t always easy. But if you’re going to be allocating a chunk of your marketing budget to an influencer marketing campaign, you need to take steps to make sure you’re using it as effectively as possible.

Ellie Shedden is the owner of digital marketing agency THE-OOP.COM who has used influencer marketing with great success, but she says it’s important to approach the audience metrics with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Shedden says, “The biggest piece of advice I can offer to businesses looking to run an influencer campaign is to check that the following is genuine. Nowadays, you can buy 10,000 likes for less than $50, and these influencers are not going to help your campaign in any way. When choosing your influencer, it’s important to deep-dive into their previous posts and check what type of engagement they are getting. Ideally, you should select an influencer with an engagement rate of around 4%.”

How do you calculate the engagement rate? Divide the number of followers by the number of Likes on an average post, and divide by 100. More likes mean more followers who really care about the influencer and help you determine if the numbers they’re touting are real.

Wimmer, based on his experiences with TriNova and Gold Eagle brands, suggests that marketers, “…avoid influencers with feeds that seem like non-stop commercials. They have inflated stats and probably aren’t helping sell anything. If they were – they’d just sell their own products!”

Finally, you’ll want to make sure the influencers you choose are right for your brand. As Nick Shackelford, Co-Founder of Structured Social notes, “…it has to be the right influencer for the right product or service. If you’re using Kylie Jenner to sell life insurance, that’s just a huge mistake. Lastly, everyone should be considering micro-influencers who have smaller groups of followers but those followers are easier to verify and target. If I know exactly who your 50k followers are, I know what I’m getting for my money.”

For many eCommerce stores or brands, the ideal follower count of an influencer will probably land somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000. That means the influencer you’re working with has an audience large enough to generate results but not so massive that working with them is beyond your budget restraints. This group is often called micro-influencers, and they’ve become more valued because they often have followers that are more devoted with higher levels of engagement. 

Whatever you do, remember to approach your influencer campaign as analytically as possible. Separate how you might feel personally about an influencer and focus on evaluating their numbers, their reach, and the demographics of their followers. Don’t be swayed by emotion.

Collaborate on content creation and messaging.

A successful influencer marketing campaign involves a healthy amount of back-and-forth between the brand and the personality. Don’t expect to simply mail some free product samples to a star of YouTube videos, go to their channel, watch them talk about your brand, and then wait for the sales to pour in.

The best campaigns involve collaboration between brand managers and influencers. They should both have a stake in creating awareness and, ultimately, purchase decisions. Marketers want results and influencers want to demonstrate the value of their channels—it’s a give-and-take. Leading influencers will want a certain amount of creative freedom, but you’re going to need to protect your investment by putting your products out there in a way that generates results. 

Aim to make any content—YouTube, blog article, Instagram post—as evergreen as possible. That means working with the influencer to optimize for search—suggest a How-To, a Seven-Reasons-Why, a Guide-For, etc. A blunt, obviously purchased product review won’t gain the traction in search that you want and may turn off potential customers. It doesn’t even have to be the epic fail of Scott Disick and BooTea to be ineffective—or worse.

Work together on ideas to encourage engagement with followers. How can you get the audience to share a post or a video? Will a trackable discount code help? Is there fresh content the influencer can create just for your brand? Keep all options open and encourage the people you work with to bring ideas to the table.

Remember—leading influencers have found a way to connect with people. Not utilizing their talent and creativity to help leverage your brand would be a serious mistake.

ALSO – 4 Ways to Get Compelling eCommerce Content for Your Brand

How to measure the success and ROI of eCommerce influencer marketing.

The major reason why so many eCommerce stores turn to influencer marketing is simple: the results are outstripping other tactics. According to a study by Tomoson, a seller of software that helps automate influencer marketing efforts, these campaigns typically yield a return of $6.50 for every dollar spent. Those numbers are backed up by other studies. The fact is, influencer campaigns can produce a return any brand manager will love.

But how can you measure the success of your own outreach? First, start with goals. Do you want to build your follower base? Are you going to measure engagement through Likes or other mechanisms like contest entries and the use of discount codes? Codes can be especially useful because they allow you to track the source of purchase decisions and compare your influencer marketing campaign to email efforts, paid search, and other communications you do to build your eCommerce store or brand. 

Back to Nick Shackleford, Co-Founder of Structured Social, with some words of caution. He says, “You can’t just throw money at an influencer campaign and hope it brings in revenue. Every client I talk to, every client whose campaign I’ve managed, gets the exact same advice from me. Start with revenue and work backward. Throwing money at someone with a million Instagram followers is pointless if those dollars don’t provide real value for your product.”

When you first try influencer marketing, it can feel like a roll of the dice. Make sure you have a plan in place to properly analyze and measure results so you’ll know the true ROI of your efforts.

What to expect from influencer marketing.

“Influencers are great when used properly, but they aren’t a cure-all,” adds Shackelford of Structure Social.

Don’t view your influencer marketing efforts as a replacement for everything else you’re doing to engage with potential customers of your eCommerce store or brand. For many, it will be a tactic that produces better results than anything else. For others, it will be an effective way to bolster other campaigns. But the research is clear: influencer marketing for eCommerce is effective, and engaging in it can produce brand awareness and better long-term sales results than traditional offline and online advertising.

The post Using eCommerce Influencer Marketing to Drive your Brand Forward appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But it’s not easy. The challenges of running an online store are like tentacles, expanding as your success increases. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re likely to want to manage it all yourself. That independent streak, after all, is a big part of your success.

But when your business is growing in all directions, it’s important to take a step back and examine how other tools can help you manage it more efficiently. Trust us—even if you take special pride in your 70-hour workweeks, it’s not admitting defeat to get some help. 

Let’s look at some ways you can make managing a successful eCommerce business and your online presence a whole lot easier. Not to mention more profitable.

Make sure the copy is doing the heavy lifting.

There are few things more disappointing than pouring effort into your products, building a visually enticing and functional site, and then finding you have a lot of visitors who leave without making a purchase. You launched your online store to produce sales, and you’re not getting as many as you imagined.

What’s to blame for this problem? Well, it could be your sales team. After all, your eCommerce site has a salesperson on every page—the product copy.

Download our Free eBook on Creating eCommerce Content Today!

Informing, enticing, convincing—your copy needs to be all of these and more. Your potential buyers want to be convinced that your products are not only great but can add value to their lives. That doesn’t matter if it’s a 100% cashmere throw or a pair of hedge clippers—luxury, utility, and everything in between still need an emotional connection.

You might find that you’re great at crafting copy. After all, you’re fully invested in your products. But be brutally honest about your talents in this area. It’s easy for product copy to veer off course, often because the people writing it have spent so long obsessing over the details of a product that they lose touch with what will actually motivate someone to buy it.

Once again, there’s also a time element here. Evaluate how much time you can devote to crafting great product copy and whether other aspects of your business need more attention. If you have the time and the talent, go for it. If you don’t, hire freelancers and develop effective relationships with them. If they are more plugged into your company and its products, the copy they produce will reflect that. When your company enjoys major growth, you should consider full-time hires or contracting with an outside agency.

ALSO – Product Copywriting for SEO: How to Be Sure Your eCommerce Copy Converts and Ranks

Manage social media well. Or get a pro to do it.

Whether you sell everyday consumer products—Instagram! Twitter! TikTok!—or you have a business-to-business— hello there, LinkedIn—social media can power the growth of your online store. If this is a task you enjoy and want to take on yourself, then go for it—social media efforts can benefit when someone like a company founder takes it on. 

But this isn’t posting a few vacation photos on Facebook, and it requires consistent work. Ask yourself if you really have the time to write posts, manage comments, and court influencers – among a host of other things that are involved in effective social media marketing. Chances are, you simply don’t have the bandwidth to do it yourself.

If you believe in the
power of social media to bolster your e-commerce store, consider hiring someone to manage it for you. This can be a full or part-time staffer, or an outside consultant or agency. Track the ROI by regularly reviewing the source of your site traffic—you should do this constantly anyway—to see if social moves the needle for your sales numbers.

ALSO – Social Media: How Does it Impact Your SEO in 2019?

Invest in collaboration tools.

When you’re developing a large eCommerce site, you’ll be connecting lots of different talents. UI designers, strategy professionals, developers—it takes a team if you’re building a comprehensive, product-rich online presence.

To help manage your team and keep everyone on track, invest in a collaboration tool that allows them to share ideas, work-in-progress, see changes, and seamlessly hand off design work. There are a number of different solutions available—choosing the best one is going to come down to finding software that suits the type and the scale of your projects.

The bottom line is that the best ones require some investment. But don’t forget that time is, indeed, money. Every day that your site remains in development is a day you’re not recording online sales. If a potential customer pores over the offerings on your eCommerce stores but fails to make a purchase because the experience is too slow or confusing, you need to make revisions—fast. Collaboration tools can speed up both the initial launch and ongoing improvement.

Work with an order management provider.

You’ve built a great online store. You have invested to bring in visitors. And you’re getting all kinds of orders.

Orders are the lifeblood of your business. No orders, no business. But when you start getting a lot of them, you’ll need a process to manage and fulfill them. If you’re spending all your time just getting products out the door, you’re not devoting any hours to future growth.

When orders are overwhelming—a good problem to have—look at cloud-based, SaaS software that can make managing them a seamless part of your business. If you’re already working with a provider but finding it’s still soaking up a ton of your time, it’s probably time to start looking for one that will deliver what you need.  

The best providers can handle both online orders and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) transactions. Even if you’re currently handling nothing but orders that come directly from your online store, there’s a good chance your business will grow and you’ll find yourself selling to major retailers. And those clients will not only ask that you use EDI—they demand it. EDI remains the most popular data exchange format for large-scale retail.

But seamless EDI and online order management aren’t the only challenges the right software provider can help you resolve. You should also be able to integrate orders into the system that powers your business, whether it’s an ERP like NetSuite or accounting software like QuickBooks.

It’s even better if they offer additional time-saving features such as connections to shipping providers—it makes labels so much easier—and, if you use a 3PL, it should be able to integrate with them, too. Do you also sell through online marketplaces like Amazon or eBay? Great, but make sure you can bring those orders into your system without a hitch.

Finally, get the customer support you need. The best providers will have an expert team to back you up when things get tricky. Ask about their hours and if they’re contracted or in-house. When a company invests in its own support team, it indicates they want to provide a great customer experience for you.

Ready for a more efficient online store?

The internet and eCommerce have opened marketplace opportunities that have never existed before. You can have customers from all corners of the globe, people can shop in their pajamas, and a brand can grow faster than ever before without the major investment that it took in the past. But it’s work—and success can often breed more work. Make sure your eCommerce store is working as hard as you are but also find solutions that will carve out more time for you.

The post 4 Ways to Manage Your Online Store Without Losing Your Sanity appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

These industries work months, even years, in advance when it comes to writing content including product copy, category page descriptions and buying guides.

So while this year’s efforts may be coming to fruition now, it’s important to look ahead to what you can do next year to take your SEO and conversions to new heights.

With that in mind, we recently hosted a webinar with Brian Hennessy, CEO of Talkoot and former Global Writing Director at Adidas, that explored what the world’s most successful brands are doing to create amazing product copy.

In short – Brian really, really knows how to write amazing product copy, and I haven’t met anyone else as passionate about product stories as he is.

If you didn’t catch the webinar, here’s the recording:

I also want to highlight some of the key takeaways from the webinar.

Information Confirms. Stories Convert.

Brian’s first point was a great one. When it comes to writing product copy, many brands don’t put a ton of effort into each individual product, and what gets produced is rather short and tends to provide descriptive information about the product and little else.

Those types of descriptions do have value, but Brian’s point is that they’re most likely going to confirm information that shoppers who are already seriously evaluating a product already know and give them a small nudge to make the purchase.

Shoppers who are undecided are unlikely to be convinced to buy based on this type of product copy. But, if you craft a compelling product story and establish an emotional connection with this shopper, they may just convert.

This screenshot shows product pages for two very similar axes from Best Made and Lowe’s. Brian highlighted that despite being very similar and largely serving the same purpose, Best Made’s axe costs around 8 times what Lowe’s does.

How are they able to charge more?

A big part of it comes down to their product copy. Lowe’s example basically just lists the key features of the product, whereas Best Made’s tells a rich story about the axe’s design, manufacture and uses. The story builds intrigue and helps the buyer feel connected and invested in the product.

That adds to perceived value and makes shoppers more likely to convert.

eCommerce SEO Helps You Write the Way Shoppers Buy

As marketers, we know that SEO is really important. It can drive a ton of traffic to eCommerce sites, and that traffic is more likely to convert than traffic from most paid sources.

In the webinar, we highlight that by discovering the search terms and intent that your customers are using when they search online in Google and other search engines, you can discover what they’re looking for and craft your content to match.

Shoppers are using Google to help them as they make their buying decision and move through the buyer’s journey. Keywords can help you get insight into that.

By doing the proper keyword research, you can find keywords that represent different stages of the buyer’s journey for people that could buy all your different types of products.

 Consider the example of someone who is thinking about buying a tent.

At the awareness phase, he might be looking for general information on the different types of tents available and would search Google for a broad keyword like “tents.” You’d want to make sure you have a good blog post or category page covering this topic in-depth to help him learn and also get him into your funnel.

At the consideration phase, he might have narrowed his search down to a particular type of tent and would be searching for longer tail keywords like “pop-up tents.” This is a great place for you to create an informative category page description that explores the benefits of pop-up tents. You can then link off to specific models to get him engaging with your product stores and push for the conversion.

Finally, at the decision phase, he’s largely identified the type of tent and likely a specific model he wants. His search in Google will be very long tail and likely show commercial intent. He might search for “buy Coleman pop-up tent”. Traffic from these types of searches is extremely high value and close to converting, and also almost always link to product pages, which is why so many brands put so much effort into crafting product stories that are SEO-optimized and designed to convert.

Also – 4 Ways to Get Compelling eCommerce Content for Your Brand

The Product Content Lifecycle

You’re familiar with the product supply chain, but have you thought of writing product content in that context?

One of Brian’s points was that there’s a lot that goes into writing just one product story – research, writing, review and QA, editing, publishing, optimizing, etc. The process will vary a bit depending on your company, but his point was that defining your process is key and ensuring you’ve built the right team and collection of tools to efficiently follow the process is critical.

This is something that we’ve done at Crowd Content with our Enterprise content team. Depending on the project, we have defined processes, tools and teams for each step of the process:

1.       Research

2.       Writing

3.       Editing

4.       Quality Assurance

5.       Publishing

Brian goes over some great tips on how to set this up, so be sure to check out this section of the webinar replay.

Good Product Copy is Fresh Product Copy

Most major brands are constantly refreshing their product copy.

Why?

For a number of reasons:

1. Google’s Freshness Algorithm. Freshness is a dedicated ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, so the simple act of refreshing your content can help you realize a ranking boost. It looks at how much of your content you refresh, how often and what percentage of your text is refreshed. Think of it like this – if you see content that hasn’t been updated in a long time, wouldn’t you also think it’s losing relevance?

2. SEO performance. Content is the most important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. If your product pages aren’t ranking well, you’ve ensured your other on-page factors are optimized and you have high domain authority, there’s a good chance your content could be updated to help give you a ranking boost. Things you can look at improving are your freshness, match with search intent, topic completeness, readability and crafting better content than competing content that currently outranks you.

3. Seasonality. How your shoppers interact with your products may vary depending on the season. Think of how you’d position a t-shirt in the summer versus winter:

In the summer you want to focus on how the t-shirt can help you keep cool, whereas in the winter, you might position it as a base layer that will help you stay warm. By updating to make your product copy more seasonally relevant, you can boost conversions.

4. Product Updates. Often, details about your products will change or how your consumers use them will. It’s critical that your product copy is updated promptly if this happens. Consumers are intelligent and will often notice inaccuracies which can create doubt during the buying process. Worse, if someone buys your product and then discovers the information that led to their purchase was inaccurate, you may be faced with a costly return.

ALSO – Content Marketing for eCommerce: 6 Types of Copy You Need to Succeed

Wrapping it Up

We had a great time working with the team at Talkoot on this webinar, and I feel that Brian brought some great insights that anyone looking to succeed with creating product copy can learn from.

Be sure to check out the replay and please let us know what you think.

The post Webinar Recap: 5 Secrets From Successful Product Copy Teams appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Need help writing killer category pages? Connect with skilled eCommerce content writers today!

If you’re looking to purchase a new shirt, you’re much more likely to plug “men’s shirts” into Google than “Ralph Lauren collared cotton button-down shirt in brown and blue.” The category phrases still have strong intent, though they’re a bit higher up in the funnel, and those long-tail searches are where your product pages come into play.

There are plenty of other reasons to create and optimize SEO eCommerce category pages:

• There’s lots of competition for those long-tail, bottom-of-the-funnel product keywords, which makes them difficult to rank highly in the search results
• Category pages with robust content help the search engines understand the site structure a bit better
• Even though category-type search phrases don’t convert as well as product-related keywords, you can use them to drive substantial traffic to product pages
• Traffic that hits your category pages is highly qualified and likely to convert if you run retargeting campaigns 
• Category pages are higher up in the hierarchy of the site than product pages, so they get better internal link equity

ALSO – Content Marketing for eCommerce: 6 Types of Copy You Need to Succeed

What should I include in my category page content?

Google is all about quality content instead of those keyword-stuffed gibberish pages of the past, and that includes eCommerce category pages. Many eCommerce companies, though, still create short paragraphs that are filled with keywords and shoved down at the bottom of the page below the products. These SEO footers aren’t usually meant to be read, so quality is often pretty poor.

If you want your category pages to do their job, they must:

• Meet the searcher’s intent
• Add value to the reader
• Educate, inform and engage

Let’s say someone searches for “kitchen blenders” and they land on your category page. The text should tell the reader about the different types of blenders, what features are available, what they can use the product for and, typically, what the most well-known brands are.

The category page for blenders on the Williams Sonoma site does a terrific job.

The content on your category pages should be useful to those in the early stages of the buying process, and it should also include a clear call to action. Mention leading or well-known brands, provide useful information about the products and for new or obscure products, don’t forget to mention usage occasions. Also, sprinkle lots of action verbs in your content, and stay in active voice whenever possible. 

Even if you’re not an eCommerce operation, your pages may benefit from category pages that are beneficial to the reader.

What should the content cover?

Part of satisfying search intent in today’s SEO landscape is ensuring that you cover the semantically related topics to your target keyword well.

Remember that Google is ranking semantically complete content highly these days, which means you should be crafting content that covers all the semantically related keywords and topics. 

For example, when searching Google for “LED televisions,” pages that cover some of the following keywords/topics as identified by SEMrush’s Content Template are more likely to rank highly.

These keywords can help you design sections and subheadings your description should cover. This is especially valuable when you need to create longer content. For reference, SEMrush recommends that a category page aimed at the keyword “LED televisions” would need to be longer than 1600 words to outperform Google’s current top 10 ranked pages. 

ALSO – Copywriting for SEO: How to Be Sure Your eCommerce Copy Converts and Ranks

Should I include internal links in my category page?

Yes, yes and yes. Ecommerce category pages are a perfect spot to include links to internal pages. Bloomingdale’s does a great job at internal linking, though you could argue that they could include even more.

Always link to subcategory or brand pages from your category pages and avoid links to product pages. Since products tend to come and go and newer, better models replace old ones over time, you could find yourself spending oodles of time fixing broken links and updating copy.

Need help writing product descriptions? Hire professional product description writers.

If you’re creating content for subcategory or brand pages (and you should be), be sure that these pages do link off to specific products. Visitors that have made it to these pages are further along their buying journey and more likely be evaluating products.

While pushing visitors closer to your product pages is an important use of hyperlinks, remember that you’re ultimately helping visitors learn more about their options at this stage of their journey. You should also consider linking off to more educational resources such as buying guides to educate consumers.

Here’s how Best Buy helps visitors to their TV category page to learn more about their options:

How long should my SEO eCommerce category pages be?

The experts are all over the map when it comes to the proper length for SEO eCommerce category pages. Ahrefs says they should be “short and sweet, but Backlinko insists that category pages should be at least 1,000 words long and contain your primary keyword three to five times. The truth is that there’s no one answer. Your category pages should be as long as needed to get the job done.

A good rule of thumb – take a look at what competitive eCommerce websites have on their category pages, and then do more – or do it better. This is true for the length of content and for the number of products that you display on the page. Don’t forget – if retail giants like Amazon and Walmart have category pages for women’s shirts that display a lot of products (50 or more) per page and your women’s shirt category only displays 10 products, your rankings (and traffic) may be impacted.

ALSO – How to Determine Optimal Content Lengths (and Why Longer Isn’t Always Better)

I mentioned the need for creating semantically complete content earlier in this post. Using tools like SEMrush to audit your top competitors helps you identify the topics that are being covered in Google’s top-ranked content so you can craft content that covers all the topics they do – and more.

In the example of the search for “LED televisions,” you can quickly build out a category page with multiple subheadings about screen quality, gaming and power use. That’s incredibly helpful when you’re trying to write a piece that’s at least 1,600 words long.

Where should I place the content on the page?

At the top of the page or at the bottom – it’s a question that’s up for a lot of debate. Most designers want category content to show below the product listings so as not to mess with design or user experience, but copy that’s shoved to the bottom of the page may or may not ever be read.

How to handle this dilemma? Consider putting your content at the top of the page with a Read More button or put a short sentence or two at the top – just enough for the search engine bots and readers – and then include the remainder of the content at the bottom.

You’ll need to assess what’s right for your site’s design as well as the consumer experience.

The best piece of advice we can offer is to make sure that your content is displayed in an appealing way. Great content hooks readers and boosts search rankings, but how both interact with that content makes a difference between a page that looks appealing and one that’s bound to drive consumers away. 

Try to break up your longer content into multiple sections, add imagery and leverage expandable fields to give your content the best chance of being read.

What about on-page SEO?

As discussed, there are two primary reasons for crafting high-quality category pages:

1.       Providing useful information to the consumer
2.       Giving the search engines something to grab onto to help rankings

SEO is extremely important for brand and category pages – in fact, it’s the first thing you should think about. That means really putting thought into the length you’ll need and the keywords you’ll use. There are lots of other things to think about as well, but digital marketing experts like Search Engine Journal and Credo have done a great job of covering everything you need to know to optimize your category pages properly.

To sum it up:

• Assess your competitors (which keywords, how much text, how many products, etc.)
• Determine which categories you should optimize 
• Research how many products you should display per category
• Do thorough keyword research
• Organize your keywords according to search intent, mapping each intent to a stage of the buyer’s journey
• Write semantically complete content
• Craft your metadata properly
• Include internal links and make the link text relevant
• Keep an eye on page load speed
• Ensure you have a simple navigation hierarchy – no more than three tiers

Category pages are some of the most important pages for any eCommerce site. Whether they’re landing pages for traffic from Google search or pages your visitors navigate to in order to move along their buying journey, make sure they’re adding value to your visitor and you’ll go a long way towards higher page rankings and increased sales. 

The post How to Create Killer SEO eCommerce Category Pages appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Review posts and articles are also a great way for bloggers, marketers and businesses of all types to increase site traffic and revenue. Knowing how to write a product review is essential to success in those efforts, though. Discover more about types of reviews, reasons why you should write a product review and how to do it below.

We’ll also cover some times for finding skilled product review writers who can do the job for you.

ALSO: Content Marketing for eCommerce: 6 Types of Copy You Need to Succeed

What Are Product Review Posts, and Who Should Write Them?

Numerous types of product reviews exist, including:

• Consumer reviews, such as those posted on Amazon, wherein people who own or bought the product leave a short review and star rating
• Expert reviews, such as those written by CNET, wherein writers with knowledge of a certain type of topic review them as a third-party for the purpose of educating consumers
• Round up or list reviews, such as those provided by Capterra, wherein writers compare a number of similar products to help buyers make a choice
• Blogger or affiliate marketing reviews, which are written by people who received the product for free or who get some type of commission if you buy the product off of their links

Expert, round up, blogger and affiliate marketer reviews are all ways to monetize content on your site when you aren’t the manufacturer, producer or direct seller of products or services.

Steve Kurniawan, a content and growth strategist at Nine Peaks Media, explains when review posts work and when they may not:

“In my opinion using this approach is only effective when the business is not the producer of the product/service and this is not the only product they sell. For example, if you’re an eCommerce site covering a niche, you can review a lot of related products. You can get revenue either by selling these products yourself or through affiliate marketing.

If you’re the producer of the product/service, people won’t believe your own reviews because they’ll consider them biased, so this can be very counterproductive.”

Examples and Tips for How to Write a Product Review

Before you set up affiliate links or stalk brands on social media in the hopes of becoming an influencer for them, take a look at the examples of review posts below and what you can learn from them.

1. CNET: Expertise and an Easy-to-Read Format

CNET is a go-to resource for many consumers on the prowl for electronics and other technology devices. What sets CNET reviews apart from the crowd is that they are written by people who understand the technology deeply — if not by actual industry insiders. At the same time, CNET marries expertise with a conversational tone and explanations of specs, so anyone reading the reviews can make an informed decision about the products.

Let’s take a look at this CNET review of the Google Nest Hub to get some tips for writing a review.

• Even before the review article starts, CNET provides a quick summary that consumers can scan for high-level details.
• CNET never gushes over a product without offering a look at the disadvantages. Remember that no product is perfect, and hyping something without writing a realistic review won’t inspire trust (and thus, conversions). Including the pros and cons of a product or service is important.
• CNET provides easy-to-access links to reviews of similar products, ensuring consumers can compare options and stay on CNET’s page. That increases the chance that, whatever the consumer ultimately buys, the affiliate link comes from CNET.

2. Capterra: Comprehensive and Convenient

Capterra takes a similar approach with its reviews, providing expert and comprehensive content for the software niche. But Capterra is also known for its lists; if you’re looking for a type of software, you can usually find lists of 10 or even hundreds on Capterra along with reviews, comparison tables and links to the product site.

Consider this page of reviews on applicant tracking software.

The top lesson review writers and publishers should learn from Capterra is that presentation matters. Check out how easy the interface is to use. If people can’t find the product information on your site, they’re not going to fumble around on it forever for the pleasure. Even bloggers should create categories, tags and menus that make it simple to navigate information.

Capterra also provides high-level content with the opportunity for readers to dig deeper as desired. Note that users can see the star ratings and a small blurb for each type of software on the list. They can then choose to:

• Click on the link to read the full Capterra review for that product
• Click on the link to go to the product website to make a purchase
• Add the product to a comparison table to see how it stacks up to other options on the list

It’s always important to present the reader with a great article about the product or service and then get out of the way so they can make a decision about buying. But before you step off stage, follow the Capterra example and leave a link for that purpose, whether it’s to the product on your own site or an affiliate link.

3. Golf Influence: Niche-Based Product Reviews

You don’t have to be a tech or software guru to use this type of content to your advantage. It works with almost any product; Golf Influence does it with golf-related goods.

Check out this article on irons, for example. The site takes a more magazine-style approach, creating a gorgeous review piece that’s full of visuals to support scanning and inspire sharing.

Right away, you get an information-rich graphic that demonstrates the authority and accuracy of the content below it.

Golf Influence presents a comprehensive article, but for consumers with little time or short attention spans, it first calls out a top three of sorts. The table provides some quick tidbits and the all-important affiliate buy link.

Once you get into the meat of the review article, each section is broken up with handy infographics that provide the top talking points, including the pros and cons for each product. Readers can make a decision from that information or click to read more about every option.

Like CNET and Capterra, Golf Influence provides expert, comprehensive product reviews. But it does it with additional graphical style, which increases the opportunities for social shares. This is a great tip for anyone writing product reviews for niches that perform well on Pinterest or Instagram.

4. Bloggers: Personalized Reviews and Recommendations

When bloggers share their personal journeys or use of products, it creates an incredibly authentic product review. While consumers appreciate input from the experts, especially with complex or niche goods, they also like to see how a person like them is able to put the item to use.

Consider a post from Make it with Missy about a NECTAR mattress. It’s a very personable post, including images of her family interacting with the product. Missy also provides a detailed look at how the mattress comes, why it comes packaged the way it does and how you open and set it up. That might seem like a lot of weird pictures for no reason, but if you’re a consumer shopping for this type of mattress, you may wonder exactly how a rolled-up tube becomes a posh memory foam product on your bed. Missy answers those questions to alleviate buyer fears.

Missy also includes a pros list in her review. She tells other consumers exactly how the mattress has helped her.

5. Integrating Video Reviews

Product Review Mom shares her lifestyle in the form of product reviews. As with Make it With Missy, this blog provides super personalized reviews that often give readers a look at how this mom and her family put goods and services to work.

Product Review Mom also does something any reviewer can do: she enhances her content with video in addition to images.

Check out this review for RevAir, for example.

Product Review Mom doesn’t just address the product. She reviews it from the perspective of her needs, which likely resonate with the needs of her target audience. She specifically answers the question whether RevAir works for black kinky/curly hair, which automatically adds value to her review for that target audience. Then, she shows her readers how the product works for that niche by including a video.

ALSO – 4 Ways to Get Compelling eCommerce Content for Your Brand

Start Writing Product Reviews Today

Product reviews are a great way to increase conversions and revenue for all types of sites. Start writing your own reviews today or connect with freelancers who can get the job done for you.

The post Writing Product Reviews to Engage and Convert Shoppers: Examples, Tips and Best Practices appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

There are plenty of options when it comes to finding writers and editors, including hiring freelancers or using eCommerce content creation companies or agencies, but each one comes with its own set of pros and cons.

In-House Staff Writers

PROS: The value of in-house writers is their experience with your company and products. Whether part-time or full-time, in-house writers know the value your company provides, and they have an intimate knowledge of the entire content-writing process for your website. They also have better access to the right people and products when they have questions.

CONS: Most companies simply don’t have enough experienced writers on staff to complete a major overhaul in a timely manner. Hiring a full team of writers can be cost-prohibitive when you factor in salary and benefits. If your content creation needs slow down or go through a lull, you still have to pay your in-house employees.

You may also find that your company’s in-house writing team has lots of priorities on their plate, and your project may not be at the top of the list. This could mean your project will take a backseat to other work, which may impact deadlines.

Freelance Contract Writers

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PROS: There are thousands of freelance writers available who would jump at the chance to work on content creation for your eCommerce website. They typically can start work quickly, and you can often find professionals with extensive experience in your company’s niche. Since they usually charge by the job or by the hour, you aren’t obligated to pay them when you don’t have a need for content.

CONS: Hiring your own team of freelancers is often the most stressful and time-consuming option by far. It’s usually very labor intensive at the start — just as difficult as hiring a brand-new team of employees — and you could find yourself drowning in paperwork just to get them paid.

Once you have a team in place, you’ll probably find the quality of the writing varies from writer to writer. Like new employees, there will be growing pains, edits and rewrites as you coach the different freelancers in the style, process and overall results you’re looking for.

Agencies

PROS: For many companies, hiring an agency is attractive because it gives them one point of contact for their project. An agency will usually assign you an account manager to organize the project and work with you to ensure the work meets your specifications. Agencies typically offer other services as well, such as SEO, creative or marketing, so some companies look at agencies as a one-stop shop.

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CONS: Some agencies have in-house teams of writers, but many turn around and hire freelancers or content creation companies to complete projects as needed. They then simply mark up the fees and pass the bill along to you. So if you don’t need the agency’s additional services, you’re almost certainly paying too much.

Specialized Content Creation Company

PROS: In many ways, this option provides a balance between hiring an agency or a team of freelancers on your own. It gives you access to a pre-qualified team of writers with experience creating content for eCommerce websites.

Most companies will assign you a project manager, so you won’t have to hire and train each writer individually. It’s also often a less expensive option than hiring a traditional agency, since you’re not paying the marked up price you’d pay the agency for the services of the writing team. And many content creation companies are poised to scale with you as your content needs grow. In fact, many agencies rely on these kinds of specialized writing teams for exactly the same reasons. By hiring them directly, you cut out the middleman.

CONS: Content creation companies are not created equal. Some use a rigorous vetting process and hire only highly skilled writers; others don’t have high standards in place. Pricing is all over the board with these types of companies, and the price isn’t necessarily reflective of the quality you’ll see in your product descriptions. When you go this route, expect to invest some up-front time to be sure you get the company that will do the job you need.

What’s Best for You?

Every project and every website is unique, so you’ll need to run the numbers to see what works best for your project. Most agencies and content creation services will gladly sit down with you and discuss your situation at no cost to you. Depending on the volume and scale of your project, you might be able to do a small proof of concept trial before signing on. You have nothing to lose by reaching out to them to see what they can do.

Now that you have a sense of your options and the pros and cons, it’s time to make a decision on what works for your business. Remember to ask yourself:

• Do you have the team of writers you need to accomplish the task?
• If not, what’s the most cost-efficient method available to get them?
• Is the solution you choose able to deliver the quality you need?

Whatever you choose, remember to focus on the quality of content (everything from titles to descriptions) you are adding to your site whether they’re being written in-house or by outside contractors.

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PS: if you want the full story on how you can create content for an eCommerce website at scale, you might want to download our eBook for the full how-to.

The post 4 Ways to Get Compelling eCommerce Content for Your Brand appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

And that’s why online retailers must continue to drive traffic with the right content marketing for ecommerce.

Defining the eCommerce Content Marketing Mix

Most eCommerce sites need a good mix of content to increase awareness of products and help interested customers make choices throughout the sales funnel.

Here are some of the most common types of eCommerce content that can help your products or services show up in search engines and persuade consumers to take the next step in the buying journey.

Product descriptions or product pages

A product descriptions market a single item or service. Often between 50 and 300 words (with longer formats reserved for specialty or complex goods and for brands who opt to focus on storytelling), product descriptions educate consumers about the item and encourage readers to visualize themselves using the product or service.

This is accomplished through feature/benefit writing that answers the questions: what is this, what does it do and why does the user need it? You should have a product description or page for every product or service you offer.

Product descriptions tend to be bottom of funnel content, so you can focus on converting already interested visitors and ranking for very transactionally focused search terms with your SEO.

ALSO:  Tips and Tricks for Writing the Perfect eCommerce Product Title

Category pages or descriptions

Category pages are ideal for creating content that boosts your performance in the search engines while providing useful information to the reader. Category descriptions provide some overall information about the types of items in a category, such as why they’re necessary, how to choose one or what types of subsections consumers might find.

For example, a category about women’s purses might explain different types of bags, what to look for in a bag, what materials are used, etc. Here’s a category page for women’s purses from Simon’s that helps shoppers narrow down their purchase decision:

Aim to have a category page for at least your highest level categories. Make sure they link off to related products, and you’ll be on your way to moving customers along their buying journey.

Category pages tend to serve customers who are mid-funnel, knowing they’re interested in a certain type of product, but not sure which ones just yet. Your category pages can be a great tool to help consumers find suitable products and can also help you rank for keywords that show an intent of learning more about a certain category of products.

Brand pages

Etailers that carry products from other companies can capture brand-specific SEO traffic and help customers early in their buying journey learn more about specific brand options by adding brand pages.

These are similar to category pages in that the content discusses the specific brand and what types of products it offers or is known for. You might consider adding such a page for every brand you carry or limiting it to special partnerships, highest performers or brands for which you carry many items.

For example, Best Buy has a brand page for Samsung TVs:

This page ranks for search terms related to Samsung televisions, and it also helps shoppers learn more about what their brand options are.

Buying guides

These are typically long-form article or blog pieces targeted to the early parts of the buying journey. While you can mention your goods and services, buying guides are usually meant to be educational pieces that help the consumer decide what type of product they need and how to purchase it. For example, a buying guide for a student laptop computer might cover topics such as how much RAM is preferred, how to choose the best screen type and what peripherals a student most commonly uses.

Let’s look at Best Buy again for a good example. Here’s their buying guide for purchasing laptops:

This page is full of great info that will help shoppers learn about what to look for in a laptop, which will then help them start reviewing your specific products. It also links off to different categories of laptops to help shoppers move along their buyer’s journey even easier.

You might consider publishing buying guides on some of your top-selling products types or aligning them with seasonal sales growth (such as holiday or back-to-school buying guides).

Buying guides are typically long-form content. This gives you a good opportunity to create “complete content,” which will rank well and best serve your visitors.

Blog posts

An on-site blog is a powerful way to expand your content marketing strategy outside of the more marketing-heavy content types above. Blog posts let you educate and entertain your audience, create content that encourages links and shares and engage in building a brand that’s bigger (and longer lasting) than any single product you might sell.

Test how various blog formats and publishing schedules perform with your target audience to drive performance for this type of eCommerce marketing. You may find your audience enjoys seeing blog posts twice a week or that guest posts perform the best.

Blog posts are another great tool to reach those top-of-funnel shoppers. They may not even know they’re interested in a type of product yet, but your blog posts could capture their attention and start them on their buyer’s journey.

ALSO: A Proven Process To Show Writers How To Write Blog Posts That Drive Results

Product Reviews

Often included on an eCommerce company’s blog, product reviews are a great way to spotlight specific products you’d like to move, new technologies and newsworthy items (think new video game releases). They also let you establish your company’s authority in a certain niche by exploring in depth the pros and cons of a product.

Not to beat a dead horse, but let’s look to Best Buy for another example. Here’s their review of Final Fantasy X for Nintendo Switch:

They review a lot of video games on Best Buy’s blog. This lets them build authority as a go-to source for video game news and sales, a following of people who will check out new reviews, organic search rankings and even traffic from social sharing.

The up-side here is that if people are interested in a product enough to read the review, there’s a good chance they’re going to click on a link to buy the product in your review.

Reviews are great for buyers near the end of the buying journey as they’re a great source of product information and may nudge them to checkout. That said, a well placed review might capture a buyer early in their journey and get them interested in the product.

Going Beyond Basics: Digital Marketing Tips from the Experts

Stepping outside of the basic eCommerce business content types above helps you increase your brand authority, capture consumers at different stages of the sales funnel and drive more traffic and conversions. Check out the advice below from three experts on how to go beyond basics with content marketing for eCommerce.

1. Customize content formats for each stage of the buyer journey

Product descriptions and blog posts are proven methods for driving eCommerce sales, but companies must remember that the digital marketing landscape is evolving rapidly. Today, individuals are shopping online via desktop, mobile and even voice-search devices, and they’re likely to use different tools for each stage of the buying journey. Your content marketing has to play the same game.

“The best success we’ve had in driving potential or in marketing customers down the funnel toward eCommerce conversion is to build content themes against our content pillars, leveraging formats for each stage.” says Robb Hecht, an adjunct professor of marketing with Baruch College. “For example, for mobile audiences who need to be made aware of your company (top of the funnel) we target them with large imagery-focused creative with either disruption or value-focused messaging.”

Hecht also provides examples for other parts of the marketing funnel. “For middle of the funnel, where eCommerce consumers are in a consideration stage, we try to obtain their opt-in email messages by leveraging social platform lead gen units and communicating informative messages, educating them about the product. Finally, for bottom of the funnel customers who just need a push, we develop content with offers, coupons and discounts, which drive them to a conversion landing page or physical store.”

2. Don’t just sell: Educate and build brand culture

You’ve probably heard the 80/20 rule of social media marketing: only 20% of your posts should be specifically about selling you and your products. The other 80% should be about building brand culture, educating your target audience and even sharing content from others in the industry. This concept can be applied to other content formats, too. By integrating more organically into the community you’re trying to build, you’ll create lasting relationships that support more sales over the long-term. And you’ll find that all that relationship building can segue easily into sales funnels if you’re authentic and transparent.

Taylor Gilliam, the Director of Social Media at ReadyCloud.com, says, “We’ve used content marketing to great impact for our company. By using education-based content, we have greater appeal to our client base and to industry leaders who influence prospective clients. It has been the most effective way to develop credit and establish our brand as an authoritative resource.”

“Content marketing has also helped us build a cohesive brand imagine that extends into infographics, videos and social media outreach,” says Gilliam. “Currently, branded content drives at least 200k unique web visits per year, and it serves as a gateway to our sales funnel. It has helped us improve our reach massively, especially when combined with retargeting and native ads.”

3. Write a lead magnet book

Vince Massara from We Make Lead Magnets takes the educate and inform premise even further, tying it into lead generation.

“We have seen great success with eCommerce owners using some new content marketing strategies,” says Massara. “Many are using a book, which would typically be a trip-wire lead magnet in eCommerce, as the core of their content marketing. By writing the right book to the right audience, you can put a few advertising dollars behind it to quickly grow a list of interested leads. From there, you create your content with an audience in mind, rather than starting out at zero and waiting months or years for the content to start to pay you back.”

Successful Content Marketing for eCommerce Isn’t Formulaic

Always remember that successful digital marketing doesn’t adhere 100% to a single formula. There’s simply too much going on online for a one-size-fits-all approach to work for anyone; take a look at WordStream’s eCommerce statistics to get an idea of how many approaches you can take to online marketing and why they’re all important for different types of brands.

The key is to figure out what works (and is important) to your brand.

A successful content marketing mix is one that performs for you, so start with the basics and expert tips above to build out your content. Then, test, tweak and test again. Because if there is one truth for all eCommerce businesses it’s that the online marketing job is never finished.

The post Content Marketing for eCommerce: 6 Types of Copy You Need to Succeed appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But it’s not only about money. Long-tail keywords are usually used by searchers when they are closer to purchasing a product.

For example, if you sell summer clothing, bidding for the keyword “clothes” will be very expensive as there will be a lot of competition. Plus, people searching for “clothes” are likely in the early stages of their purchase decision and not close to buying.

If you are a small business, you likely won’t have the same budget as large companies like Zara that have a huge marketing budget. As a small company that sells summer clothing, you’ll want to find more specific and lower-cost keywords like “slim-fit short sleeve,” which also show searcher intent to buy soon.

A smart implementation of a long-tail keyword strategy leads to a lower traffic acquisition cost and higher-quality traffic, which means a higher conversion rate and, therefore, a higher ROI. You’ll attract the audience that’s searching for the exact same products you’re selling at a lower cost per click.

There are several ways of finding long-tail keywords that fit your products and services. However, the question is, how do you make sure those keywords are going to bring you enough traffic, and, more importantly, high-quality traffic that converts? Here are some tips:

1. Go to Google.com and search for terms related to your business.

Using Google’s autocomplete in the search box is the easiest way to find long-tail keywords, but not many people do it. It will show you some suggestions for searches starting with the word or words you used. These suggestions correspond with what people search for online. They are not necessarily the most searched keywords, but you should target them, as they will definitely be high-quality keywords.

2. Go to your Google Ads account and check the keyword tool.

The Google Ads keyword tool might seem complicated at first, but it’s actually a very easy and resourceful feature to use. Let’s take a look at how to use it:

Once you are on your Google Ads account, go to Tools > Keyword Planner and click on Find New Keywords. Then you can suggest some keywords related to your business and the kind of long-tail keywords you want to find. If you don’t have any keywords you want to choose from, you can also insert your URL and Google will suggest keywords based on the content of your site.

You can make the search more sophisticated by excluding the terms you don’t want in your long-tail keywords. And that’s it! Google will suggest plenty of long-tail keywords you can select that could be relevant to your business. Not all of them will be, but it will give you tons of ideas.

Not only will it give you ideas for keywords, but also their number of monthly searches, trends, competition, and bidding estimations. This information is very useful when it comes to making decisions on which keywords are best for you, taking your budget, products and objectives into account.

A useful trick that you can perform on your Keyword Research Tool is entering your competitors’ URL and checking the terms that appear as relevant for them. You can find good ideas here that you might not have thought about. However, it is possible that the keywords that appear here could have a higher cost per click than usual.

3. Check which terms people are using to find your site.

You can do this directly from your query report on your Google Ads account. Here, you’ll probably find keywords you have already targeted, but you can always make important discoveries by checking it once in a while.

Where can you find your query report? Just enter the keywords section of one of your campaigns or ad groups and go to Search Terms. You will be given the option to add and exclude keywords directly from there. Excluding the keywords you don’t want to appear will result in saving money that is essential for you to spend on keywords that are actually relevant to your products.

With the extra information it provides you (interactions, cost per conversion, conversion rates, etc.), you can make very informed decisions that will help you optimize your Google Ads campaigns correctly.

4. How is organic traffic coming to your website?

SEO and SEM strategies are quite different, but you can use them in collaboration to get the best traffic to your online store. Checking the organic terms you rank for and the terms people use to get to your site can be useful when it comes to thinking of new keywords for your ads. You can make a list of them and create variations, add them to the Google Ads keyword tool to generate more ideas, etc. Once you have the final list, include them in your Google Ads campaigns.

Note that this method only looks at the terms you currently rank for in Google search results. That’s a result of your SEO and will depend on your eCommmerce content, backlinks, and many other factors. Talking to your SEO team might help you reveal other search terms you’re not currently ranking for (but want to), as well as search terms your competitors are ranking for.

You can make a list of them and create variations, add them to the Google Ads keyword tool to generate more ideas, etc. Once you have the final list, include them in your Google Ads campaigns.

You can find this information in your Google Search Console or Google Analytics account. Just enter your Google Analytics account, go to the Acquisition section, then click on Keywords > Organic, and a list of the organic keywords you are ranking for will appear.

ALSO – How is your eCommerce copy performing?

Keywords are one of the most important, if not the most important, parts of any Google Ads account. Your keywords are the key your clients use to enter your online store. By researching long-tail keywords, you will improve and optimize your account and “generate more keys” that more customers can use to access and enter your site. Try all these strategies to get more qualified traffic and a higher ROI.

The post How to Find the Best Long-tail Keywords to Drive Google Ads Conversions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Setting up an ecommerce store on a marketplace like ​Bonanza​ is a breeze, but settling on an item title might have you stumped. After all, you want your item title to be descriptive enough to inform shoppers what you’re selling, but intriguing enough to tempt shoppers into clicking your item. What’s more, other sites that might advertise your items, like Google Shopping, have specific guidelines for item titles and won’t accept items that don’t comply.

Lucky for you, we’ve done lots of market research and number crunching to find out which strategies work and which ones don’t. Read on to learn which methods are tried and true — and which ones are total flops.

Use straightforward words to describe your item. ​The goal of an item title should be to tell shoppers what your item is and generate enough interest to drive clicks to your listing. You only need to include enough information to let shoppers know what your item is at a glance. Do this by using simple words that explain exactly what exactly your item is.

Include the brand and MPN (manufacturer part number) if known. ​This helps our software put your item in the proper category, and will give your item a better chance of being discovered on third-party shopping platforms, like Google or Bing Shopping.

Mention traits like gender, color, or item type when applicable. ​Put the type of item you’re selling near the beginning of the title. When applicable, gender and brand should go at the beginning, as they are more important traits, while color should go at the end. If your item comes in multiple colors, it is not necessary to put the colors in your item title.

Strong eCommerce content provides potential customers with the details they need to make their buying decision. Including as many relevant traits as you can will help them immensely.

Make full use of the available character limit by using strong keywords.​ While it is unwise to add irrelevant words to your title just for the sake of using the character limit, you might want to add some additional words to describe your item if the character limit allows. Adding the keywords to further describe the item style or appearance could bring additional exposure to your item through various keyword searches.

#protip:​ If you’re unsure of how to word your item title, try searching for your item on Google Shopping. This will help you think about your item from a search term perspective. It will also give you insight into the titles other sellers are using that have been approved by Google.

Using all capital letters in your item title. ​This can give your item titles an aggressive and overbearing impression. Typing in all caps screams “LOOK AT ME,” which can often have the opposite effect. In addition, Google Shopping does not allow items with titles in all caps.

Having grammar or spelling errors in your item title. ​Having errors in your title looks unprofessional and careless. Show shoppers that you value your online business by taking the time to proofread your item titles.

Including excessive or incorrect punctuation in your item title. ​Incorrectly used punctuation like “!!!! Women’s D*R*e*S*S* !!!!” will deter shoppers, as they might feel like your items are fake or scammy. Similar to all caps titles, Google Shopping does not accept any items with titles like these, as it is considered “promotional text.” Including punctuation like this could disqualify your items from the Google Shopping feed.

Including fluff words that don’t describe the actual item you are selling. ​You might think that words like “new,” “real,” or “authentic” add perceived value to your item – but in reality, these words detract from your item. The only exception to this rule is during the holiday shopping season. At that time, many shoppers search for new items as gifts. Any other time of the year, words to describe the item’s condition are better to list in your item description and traits.

Now what?

Now that you know the basics about writing an item title, it’s time to list some items! Like anything, you should be monitoring your item traffic and sales to see what’s working and what’s not. Often times, changing simply one or two words can make the difference between an item that’s gone stale and an item that’s flying off the shelves.

Curious to learn more about how to set yourself up for success at Bonanza? ​Create a booth today​ and be sure to take a look at one of our ​many other help articles.

This post originally appeared on Bonanza’s ​Seller Success Homepage​. 

The post Tips and Tricks for Writing the Perfect eCommerce Product Title appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The good news is that it’s possible to create eCommerce content at scale if you have the right resources and support. We wrote this guide to help you understand why you should make content creation a priority, explain how to grow your business with large-scale content creation and get the support you need to maximize quality without ignoring your other responsibilities.

Benefits of Large-Scale Content Creation

Increased Authority

When you search for information online, who are you more likely to trust: an established company with a strong web presence or a no-name company with two or three pages of content on its website? If you’re like most people, you’re more willing to trust a company that does a good job communicating what it does and how you can benefit from its products or services.

Large-scale content creation capitalizes on that natural instinct by increasing your authority and making you seem more trustworthy to current and potential customers. Imagine how much faster your business would grow if you had a website filled with articles, blog posts and other content positioning your team members as experts or showing people how your offerings can solve their problems.

Higher Search Engine Rankings

Search engines are one of the best sources of traffic for companies in every industry. When someone searches for a term related to your business, you want your website to show up as close to the top of the first page of the search results as possible. The farther down the page is, the less likely someone is to click the link and visit your website.

Google considers dozens of factors when determining how to rank each page. According to Search Engine Journal, quality content is the most important. You can spend weeks tweaking your site’s design or optimizing each page for mobile devices, but your time is better spent developing quality content to drive up your rankings and improve the user experience. Focusing on content also creates opportunities to optimize your site for other ranking factors, such as frequent updates and the use of relevant keywords.

Better User Experience

SEO is important, but it’s not quite as important as serving the people in your target audience. Visitors won’t feel comfortable subscribing to your email list or making a purchase on your website if you deliver a poor experience that makes them question your authority or ability to meet their needs. Many factors influence the user experience, but one of the most important is the quality of the content you publish.

Your content should be useful, meaning it’s original and fulfills the user’s needs, and credible, which means readers must be able to trust your message. Large-scale content creation gives you additional opportunities to meet a user’s needs and help them trust what you have to say.

More Opportunities To Collect Data

The main purpose of publishing content is to attract people to your website, educate them about what your company has to offer and persuade them to sign up for your email list, buy something or take some other action. What many business owners don’t realize is that publishing content also gives you an opportunity to collect data about the people in your target audience.

When most people think of content, they think of articles or blog posts, but there are dozens of types of content you can use to achieve your marketing goals. Publishing quizzes and surveys can help you gather demographic information or find out what products or services your customers would like you to offer. Maps, calculators and other tools can also help you collect data and gain a better understanding of your customers’ needs.

Improved Brand Awareness

Brand awareness refers to how familiar people are with your brand. If most people have never heard of your company, then brand awareness is low. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have extremely high levels of brand awareness because their names, logos and products are familiar to millions of people around the world. The more content you publish, the more opportunities people have to see your company’s name and associate it with the products or services you provide. Large-scale content creation can lead to higher levels of brand awareness. This happens when members of your target audience stumble across your brand in search results for relevant queries. Soon, they’ll consider you a thought leader in your niche.

How To Grow Your Business With Large-Scale Content Creation

If you’re ready to reap the rewards of creating eCommerce content at scale, here are the first steps you should take.

Hire the Right People

To maintain a high level of quality, it’s imperative you have the right people on your team. Just because your marketing manager excels at conducting marketing research doesn’t mean they’re the right person to create content and publish it to your website. You may need to hire a full-time copywriter or someone with extensive experience in content marketing.

If a full-time hire isn’t in your budget, consider working with a team of experienced freelancers. Crowd Content has thousands of skilled writers available to help you produce eCommerce content at scale, leaving you free to focus on business growth.

Streamline the Process

Inefficiency and disorganization are two major roadblocks to large-scale content creation. That’s why it’s so important to develop a standardized process for choosing content types, producing the content and getting it published. Your process should include activities like choosing a topic, writing the content, optimizing it for search engines, having an editor review it, adding design elements and publishing it to your website.

Plan Ahead

Large-scale content creation is much easier if you plan as far in advance as possible. Many companies use editorial calendars to plan what they’re going to publish over several months. An editorial calendar typically includes the topic, a draft title, the type of content to be produced and a short description of what the content should cover. It should also include the anticipated publication date for each item.

You should also prepare for large-scale content production by creating a set of branding guidelines for your company. These guidelines explain how you want your business presented to customers, investors and other stakeholders. Although most people think of logos and colour palettes when they hear the term “branding guidelines,” you can also include grammar rules or instructions regarding the tone of voice you want writers to use. For example, some business owners prefer a formal style of writing with a third-person point of view, while others prefer a more conversational tone.

Make Assignments

When giving assignments, be sure to consider each writer’s skills, experience and role in your company. For a document that uses technical terms to explain how a software package works, you may want to assign the content to someone who was involved in developing the software. Something less technical, such as a blog post on the benefits of working with your company, might go to someone in your marketing department.

Who Can Benefit From Creating eCommerce Content at Scale?

Almost any business can benefit from creating eCommerce content at scale, but this approach is especially helpful for product-based businesses that rely heavily on online marketing. If you sell tangible products, there are dozens of ways to grow your business with large-scale content creation. One of them is to write keyword-rich product descriptions and category descriptions for everything you sell.

For example, if you sell kitchen products, you could have category pages for pots and pans, cooking utensils, baking pans and kitchen electrics. Then you’d have a keyword-rich product description for each item. Every time you publish a new category page or product description, you’ll have another opportunity to drive organic traffic to your website and educate people about what you have to offer.

Another way to benefit from large-scale content production is to produce detailed buying guides. Like product and category descriptions, buying guides drive traffic to your website and help you improve your page rankings. They’re also useful for showing visitors they can trust your expertise.

Grow Your Business With Content

Content is one of the most valuable assets of any business. Whether you’re blogging about industry trends or publishing detailed descriptions of the products you sell, every piece of content creates an opportunity to educate, entertain or persuade. Even better, content marketing is less expensive than many other marketing methods, making it a cost-effective approach for almost any business.If you’ve been looking for a way to grow your business, large-scale content creation could be the answer. The expert freelancers at Crowd Content are ready to help you create high-quality content at scale and provide expert insight that can help you improve your search engine rankings, drive traffic to your website and convince more people to buy from you.

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[ctt template=”4″ link=”p_eKn” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”]#eCommerce take note. Today’s young adults tend to spend money on experiences rather than fancy stuff. #experientialmarketing[/ctt]

Experiences > Stuff: Because It Makes You Happier

Money can’t buy happiness — we all know the saying. But money can buy a lot of stuff. Can that stuff make us happy? Turns out, according to both anectodal evidence and plenty of behavioral studies, more stuff doesn’t bring long-term joy. It’s a lesson younger generations, who came of age during a major recession and saw generations before them work hard, run up credit and even give up meaningful experiences to procure plenty of stuff, have apparently taken to heart.

Millennials are more likely to splurge on world travel than a fancy vehicle, for example, and eating out, yoga or time spent with friends at a favorite coffee shop are all more likely to appear on the budgets of younger generations than a fancy watch or new pair of designer shoes. This emphasis on experience is one reason for the restaurant renaissance (the revival of dining out, in all its forms, as a popular pastime).

That’s not to say younger generations don’t buy things; the way they purchase is just much more tied to experience than it is to the stuff itself.

Related: 8 Interesting Facts Every eCommerce Operator Should Know

What Does This Mean for Lead Generation Strategy?

For eCommerce companies, this shift means a necessary evolution in marketing strategies. Content marketing is actually well-suited to the change, because you can craft content that is about the experience as easily as you can create content that harks the features and benefits of products. Experiential marketing is also known as aspirational marketing, and it’s something luxury and premium brands have done for years.

Today, though, brands have to concentrate even more on the experience; instead of illustrating why the audience needs a thing, eCommerce businesses must prove that a product enhances or makes possible an experience.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”FPpZX” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”]eCommerce companies must shift their #marketing strategies to reach millenials via experiences rather than products. [/ctt]

Here are some tips for developing a lead generation strategy within this new context.

• Tell stories. Stories make your marketing itself an experience. You can use video, text and images to relate them via your site or social channels.
• Enjoy the experience too. When you actually love a product or enjoy the experience of sharing it with other people, it comes across. Marketing made by people who are truly invested in the experience is organic, honest and almost tangible for the audience.
• Invest in influencer marketing. When other people are having the experience already and sharing it, others are more likely to join in.
• Suggest product/experience pairs. Don’t show a water bottle and list its features. Show the product as it travels the subway, tucked in the pocket of a business woman’s bag, sweating in the heat on a bench in the sun as the athlete completes his run or nestled among fallen leaves at the feet of embracing lovers on a hiking path. Use imagery and metaphors. Link your product to benefits that are less tangible than “durable stainless steel construction” and “no-spill spout.”

Creating an experiential lead generation strategy isn’t always easy. It takes creativity and skill, which is why you might want to consider working with some our roster of experienced writers. We’ve got plenty of creative storytellers who can help you develop experiential marketing copy.

The post Why Savvy eCommerce Companies Need to Leverage Experiential Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Maybe some spoke to you, and maybe some turned you off from a purchase completely, but in a marketplace driven by ecommerce – in the U.S. alone, online shopping represents nearly 8% of total sales – what marketers have to say about a product can hold great influence over a site’s success or failure. Skilled product description writers know their copy directly impacts both conversion rates and a site’s SEO which are both critical.

1. Paint a Mental Picture

In a brick and mortar store, you can hold a product, feel the material between your fingers, and evaluate fit, size, color, and appearance in person.

In an ecommerce setting, on the other hand, product images and descriptions are the only resources shoppers have to make a purchase decision, so a poorly written description isn’t doing anyone any favors.

A good product description exists to paint a mental picture, creating the experience of seeing, feeling, and assessing an object first hand.

Through the use of evocative, illustrative language and tools like buyer personas, marketers can create a written representation of the personal experience online shopping lacks.

2. Build an Emotional Connection

Use of descriptive language is only part of the equation, however. The other half involves creating an emotional connection, inspiring need or want in a consumer.

Describing a little black dress isn’t enough; marketers need to take things one step further, providing a potential buyer with a linguistic adventure detailing what kind of feelings such a dress may offer.

A dress by itself isn’t necessarily exciting, but imaging the experience of attending a glamorous event in the aforementioned dress, for example, can be the missing piece of the puzzle a shopper needs to click “Add to Cart.”

Psychology tells us that emotional connections are paramount in influencing buyer decisions, making an ability to connect with shoppers is an extremely important tool in content marketing.

3. Provide SEO Benefits

You may be able to craft the best possible product descriptions on earth, but if no one can find your site online, shoppers will still pass you by.

Superb product descriptions can provide SEO benefits in addition to drawing in consumers, elevating your site in the SERPs in order to draw customer attention.

In order to reap the SEO benefits of your product descriptions, fresh, original, and high quality content with an emphasis on the right keywords content is a must.

Duplicate content and keyword stuffing can only hurt you, so playing by Google’s rules while still crafting compelling, creative content can help you create product descriptions that hit the mark every time.

Are your product descriptions worthy of an A+, or are you still struggling to nail a 4.0?

Tell me in the comments what you do to write product descriptions that wow!

The post What Are the Benefits of A+ Product Descriptions? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Absolutely!

With category descriptions, your e-commerce store will be divided into categories, just as a brick and mortar store has many departments. How much longer would it take to find everything on your shopping list if there were no departments?

The categories of a clothing store might include men’s clothing, women’s clothing and children’s clothing, with sub-categories of each. An online liquor store might have categories of beer, wine and spirits, with corresponding sub-categories. Are you starting to see how important category descriptions can be?

Benefits of Category Descriptions

Category descriptions can actually benefit your online business in a three very important ways, but it requires the help of a professional category description writer with plenty of experience in sales copy. Unlike product descriptions, category descriptions are not meant to promote and should not include a sales pitch.

The primary purpose of category descriptions is to inform and guide your customers, making it easier for them to shop for the items they need. Category descriptions can also entice consumers to click into your e-commerce catalog, and browse in the areas that will interest them most. Here are the three primary reasons your e-commerce site needs category descriptions:

1)    Impress Google with original keyword rich category descriptions

2)    Establish yourself as a leader in e-commerce

3)    Increases the likelihood of a sale

Category Descriptions that Drive Consumers

For superior category content that drives consumers, your freelance category description writer will need a list of categories, sub-categories and important keywords as well as a list of popular or best-selling brands for each category. An appropriate word count will vary, depending on the products you offer to consumers, but most category descriptions fall between 100 and 200 words, on average.

Adding category descriptions to your e-commerce site is a small project that won’t be too difficult when you choose an adequate writer, but this small effort can lead to impressive sales increases over the months that follow.

Are you using category descriptions to increase sales?

The post Are You Missing out on This E-commerce Secret Ingredient? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

• The products or services you are offering
• Your website
• Content and appearance of your ad
• Your target audience

Outline Your Goals, Expectations, and Resources

An effective online advertising campaign starts with a basic written plan. This plan is an outline of your advertising strategies spanning the various online outlets you intend to use to reach your target audience(s).

• Goals – What do you want to achieve with your online advertising campaign? This includes your overall expectations and your short-term goals for each online platform.

• Market Definition – What is your target audience? While you may say “everybody,” realistically there are specific demographics and geographic locations you want to reach.

• Online Advertising Mediums – Where are you going to advertise online? Get specific with what sites or social platforms you intend to use.

• Sales Cycle – When do you want to reach your target audience with your message and for how long? This depends on your goals. Seasonal campaigns, for instance, have a very specific window. Increasing brand awareness, on the other hand, is a continuous goal.

• Budget – How much you can allocate for your online advertising campaigns? This includes a specific breakdown of what you are willing or able to spend on each online platform.

Sales and Marketing Goals

Before diving into an online marketing campaign, you should clearly define your sales and marketing goals. This includes your expected immediate results and long-term results. Your sales and marketing goals can be broken down further:

Sales Goals

• Immediate results to start building revenue and generating conversations
• Long-term results related to sales cycles
• Building productive relationships with your target audience
• Recurring revenue from new and returning customers plus referrals

Marketing Goals

• Branding
• Streamlined email list building
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Market awareness

Putting It all Together

An effective online advertising campaign doesn’t have to volumes of details facts and figures. In fact, you can put together an effective campaign in a concise 2-3 page report. You want to make sure that everybody responsible for executing your online advertising campaign is clearly on the same page. Go ahead and start sending out those emails and placing ads on carefully selected websites, social platforms, and blogs.

Measuring Results

Keep track of your click through rate (CTR) and understand what it really means. Just because people are clicking on your online ads doesn’t mean that they are actually making a purchase or using your services. Even a poorly developed ad can generate a significant amount of curiosity clicks rather than productive conversions. Tools like Google Analytics can help you see where your online traffic is coming from and how many conversions you are getting.

Take a look at where you are getting the desired results and where you are falling short. No effective online marketing campaign is set in stone. All the research in the world can’t accurately predict the way that consumers are going to react to your online advertising efforts. Stay focused and make adjustments as necessary.

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