Do eCommerce Websites Need Content?

Content on eCommerce Websites? Yes!

Let’s just answer the question: yes, an eCommerce website still requires a good amount of content – especially for search engine optimisation. The content will immensely help search engines to understand how your websites relate to your products and increases relevancy between your pages and the search terms. Not only is written content useful for SEO, but it can also help to convert customers who would like to know more about your products before purchasing – and sometimes this information is best presented in written content. For example, before purchasing a new phone you would probably like to know whether it is locked to a specific network or not, how much storage capacity it has, and if you’re really into your phones you might also want to know about the phone’s CPU, available operating systems etc. These type of specifications are best presented in written content formats.

Now that we know that content is indeed a very vital part of an eCommerce website, let’s outline exactly how you can incorporate content on your website in a user-friendly manner.

Product Descriptions

The first one is quite obvious – your product descriptions! This is the perfect place to include written content that is highly relevant to your product, which will both help the website’s SEO as well as give additional insight and information into your product for customers who are still deciding whether they want to purchase or not.

When writing detailed and extensive product descriptions it’s important that the layout is user-friendly and entices a customer to read it – you don’t want a massive block of text with 6 paragraphs. This is even more important for mobile users who will have a smaller screen to display the content. A simple method for this is to structure your product descriptions into different categories with accordions, or use functions such as “read more.”

For the SEO side of this tactic of displaying content upon the user’s input, it’s important to dispel some myths and misunderstandings of how Google will treat text behind accordions or “read more” tags. The common misconception here is that Google will either completely ignore or give less importance to the text that is hidden. Once upon a time (over a decade ago) this was true – but this is no longer case, and it hasn’t been the case for a long time now. Multiple Google employees and webmaster helpers, such as John Mueller and Gary Illyes, have publicly stated that content ‘hidden’ in this manner is given full weight by Google. Any content that can be seen in the webpage’s html file is always given full weight.

in the mobile-first world content hidden for ux should have full weight – Gary Illes

Specifically when it comes to content on mobile pages we do take into account anything that’s in the HTML.

So if there’s something there that might be visible to users at some point we will include that… so that’s completely normal.” – John Mueller

Category Pages

Any good eCommerce website will have their products organised into category pages. These category pages can make excellent landing pages for people who are looking for your products, but may not have a specific idea of what they want. For example, we have an eCommerce client which sold second hand phones on their website. We organised their products by brand ie Apple, Samsung etc and had separate category pages for each. Once we completely optimised the Apple page with useful and detailed content we managed to increase the traffic to this page by 3,469% (that’s not a typo) with the best SEO in Manchester.

Blogs

A fairly obvious one, but blogs are also a perfect place to include written content for your eCommerce website. On the SEO side, blogs provide great opportunities to increase your internal linking on your website. Internal linking is a strategy to improve relevance and importance to specific pages on your website. High-quality blogs can also be optimised to show up in the search rankings for people who may be looking for information about your products but may not necessarily be ready to purchase yet – it’s up to your blog content to convince them otherwise! This can also improve user experience for customers who may be looking for additional information about your products by purchasing, and with a helpful blog section they won’t even have to leave your website to find this information.

If executed correctly, a blog is a fantastic strategy which incorporates three big benefits for your eCommerce website: it can greatly improve your website’s SEO, includes a content marketing strategy to drive traffic from a new audience, and helps convert potential customers with additional information about your products.

Conclusion

To conclude, yes, eCommerce websites need content! High-quality and detailed written content, when done right, can help in a number of ways such as SEO, increasing conversions and driving new traffic. This content can take a range of forms including blogs, product descriptions and product category pages.

If you need help setting up your eCommerce website, driving traffic to your website with SEO or writing good content for your website – don’t hesitate to get in touch with Blue Whale Media. We have dedicated teams and services to help you with all things digital!