Let’s face it, it’s a very very small set of stores that have such a good blog that you want to subscribe to it and read it weekly. Most content is consumed on social media and news sites. So why bother with blogging for your Shopify store? Because it is the #1 type of content to drive organic traffic to your shop from Google.
What Results To Expect
As long as you’ve sorted out essential SEO issues using an SEO app like ours, Plug in SEO, then frequent blogging will increase your search engine impressions and clicks over time. It’s that certain.
Every shop we’ve looked at with new blog posts at least once a fortnight of at least 600 words sees this gradual increase over time.
Here’s how our Google impressions have grown since we started blogging regularly on pluginuseful.com:
The point at which we started blogging is clear, kicking off a nice steady increase in our search engine visibility.
But why does blog content perform so well for SEO vs. other types of content?
Good Blog Content Is Unique And Text-Heavy
Search engines love unique, text-heavy content. They can easily extract meaning from it and therefore display it for much more specific searches.
Things like product and collection descriptions are often just a paragraph, and that paragraph may be quite similar to many other products and collections around the web. This doesn’t give this type of content a good chance to be shown.
Instead, get your team to write 600-800 word blog posts. Google loves this.
Capture The Long Tail Of Search
You may have heard of the ‘long tail’ of SEO. These are the majority of searches that are unique or infrequently searched vs. extremely popular searches. A long tail keyword like [Maltese jewellery] may only be searched a few hundred times a month, but if it is relevant to your business and you can rank high for it it could be very valuable. Much more valuable than the ultra-competitive [jewellery] keyword where ranking high to get anything like the same number of clicks would be futile.
Blog content captures this long tail of search very well. Since search engines have so much text to draw from, you’ll start to appear for many terms that you hadn’t even thought about.
Drive Traffic For Different Types Of Search Intent
Ranking your product pages in Google is great if the searcher is immediately ready to buy your product. But often they’re just researching a topic or looking at their options. Dropping them straight onto a product page, in this case, is not a good experience (note: popups are not the answer!), and this is why Google typically won’t show your product pages in these types of searches.
If you sell protein powder, writing a blog post about ‘How to select the right protein powder’ captures potential customers who may not be ready to buy immediately but want to learn more about the top.
While we’d all love it if customers buy our products immediately on the first visit, in reality this doesn’t happen for most retailers. Thinking about different types of search intent and writing blog posts about those will open up a whole new set of searches for Google to send traffic to your shop for.
How Long And How Often To Blog
There is no hard-and-fast rule here. The #1 problem with blogs is that people write three posts in the first week and then give up. Commit to being consistent as a first step. Be that two posts a week, one every two weeks or even less. Those who succeed with blogging for SEO on Shopify put out this steady stream of content.
You also cannot expect a massive spike in traffic from one blog post. While it does happen, the most likely (almost guaranteed) pattern is that with consistent blogging you will see your search engine impressions gradually increase over a period of months. Do not give up too early and don’t expect a tidal wave of sales. Good blog content is a long term investment that will continue paying for itself many months and even years after you’ve written it.
Your blog posts should not be mainly images for them to have good SEO. Roughly we recommend 600-800 words, but again it is much more important to be consistent than to pressure yourself into writing at least that number. Aim instead to write for as long as feels natural and emphasize text over images.
Blogging for your Shopify store is a tried-and-tested way to drive more traffic and sales from Google.
