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In a time of uncertainty amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, what we’re seeing with our ecommerce clients is a big spike in searches for generic product keywords with ‘online’ at the end of the search query as consumers turn their reliance to online retailers.

With this in mind, this blog post will explain how you can reach new customers (who didn’t already know about your products/services) by getting your brand at the forefront of their minds; by making your current website content work harder to drive more traffic to your website and ultimately more sales, with a solid SEO strategy.

Content Relevance

What we often find with new clients who work with us, is that content is rather thin, there’s not enough helpful content or there are too few guides available to capture consumers in the research phase of the buying process. Therefore, what you need to consider is ‘what are the questions consumers are wanting answers to around our product/service?’ and how can we facilitate this by providing the best answers available to get at the forefront of their minds? Google naturally want to rank the best content available on a topic and their core algorithm in a nutshell is largely focussed on this.

Keywords in content

It might sound rather simple, but do your product or service pages include all the relevant keywords that the page deserves to rank for? Are they optimised for search engines, can search engines easily crawl and index this information? If the answer is no, focus on your heading tags. Your H1 tag (often the title of the page) should give search engines an idea of what content it is expecting to crawl and structure your subheadings with relevant h2s, h3s, h4s etc…

Google are a lot better at understanding search intent and semantically relevant keywords, so consider optimising for these types of search query. For example, don’t just focus on the word ‘cheap’ if that’s relevant to your product or service, consider using keywords such as ‘budget’, ‘bargain’, ‘sale’ or ‘low-cost’ in the headings on the page.

On top of your keyword research, look at what keywords your competitors are choosing to target to spot further opportunities you may not have considered.

What information should you include in your content?

If you are struggling to find inspiration on what information to include in your guides there are some great free tools which can provide you with exactly that. Here are some ideas that can point you in the right direction.

This is a great keyword and search query research tool to find all the questions users are searching for around a product/service. Simply enter the topic you want to find questions for and write content which answers that query in your product/service guides.

  • People Also Ask

The PAA SERP feature is essentially gives you topics you may want to include in your product/service guides. Just conduct a Google search of your product/service and you’ll see a list of queries related to that topic which users are searching for. Take this further and click the question which will drop down an answer to the query. That answer should be the benchmark of the quality of the content you produce to better the answer for an opportunity to gain the answer box for the given search query.

This example is for the search query ‘mortgages for first time buyers’ as you can see, there are some examples of the type of things to include in your guide below:

  • Google Keyword Tool

Google’s keyword planner is a great way of discovering keywords related to your product/service which you may want to optimise your content for (along with search volumes). Simply add the keyword (s) your content is focused on and click the ‘keyword ideas’ button.

Internal Linking

A common mistake some clients make is they have great content on the website, but it’s buried deep within the website and search engine bot’s find it hard to crawl and/or index it.

Consider the internal links going to the content you’ve produced and ask yourself the following questions;=-= Are there any? How easily accessible is the content to users first and then to search engines?

There’s no point producing great content if users and search engines can’t find it.

Internal links are the only links a webmaster can manually control so you can be quite strategic in the anchor text you use for internal links pointing your content. Use the keyword research you have conducted and include your most important keywords in the anchor text linking to the page.

As an additional tip, a good and seamless way of internally linking through to content is to add a related articles shelf to the page at the end of your content to keep users on your site and the provide a good user experience to those wishing to read further information. Keeping with the topic of mortgages, this is an example of how moneysupermarket.com do it:

It’s also worth bearing in mind that as this content is likely to bring new users though to your site, you should include product/service page links to more commercial pages where natural, to drive traffic through to product pages and to help convert new users visiting the site.