SEO agencies often have struggles with certain niches. While major niches are easy to work on, there are niches that can be quite difficult to create an ecommerce content strategy with.
Why Invest in Ecommerce Content?
There are difficult niches that can be quite a struggle to rank in. Link building is tough, even for easier niches. While easier niches can be paired horizontally or vertically, other niches are difficult to squeeze into.
Fashion and entertainment niches may be the easiest, while these niches are the difficult ones to rank for:
- Affiliate E-commerce for Utilitarian Products
- Banking and Finance
- Debt
- Gambling
- Insurance
- Lawyers
- Pharmaceuticals & Medical Technology
- SEO
- White Label Products
You might think; aren’t these easy to rank for? These niches are hard to rank for because of the saturation of the marketplace.
There are too many competitors in the arena already, and the stigma from a niche’s past mistake has been haunting these niches.
Bad practices in SEO has marred the reputation of these websites — even webmasters cringe at the sight of “payday loans” or “best poker room in California”.
Even if you link for the best intentions, all of your efforts for link building will be futile.
How can we break the stigma? Content is indeed king, and that’s how you can pull in those links that can help you automate your link building strategy.
Building solid, valuable content can help reel in those evasive linking opportunities.
However, it’s easy to create compelling content — but building the right type of ecommerce content will help reel in those natural links that you want to build.
The biggest struggles in creating content that works are how marketers often miss the mark:
- They focus on content laden with keywords, disregarding the competitiveness of the keywords they’re trying to rank for.
- They do not have any specific goals in building the content. Since they haven’t decided what they want to do with the content, it may not be effective in some campaigns.
- They are stuck with thinking that viral content is the key. However, viral content is just a short-term boost in traffic, without real, lasting effects.
Why Your Content Doesn’t Work: Targeting Blindly
E-commerce websites are primarily affected by this out-of-place content marketing strategy. Without a definite persona in mind to serve this content, you’ll oftentimes find yourself lost in translation.
You will find yourself needing to create one piece of content after another, wasting more resources and time to create ecommerce content without anything in mind.
You might think that you’ve been reeling in traffic, but what are you exactly targeting with your ecommerce content?
Are you targeting the right market? Are you targeting the right people looking forward to buying what you can offer?
If you’re targeting your market blindly, then it’s time to step back and figure out your buyer persona.
Why Your Content Doesn’t Work: Creating Aimless Content
If you’re creating content for the sake of having things posted on your blog, then you’re in big trouble. Content should be thoroughly planned. There’s no boring, difficult industry, only boring content.
You shouldn’t be hoping that you’ll eventually get some followers without proper content targeting.
If you want to be able to bring in a steady flow of traffic, you should create content that matters for your target audience. Research on what your target market needs, create an outline, and build that content.
Your content should be properly segmented with each subtopic addressing each part of the consumer’s problem, and provide a solution to their inquiry.
At this point, an ecommerce content calendar can help you work through this. A content calendar can help you set themes or create a direction for your content strategy.
Why Your Content Doesn’t Work: Relying on Viral Content
Without a doubt, viral content has its own perks, but the main problem with viral content is its short-term effects.
Most of the bloggers online rely heavily on viral content to get a boost in traffic. But the sad thing is, the effects aren’t long term. Still, the best form of content is evergreen content.
To define it succinctly, evergreen content is, as defined by WordStream:
“Evergreen content is SEO content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers.”
Evergreen content is the key to balance the short-term effects of viral content. We encourage you to create viral content, hand in hand with evergreen content.
Evergreen content is not time-restrained. Evergreen content does not expire even after six months, or a year, or fourth. Evergreen content is continuously relevant to readers from 2013 to 2017 and beyond.
If you want to start churning your evergreen ecommerce content strategy, we recommend starting out with the following types of evergreen content:
- Top Tips
- How-to Guides
- Lists
- Product Reviews
- Videos
How to Combine Content and Ecommerce
The best way to start churning content that can help with your ecommerce site for difficult niches is through thorough content planning.
Here’s a step-by-step list on how to create compelling ecommerce content that converts, even for the most difficult of niches:
1. Determine your goal for your ecommerce content
- Are you looking to get links from your content?
- Do you want to boost traffic to your content?
- Are you looking to generate leads for your website?
These are the following questions you might want to ask to determine your content goal.
2. Determine your buyer persona
Who is your target market? According to Buyer Persona Institute,
“a buyer persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves.”
3. Brainstorm ideas for your content depending on your persona
Come up with ideas depending on your buyer persona.
Consider looking for topics that can be turned into evergreen content.
4. Create an outline for your content
Creating an outline helps in setting the direction for the content. It helps in tweaking the flow of the content without wasting time in writing it.
That way, editing the content will be easier.
5. Write the content
If you’re building pillar content for your website, it should be around 3000-4000 words.
Follow the content outline, indicate parts of your content which needs images or charts and other data.
6. Have it submitted to your editor for editing
Editing the content should be a breeze — no need to overhaul the content.
On this part, you should incorporate the keywords for SEO purposes, but don’t overdo it!
7. Create additional images and charts, if necessary
Your content shouldn’t be a wall of text.
As much as possible, incorporate images and statistical charts to represent the data.
8. Create a wireframe for the content
Extensive content should have its own page template.
The content should be formatted in a way that it isn’t purely blocks of text, nor should it be dull and boring to read like a textbook.
9. Publish, share, promote!
And you’re done!
Conclusion
It’s possible to create content for any kind of niche. But without the proper strategy or implementation, all your efforts in putting up great content will be useless.
Creating ecommerce content should have a certain goal in mind. You can always derive inspiration from your competitors, but remember not to plagiarize their content!
If your newly created post has garnered numerous links, created a steady number of clicks and traffic, and has been engaging people in social media, then you have truly created a solid piece of content that can withstand even the most difficult niches.
Author Bio:
Kenneth Sytian is the head honcho of Sytian Productions Web Design Philippines. His no-nonsense approach to design coupled with his vast creativity is a winning combination for his clients.
Featured image:
Image source: Author-owned
