Why E-Commerce Brands Should be Blogging on Shopify
To create a beautiful shoppable blog posts, we recommend our Shoppable blog mini-course. Insert products, collections and newsletter sign ups right into your blog post content with ease!
Why are blogs important for e-commerce?
Blogs have changed a lot in the last 10 years, they’ve gone from being simple online journals to a really powerful tool for brands. As e-commerce brands, why are blogs important?
1. Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The first and main reason that many brands have a blog is usually that a blog can greatly improve SEO and domain authority. This impacts how well your site ranks on search engine result pages (SERPs). This is thanks to keyword optimization, increased time spent on the website and enhanced domain authority. Let’s take a look into each what each of these means:
Keyword Optimization:
Blogs can be packed with keywords, increasing the chances that they’ll appear in search results when someone uses that word. They can also include questions and answers to for common queries, positioning the brand as the go-to solution, and another chance to sell products. If customers are searching for products that provide a solution, then blog posts can create a path from content to purchase.
Increased Time spent on Site:
Good blog content keeps visitors on your website longer, reduces bounce rates and improves engagement rates, all which give a positive signal to search engines that your website content is good, therefore boosting SEO rankings.
Enhanced Domain Authority:
High-quality blog content and backlinks from reputable sites sends a signal to search engines that your website is an expert in a certain subject matter and is trusted and recommended. This can improve your domain authority, further boosting your site’s visibility on search engines.
2. Build Consumer Trust & retention
We can use a blog to talk about the topics that are relevant to their industry, which helps to build trust and a sense of community. It’s also a great way to inject their brand's voice and personality into their content, which helps to differentiate them in a crowded market.
This kind of content should keep visitors coming back, which creates regular touchpoints with their audience. So the brand is at the top of their mind, which of course leads to repeat orders and a good sense of brand loyalty.
3. Educational Content leading to increased sales
Blogs can be used to educate customers about products, industry trends, and how-tos, becoming a trusted resource. In addition to building trust through this educational material, this content can also lead to sales.
Imagine that a stranger uses Google to search for a tutorial or remedy. A blog post with detailed answers to the questions people are looking for opens an opportunity for the brand to insert their products as a recommendation into the post. This provides an easy solution for the customer as they’re actively looking for a solution. Rather than brands seeking the customers, the customers have sought the brand out to solve their problem. Brilliant!
Brands should feature their products directly inside the blog posts to make it super easy for readers to make their purchase directly from the post. This is exactly what motivated us to create our Shoppable Blog Posts training and template.
4. Increased Lead Generation
Apart from blog posts increasing sales, brands may have other goals they wish to reach. Blog posts can include calls to action (CTAs) that prompt readers to taking an action like signing up for a webinar, downloading a resource, or viewing a collection. You can also insert newsletter signup forms right into the blog post so that brands can capture new customer emails. This is easy to do with our Shoppable Blog Posts training and template.
Use Cases for Shopify E-Commerce Blogs
On Shopify, you can have more than one blog, which means they can be a really great way to organise content. Blogs don’t have to be literal articles, but they can just be a useful way to organise the content in the backend of Shopify, and pull them into any page you create.
Here are some of our favorite ways we see brands using blogs on Shopify:
- Brand news & updates
- Press features
- Recipes
- Careers / job listings
- Events
- Informative articles
- Tutorials
- Seasonal lookbooks
Since you can create different templates for each of the blogs, using blog posts is more of a way to organize content than anything. In addition to creating blog templates for different uses, adding in the use of metafields to pull in different content is another way to expand the possibilities of blogs.
Check out the video below to see how we at Luna Templates use metafields and metaobjects to create our two blog templates:
The main drawback of using blogs to organize content like events and press releases on Shopify is that there will always be “blog” in the URL. It’s not a big deal, but something to note.
Best Shopify Themes for Blogging
Choosing the right theme to start with is always the most important step of any Shopify project. And choosing a theme with a good blog and article layout is going to really help you build beautiful blogs on Shopify.
Here are some blogging features you’ll want to look at when choosing a theme:
- Blog template: Newest blog post displayed as a hero section at the top
- Blog template: Tags for filtering by subject
- Blog template: Search bar
- Theme section: Shoppable blog posts
- Article template: Nice hero section
- Article template: Sidebar with shoppable products or related articles
We have a detailed list of the Best Themes for Blogging on Shopify here.
Drawbacks to blogging on Shopify
There are some quite serious issues with blogging on Shopify. Which is why we created our Shoppable Blog Posts training and template as an answer to some of those. Here are some of the issues we’ve found:
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Limited design options
You can’t add sections within the blog content or easily make them unique to each blog post. So before our simple shoppable blog method you were pretty stuck if you want to add a newsletter block for example. All the page sections have to come below the content. -
Limited editor
The editor is very limited, especially for long blog posts it’s hard to edit. If you need to add embedded code it often doesn’t show in the editor, which makes it very tricky to see what you’ve just added. -
Limited ecommerce options
Shopify is ALL about e-commerce BUT they don’t offer an easy way to add products within the content. The ways available were either to:- Use a premium theme that had ‘shoppable blog posts’ - The products appear either at the side of the bottom of the post, so it’s a little clunky to view, and the theme might not have other features you want.
- Use a buy button - this is a button that can be embedded actually on any website. But it’s actually not meant to be used on Shopify websites so it has huge downsides which we explain here.
- Add all the elements manually. But obviously this is quite time consuming to add the product title, price, link, image manually - AND none of it will be updated automatically, including if the item is on sale.
Yep, it’s crazy! We really hope that Shopify will improve shoppable blog posts, but for now we’ve created a method that will make it really simple to optimise blog posts to make them super shoppable.
Making shoppable blog posts easy
After struggling with making blog posts shoppable with easily insertable products and collections, we created our own solution. With our method, you can quickly and easily add products or collections right into the blog content. You can style these how you’d like with a little CSS, and it will apply the styling to every instance of the element. You can also insert a newsletter form directly into the blog post. This is all without needing to insert clunky pieces of embed code into the blog posts.
Check out our Shopify blog training and template below:
Chloe Ford
