Give your customers something to read
The days when ecommerce sites just sold products have passed us by. Many ecommerce sites, particularly in the fashion and retail sector, have journalists on their payrolls and see editorial content as a huge part of their offering.
Net-A-Porter announced in December that it will be launching a print magazine this year, a logical decision given that it’s content has become almost as much of an attraction as its products. It has even been suggested that ecommerce sites could save magazines from their slow demise.
But you don’t have to be an online fashion powerhouse to take advantage of editorial content. It is suitable for all manors of ecommerce sites and can be a great way to drive traffic, engage customers and differentiate yourself from other similar sites.
“Retail websites being largely product and category based can become easily homogeneous, which is not great for user interaction, branding or search engine optimisation,” says Teddie Cowell, SEO director for global marketing and technology agency NetBooster.
“Editorial content for retailers is important because it gives a natural context in which to differentiate the brand, place big promotions, discuss new releases & engage with customers.”
If you’re writing online, you need to abide by a few rules to make sure your content is easily digestible and works for your brand.
Don’t forget about SEO
Yes, you are writing to engage and entertain your customers but if your editorial is to act as a driver for traffic, you will need to consider those key words and phrases.
“Whilst SEO shouldn’t be the main driver in content, content is important from an SEO perspective from a number of reasons, as it creates more searchable information that will help increase a pages visibility particularly for long tail searches,” says Cowell.
“It also gives a opportunity to place links between pages outside of the standard navigation and provides weight to these links by creating a customer journey that encourages interaction with the content/brand.”
Keep it snappy
Make every word count and keep sentences and paragraphs short and to the point. It is hard to take in big paragraphs and long sentences on a screen and you have to think about your mobile audience too.
Also using the active tense rather than passive helps to give your copy dynamism. For example, if you are quoting someone, use “says” rather than “said”.
Make it east to skim through
There are plenty of tools our there to break down your copy and make it easy to read at speed. Headlines are the premier way of punctuation a page. It is also good practice to make sure your headlines tell the story so if people want – they can get the gist simply by reading them.
Images are also a good way to ease the eye through a page of text. Pop a few relevant photos in-between paragraphs and ease people eye’s down the page.
Get straight to the point
Long intros are a lovely way to open a newspaper feature but online you will have lost your reader if you don’t get to the point straight away. People don’t have time online to meander through flowery language.
Create an individual tone
Content gives you a chance to give your brand a voice. How do you want to sound? It could suit you to be very formal and authoritative, or to be friendly and witty.
“We worked on content project for Argos and something we focused heavily on was making sure that the text was really unique, and even slightly quirky so that it really grabbed users attention when they entered the page,” says Cowell.
“The idea was to support search and the customer journey, but also get users imagination going with something that really stood out from competing retail websites of this size.”
Give plenty of insight
As a retailer you are privy to industry insights. Make sure you give as much of this unique perspective to your customers who are bound to be interested in sectors in which they invest time and money in.
Give them information or news that they might not find elsewhere, is there a story behind your products or do your suppliers have interesting tales to tell?
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