Why is it important to connect your blogging activities to your Salesforce Commerce Cloud ecommerce system? Does it really make a difference? Will it drive additional sales? Is SEO for retail truly a need?
Let's take a step back and point out that SEO is an important factor in digital marketing and online selling for any retail business. Setting an SEO strategy that drives search volume to your product descriptions is important. Ultimately, your product pages are the high-quality information that your customers want to know about. This drives sales for specific products when consumers are searching for them online. This source of content marketing also drives traffic for potential customers to your brand.
Blogging and SEO for Retail
Whether your marketing strategy is to focus on local search, link building, creating assets such as the ultimate guide to Retail Advantages of Integrated Content Management Systems, or using a long-tail keyword blog approach, you are doing so to drive traffic that converts into sales. You want organic search to bring traffic to your online assets. And you do so by targeting keywords that describe your offerings, in assets like blog posts to help increase your search engine rankings, and provide the traffic noted above.
SEO is often thought of as bringing in top-of-the-funnel traffic to the site. While this may be true, when someone goes to Google to search for a particular product, there is a high intent associated with that consumer. In other words, they are searching for your product, because they either need it or have the intention of buying it. As a result, SEO-driven traffic is often the highest converting source of web traffic available.
If you are still not convinced, consider that 93% of all online experiences start with a visit to a search engine (Forbes, 2017). Then consider that 2.2% - 2.4% is the typical range of conversion rates for most websites and businesses. Yet leads from search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are generally quoted as having average conversion rates between 14% - 16%! That's an astounding difference—organically searched traffic is substantially more likely to result in sales conversions for your business. There is definitely a reason that SEO for retail works.
Well-written blogs with solidly formulated SEO help across the entire funnel. For example, SEO increases the:
- Findability of a website (hence traffic)
- Number of visitors coming to your website and online store
- Quality of visitors (as they were specifically searching for your goods)
- Rate at which web visitors convert into buying customers
Bringing SEO to E-commerce
One of the big challenges in the industry is figuring out how to bring an SEO-rich asset like blogging, into the e-commerce world. Specifically, how would you connect your blogs that describe your products in more depth to your e-commerce system built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
A good example of such a tool that bridges the gap of SEO for retail is BlogLINK. BlogLINK is a Salesforce Commerce Cloud-based e-commerce integration tool. It lets you combine your WordPress blog with that of your online store. It lets retailers streamline content management by combining the best of both systems into one platform. It allows your business to write about user experiences, how to best use the products, provide instructive blog tutorials, and much more. In essence, it lets you personalize your message to your consumer base, interwoven through your online site. BlogLINK lets you post blog content to Salesforce Commerce Cloud simply and conveniently.
Your cosmetics or apparel e-commerce stores often have features inspired by consumer requests. Blogging about them, and pointing out how other consumers have used the product to fix a problem or solve a pain point, is a great way to personalize the experience with your brand. It enhances the shopping experience. BlogLINK gives you multi-blog support, multilingual support is a self-contained integration, and lets you and your customers share and ultimately shop their stories.
This cartridge provides a responsive blog design that adapts to any device. Consolidating your content and commerce efforts lets you convert clients, attract new ones, and generally keep them engaged with your website and brand. What's not to love about integrating your blog and online retailing experience?
Best of all, you will also find that BlogLINK complies with the Salesforce Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) and SiteGenesis certifications. So, no technical worries here.
Straight from Clients
From a client perspective, BlogLINK is a popular cartridge. It is easy to use and serves an immediate purpose that helps drive sales.
A client stated the following about the product and their experience:
"We were seeking a way to swiftly migrate content from our Watchbox WordPress blog and active YouTube channels to our new Salesforce Commerce Cloud website. The project deadlines were tight, and OSF provided cartridges that allowed us to transfer this content into Salesforce Commerce Cloud and meet our deadlines." David Kaplan, Chief Marketing Officer.
While another client made the following observations.
"We were looking for a reliable and trusted solution in the LINK marketplace that would allow our content team to work directly in WordPress without needing to hand over the task to technical personnel for manual coding. We were happy to discover that BlogLINK has all the required features we were looking for." Pacsafe's Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and E-commerce, Simon MacGregor
SEO for Retail Made Easy
This cartridge simplifies the integration of WordPress with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It lets you manage your blog right from Business Manager. No need for heavy technical staff involvement to get posts up and tie them to your online retailing.
The cartridge is compatible with SiteGenesis and SFRAs customization paradigm and blueprint for site design, as well as with other third-party customization tools.
All articles should have a product carousel enabled so that your blog visitors can easily access the items referenced in the article. This applies to your products connected to the article's topic also. There is no need to leave the content. There is no better way to bring together content and commerce than through an easy-to-use tool like BlogLINK.
Spread the Story
A great way to spread your news and augment your SEO impact is through social sharing. So, encourage your blog visitors to share your posts on social media. The tool includes social media share buttons directly in your articles. It helps promote the impact of organic SEO findability and expands the reach of your material.
Multi-Lingual
Merchants selling to several countries or managing many blogs benefit from the integration of multiple blogs and multiple languages within Business Manager. This alone can make your enterprise-wide content management a breeze.
Placement of Articles
Organize article placement based on your company's objectives. This increases website traffic, average time spent on site, conversions, and improves your position with Google, based on improved backlinking to your site. Feature the articles and posts that are most important to you. Use the tool to pick the posts that need to be seen by more people. Give more punch to your articles that truly count.
Responsive Design
Integrating your WordPress blog with your e-commerce business with BlogLINK ensures that your blog is responsive across all devices. That includes laptops, mobile devices, tablets, or other electronic devices. Remember that in this day and age, if it isn't responsive, then you are losing at least half of your audience.
Self-Contained
The cartridge is self-contained and does not interfere with the operation of any other components on the site. It has been fully field-tested by many clients already using it today. To top that, it is a straightforward integration, tying your WordPress blog directly with your Salesforce-based e-commerce system.
Next Steps
When integrating a blog post with your e-commerce site is difficult, it raises the question of whether SEO for retail truly is a business driver. Based on web-based conversion statistics, it clearly is an important way to drive greater sales with your consumers. When you are using a robust e-commerce solution like Salesforce, you need an easy integration solution that connects your blog site with the rest of your e-commerce store. BlogLINK is that easy answer.
Read more about BlogLINK, and connect with us for any questions. We would be pleased to provide a live demo. Just fill out the form, and let's get started.
