Why Educational Content is Key for Ecommerce Success
Educational Content Goes Beyond Just Product Descriptions
When you think of educating your e-commerce customers, you might think of ensuring you have well written product descriptions that provide all of the information a customer needs to purchase your product. That’s a great start, but these days if you want to see success in ecommerce, you have to go above and beyond that basic level of customer education and provide tutorials, FAQs, guide and other advice and educational content.
Quality Content Improves SEO and Conversion Rates
Having high quality educational content that your customers find useful not only will improve your conversion rates, it can improve your search engine rankings. Google values and ranks websites that demonstrate E-A-T: expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Google has said that “If the person creating the content has the type and amount of life experience to make them an expert on the topic, we will value this everyday expertise” when considering where to rank a given piece of content in the search results. That life experience is where your employees and especially store associates come into play.
Harnessing the Experience of your Associates
Most ecommerce operations look to their buyers for product expertise and content. However, store associates and even fulfillment team members can often have great amounts of untapped knowledge. One retailer we have worked with created a mobile site that made it easy for store associates to submit product knowledge and guides during their down time, and incentivized them to do so. You may have a store associate in a lower performing, less busy store that can greatly improve your ecommerce sales simply by sharing what they know about your products.
Written Tutorials
The simplest place to start is with written tutorials and guides. If you sell products that require special setup or maintenance processes, make sure you publish tutorials on your website on how to perform those processes. A written guide interspersed with photos of key steps of the process will delight both potential customers and Google’s SEO algorithms.
Video Tutorials
Once you’ve completed written tutorials, video tutorials should be your next step. By displaying these on your website as well as on YouTube, you can capture traffic from the world’s second most popular search engine - YouTube. More and more people are starting their search for answers, including product information, on YouTube, so by uploading your video tutorials there and linking back to your product pages on your ecommerce website you can capture some of this traffic while also highlighting your expertise by embedding these videos on your website.
Streaming Educational Content
The latest development in sharing product knowledge is live streaming. Brands can approach this by establishing their own live streaming efforts or partnering with existing streamers in an affiliate relationship. Live streaming allows viewers to post questions and have a more interactive experience while learning about a product. This is why, for instance, Amazon is highlighting live streams via their new Amazon Live section on their website during the holiday season.
Where to start your educational content efforts?
The answer to that depends on the products you sell and how competitive your market is. A great place to start is by surveying your customers to find out what type of content they find most useful, and what content is lacking in your industry. You also want to survey your employees to find out what type of product knowledge and expertise they can share with customers. Once you have this information, you can start creating an educational content strategy that will engage and educate your customers while also improving your SEO and conversion rates.
