Harness informational content on your e-commerce site

Jack says: “We should be harnessing more informational content for our e-commerce sites.

When we're working in e-commerce, a lot of us focus on product pages, category pages, and lovely transactional search intent pages. However, there's so much value in offering content for people in the research stages, both pre-purchase and post-purchase. There's so much value in offering informational content for people looking to buy and people who have already bought something and are looking to make comparisons to other products. There is a lot of opportunity there.

With the ways Google has been shifting, with things like EEAT and talking more about building trust, experience, expertise, and authoritativeness, we need to rethink our overall content strategy. Don't just chuck blog posts onto your e-commerce site and hope for the best. You need a longer-term, more thought-out strategy.”

Can informational content help at every stage of the customer journey?

“It can help across the journey.

For pre-purchase, pros and cons articles are a good example. Google has been pushing for content that is honest about your products, not just saying, ‘We have the best product in the world. This is why you should buy it.’ Being honest about the pros and cons establishes trust with search engines, but that honesty also builds up trust with your users and customers as well.

If you read an article that is very preachy about a particular product or service compared to an article that is very honest (perhaps explaining what you don't do that competitors do well while highlighting what you are good at), you will gravitate towards the more honest brands.

For post-purchase, how-to guides are great: how to use the service, how to get the most out of it, and how to use the products. I’ve been doing a lot of DIY since I bought my house earlier this year, and so many e-commerce sites have content explaining how to use their products in specific situations. That has been really useful for me. It makes me think that, if they've got really good guides, they know what they're talking about – so maybe I should buy from them in the future.

The really big value of this is the lifetime value of that customer. Returning customers is a nice thing to have, and it can be pretty competitive and challenging in a lot of different niches. Then, they might become brand evangelists who say, ‘I read this fantastic article on this website about how to use this product, you should buy it from them as well.’ Getting that word-of-mouth and having people talk about your brand because you're offering informational, unbiased content is a really powerful tool.”

How does informational content fit into how-to articles?

“How-to is an important part of the post-purchase journey. You may have bought the product, but you need to learn how to use it. Things like FAQs are a huge part of that. There are so many easy ways to find these kinds of questions, like People Also Ask (PAA) data on Google search. That is a rich well of content. You know people are asking these kinds of questions so you should be answering them.

At any given stage of the potential purchase journey for a user, you should be there to answer their question. If you're not, somebody else will be.

Something I've been really pushing for recently is having your content across multiple formats. If you have a text article, you should have a video version or an embedded video within that article. People are going to be looking for video. I talked about DIY earlier; people are going to search for DIY content on YouTube.

You need to be available on other platforms, like podcasts. We're creating content through audio, video, and text right now. It’s especially important from an accessibility standpoint. Audio and video versions of your articles will allow more people to access, understand, and process your content.”

Is there an ideal length for how-to articles?

“I'm not going to give a specific word count. It should be as long as it needs to be to cover all of the questions you can find. This is an important part of the research stage. Have a conversation with your sales team or your client’s sales team and understand what kind of questions customers are asking from that point of view. Combine that with PAA data, feedback forms, Google reviews, Trustpilot comments, and any other sources of information. Answer as much as you can and cover as much as you can.

There's always an opportunity to update it later on. A lot of people post and forget, but PAA data changes so swiftly, and sales change a lot too. Sales teams receive new complaints and questions every day. It's worth going back and updating those articles as you go. Don't just answer five questions and leave it for another year.”

How do you determine which are the most ideal articles to start writing first?

“From an SEO perspective, the PAA data is important. Then, it’s about understanding what the most common questions are. If you have a few dozen salespeople, ask them, ‘What are the top three things customers are asking for?’ If you can narrow it down to a handful, that's always useful.

You've got to prioritise using the data you've got, and PAA is a great place to start. Over the last few years, we've been learning how powerful PAA data can be.”

How do you incorporate EEAT into informational content for e-commerce sites?

“You've got to assign an author. Make sure you have about pages for any writers and list their expertise, their qualifications, why they're relevant to this business, and why they're relevant to the product and the service.

I worked with a client who deals with medical supplies, and you need to know that they are quality products. It’s on the YMYL side of things. You need to clearly demonstrate that you know what you're talking about. You can show your expertise with things like pros and cons articles, explaining your first-hand experiences with the products. Real-life expertise and experience go a long way. Google have added that extra E to EEAT for a reason.”

How do you deal with seasonal landing pages where the search volume fluctuates over time?

“Keeping a year-neutral URL is key, so you can maintain that single URL when the season comes back around again. If you're building up to Black Friday, you can have a page like ‘yourdomain/BlackFriday’ as a single neutral landing page that doesn't include ‘2024’ or ‘2025’. As soon as you change that, you lose some of the power of that page. Essentially, if you can avoid changing that URL, you should. You want to have neutral, evergreen pages that will work year after year, that you can keep coming back to.

Keep them up to date as well because people start searching for things way earlier than you think. People are searching for Christmas stuff as we’re speaking, in September. My mother-in-law brought a Christmas present through the door the other day, and I was horrified, but people are already searching for this kind of stuff.

I was talking to a client the other day about getting ready for Christmas and they were already on it. They’re ready to go 3/4 months in advance; they’re planning stocks and buying all of the necessary things. There's a lot of lead-up to it. You could just work on seasonal pages all year long and keep yourself busy with the amount that goes into big sales days and big holidays.”

What do you do with a seasonal page after the event?

“Keep it linked but don’t highlight it. When the season is coming up, you really want to highlight it and link to it on the home page. If there's an option to link to it in the main menu or highlight it in the central nav, do that.

However, once the season is over, don't noindex it or orphan it. You will lose traction over the long term, and there is a reason to keep those links healthy. Just don't shout about it as much. If there are already internal links from product pages or articles, and people can still purchase through that page, there's no harm done.

A lot of people would completely remove that page and 404 it, or even 410 it. Then you lose a lot of traction. You don't build up that consistent evergreen content you want. There's a lot of value in keeping that URL going, even if it is just bubbling away in the background while it's not the primary focus of the business.

I was working on this for a client earlier this year. We created a little sales section which included everything that was currently on sale, but it also included links to seasonal deals that come up each year. We had wedding season deals, Easter deals, Valentine's Day deals, etc. You can still buy those products year-round, so the links are still valid, but you're not necessarily shouting about it.

That central landing page is a hub page for all the different promotional and seasonal things, which works well for people if they do end up there. It also lets people leave if they land there by accident somehow, and want to access other products and find the rest of your range.”

How do you optimally structure FAQ pages?

“FAQ page schema is hugely important. Google have shifted their focus on a lot of what is going on with FAQ schema, but it's still incredibly relevant. You are still marking up that data and information to make it easier to find. You're giving Google a little waypoint.

Even if they’re not going to be part of featured snippets as much, and they're reducing their overall visibility, there is still a lot of value in FAQs. There are quite a few different places you can go with FAQs, particularly in regard to search intent. There’s value to having FAQs on your product pages and there's value to having standalone FAQs.

If they're for the overall business, having an FAQ page covering a bit of everything is a valuable approach. You can also have categories and include them in your blog posts, and then link to those product pages where they answer product-specific questions. If you think there is transactional intent behind a query, and they’re probably wanting to buy this product, then it’s reasonable to include those FAQs on the product pages themselves. You're targeting that transactional intent with that page already.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop disavowing links. Chances are Google already knows about them and has already discredited those bad links. A lot of sites will get false positives from third-party tools, so don't worry about disavowing links.

Unless you know you've been hacked and you have some serious problems, like a security flag on Search Console, don't worry about disavowing links in 2024.”

Jack Chambers-Ward is Marketing & Partnership Manager at Candour, and you can find him at WithCandour.co.uk.