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Content marketing

Content marketing is publishing useful articles, guides and reviews that help people choose, so that shoppers still deciding find the store and buy from it.

How it works

The Content Marketing Institute defines it as creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and keep a clearly defined audience, and in the end to drive profitable customer action. For a store, that means pages beyond products and categories: guides, comparisons, care and how-to articles. They catch searches made before the choice, such as “how to choose wine glasses”, and link on to the categories and products that answer them.

One source of topics is what shoppers already ask. The search terms report in Google Ads lists the real searches your ads appeared for. Questions among them that led to orders are ready-made topics. A plan built this way: content marketing for online stores.

Google’s guidance on people-first content asks whether a page gives original information or analysis. It warns against producing lots of content on many topics in the hope that some of it performs. For reviews and comparisons, Google sets a separate bar: evidence of real use, measurements, benefits and drawbacks.

Example

Example store, not client data.

In the tableware shop’s search terms, “red vs white wine glasses” brought 60 clicks and 4 orders, and “how to clean crystal glasses” 35 clicks and 1 order. The shop writes a comparison guide for the first, linked to both glass categories, and a care article for the second, linked to its crystal range.

Not to be confused with

  • Ecommerce SEO — all the work on organic search, from crawling to category pages. Content marketing is one part of it, and its pages also feed emails and social posts.
  • Buying guide — one format of content marketing: an article that helps a shopper choose within a category.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Two hundred AI-written posts a month bring traffic faster than twenty.” Right: many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings, without helping users, count as scaled content abuse under Google’s spam policies, whatever tool wrote them.
  • Wrong: “A post needs 2,000 words to rank.” Right: Google says it has no preferred word count.

Sources