Once you start optimizing your existing ecommerce pages for SEO you realize how important it is to create more content. Considering you should only be focusing on a handful of keywords per page, you quickly run out of pages when looking at the thousands of keywords available that you could rank for – so you settle for head terms with the most volume of searches.
The challenge is that there are just so many queries to rank for – 25% of queries every day have never been seen before and over 50% of queries have more than 3 words.
Blogging is usually the first thing that comes to mind to create more content that can drive more traffic from long tail keywords that you aren’t covering with the existing pages of your site.
My point with all of this is that by focusing on optimizing only your existing pages (or in many cases only your most popular keywords) and creating more content with just your blog, is a micro way of thinking about organic search and how it can grow your revenues.
Creating more pages on your site should be a bigger emphasis. One product or category page can be duplicated several times, with only the important on-page SEO content changed. For example, lets say you have a category page full of winter coats. Currently all it is optimized for is winter coats. Make that same category page multiple times and with each version focus on a different important keyword – water proof winter coats, winter skiing coats, fur-lined winter coats, etc and for each version include those keywords in the URL, metadata, page title, alt tags and copy. All of these pages can be linked to from copy on other pages in the site but they don’t need to be included in the site navigation, their sole purpose is to be navigated to from a search engine. From the user experience perspective, it’s seamless – they search for water proof winter coats, click to your site and according to all the copy on that page, they see what looks like a buch of product that is specific to what they are looking for. They don’t know or see that that same page exists in multiple iterations.
Considering the biggest challenge to blogging is thinking up what to write about, simply making more product pages on your site is a simple way to create more content and drive more organic traffic.