How to Create an Ecommerce Blog Strategy with Impact

Most ecommerce blogs are a little bit shit.

I said it.

A lot of the time, SEOs, site owners and copywriters fall into the trap of churning out informational content for the sake of it – producing 10 pieces of blog content a month and calling it a strategy (spoiler alert: it’s not). 

Other times, we fall into the trap of creating “ultimate guides” – blog posts thousands of words long that make wild claims about offering users “everything they need to know” about a topic. All while simply regurgitating what already exists online with no further insight. As a former copywriter, I’ve definitely been guilty of it. It might have worked ten years ago, but definitely not now.

But again, that’s not a strategy.

And the less said about a strategy brief I once had to “take what’s ranking in position 1 and add an extra 500 words”, the better.

When crafting an ecommerce blog strategy, there are so many pitfalls and common mistakes that we can fall into – so it’s no surprise that a lot of businesses are left confused about blog strategies for ecommerce sites. Do they even need informational content? Is there any benefit?

Let’s dig a bit deeper. I’m going to convince you that yes, informational content can be incredibly beneficial for ecommerce sites – but only if the right strategy is in place.

I originally spoke about this topic at Digitaloft’s Ecommerce SEO Summit in November 2024. If you want to watch the full recording of this talk, you can find it on Digitaloft’s YouTube channel or via the slides below.

So like I said, most ecommerce blogs are a little bit shit.

And aside from this outdated “ultimate guide” method that plagued my early years as a copywriter, there are plenty more issues that I see time and time again when online stores build out informational content.

• The overall blog only focuses on one stage of the user funnel.
• There’s little thought for how content fits into the wider customer journey.
• Blogs contribute little to overall commercial goals.
• Content is created in a silo, separate from all other marketing channels.
• Content is created to around some vague, misunderstood notion of “creating topical authority”
• Blog posts are repetitions of other content on the internet.
• Content doesn’t provide value to the user.

And time and time again, we see blogs created purely “for SEO”.

Because people feel like they should be creating blog content (without fully understanding why).

I’m not the only one who thinks blog content is a bit shit.

Ahrefs regularly analyse stats from the 14 billion pages within their Content Explorer Index – and one stat that always sticks out to me is that 96.55% of pages get zero traffic from Google. And only 0.07% get more than 1,000 visits.

And what this tells us is that the internet is littered with poor quality content – and to stand out from the other 14 billion pages, you need to be creating content that’s going to add genuine value. 

At Digitaloft, we’ve also been doing our own research. In our 2024 State of Ecommerce SEO Survey so far (at the time of writing, the report is still collecting answers), 84% of SEOs have told us that they are regularly producing blog content as part of their ecommerce SEO strategy. Again, that reinforces the need to set yourself apart from the competition – not just copy what’s already on the internet.

But do consumers actually read the blog content we produce? 

While we’re of course seeing a huge shift towards customers heading to platforms like TikTok and Instagram for product guides and advice, don’t let that lead you into the trap of thinking that blog content is dead.

Digitaloft have also surveyed over 2,000 consumers to find out more about their online shopping habits – and from this, we’ve learned that 64% of respondents had bought a product after reading informational content from a brand.

So what does this tell us?

Blog content is alive and well. And it’s a key way to build that relationship with your customers, position yourself as the experts, and get people spending money.

People often don’t consider that a poor informational content strategy be harmful – it can present a negative image of your company, confuse users, and paint a picture of a poorly-maintained site with out of date information.

But conversely, a great ecommerce blog strategy can serve a multitude of purposes:

• It can build your brand persona, letting your customers get to know you as a company.
• It can answer key customer questions, whatever stage of their buying journey they’re at.
• It can give users a final nudge towards converting.
• It can bring in that all-important organic traffic.
• It can boost rankings for your priority keywords and priority categories.

And it’s this final point – boosting rankings – that is often misunderstood, but also potentially the most important. Particularly for an ecommerce blog, informational content is as much about supporting revenue-driving pages as it is about drawing in traffic of its own. It gives you an opportunity to showcase EEAT, build topical authority and drive authority to your priority collections via a targeted internal linking strategy.  

Making sure you understand every purpose of an ecommerce blog, particularly from an SEO perspective, is key to developing an impactful strategy.

Keyword research alone isn’t enough to guide any SEO strategy – that’s something I’m passionate about.

15% of Google searches each day are completely unique.

(And that’s come from Google themselves.)

So if you’re relying solely on keyword research to curate your blog strategy, you could be missing out on a whole plethora of valuable topics that are going to provide true value to your users.

Like any solid SEO strategy, impactful informational content relies on a rock solid understanding of your audience. That means how they’re searching, what they’re thinking, what they love, what they hate, and more.

Take the time to really consider:

• What features do people rave about in product reviews? What do they not like?
• What questions are they asking customer service teams?
• What are they searching on platforms like Reddit? What are their pain points?
• What are the main reasons they’re reluctant to try your product? What are the sticking points?
• What else is going on in their lives? What are their priorities? How much time do they have?
• What comments and questions are you getting on social media?
• What topics are trending on TikTok and Instagram?

Knowing your customer inside out is how you’re going to find those topics that will add genuine value to their lives.

This is another trap we see all the time – people casting their net out far and wide with endless blog posts, hoping that a small handful will gain traction.

This can cause a multitude of issues for your site. Firstly, it dilutes your topical focus. We learnt in May’s Google Documentation Leak that Google measures a siteFocusScore, which seems to denote the extent to which a site remains focused on one core topic. While this came with little in the way of wider context, we can hazard a guess that this means that for most sites, producing content that is closely aligned with your core product offering will be advantageous.

Producing content with little relevance to your core focus is also likely to confuse both users and search engines. For example, if you’re a car insurance company posting about the latest Formula 1 drivers, you may get traffic – but this traffic is certainly going to be low quality and unlikely to convert. As a result, the engagement signals for such pages are going to be on the floor, and will likely have a negative impact on the site overall.

In a similar vein, we also often see sites producing multiple, similar blogs that should be one piece of content. These posts are likely to be thin, feature duplicate content, and cause cannibalisation issues.

To work out if a question – let’s use “can you drink alcohol on antibiotics” as an example – requires its own blog or inclusion within a wider guide, try Googling it. If blogs are appearing dedicated to this question alone, it might warrant its own blog. However, if the results are showing wider guides – such as generic antibiotics information pages – then you might want to include this question witin a similar piece of content. For larger sets of keywords, you can also use clustering tools such as Keyword Insights.

The bottom line? Your blog’s focus should always, always be on your product. 

Having an impactful blog strategy for your ecommerce site means making any content work harder. For a piece of content to work harder, it can’t be kept in a silo. 

It goes without saying that SEO should be integrated with a wider digital marketing strategy, and the same goes for your blog content.

By aligning with other teams – whether you’re in an agency or in-house – you can understand how your blog content fits into a wider strategy and contributes to overall commercial success.

Content created as part of a blog strategy can often be repurposed for:

• Digital PR – is it relevant enough to be linked to by journalists and other websites, either through manual outreach or naturally? 
• Email marketing – is it providing genuine value to users at all stages of the funnel?
• Social media – is it engaging enough to be shared across Instagram or LinkedIn? 
• Customer service teams – is it helpful enough to answer all key customer questions?

If you work agency-side, this can often be a great benchmark for high-quality content. Ask yourself: would this blog get shared by internal teams via social media or email? If not, ask yourself why. You may have your relevance or brand alignment wrong.

Creating a best-in-class ecommerce blog is an ongoing process. A blog that ranked highly five years ago isn’t necessarily going to draw in the same volumes of traffic and revenue now. Keeping your informational content helpful, relevant and impactful requires regular auditing.

I want to briefly chat through an example of a blog audit project Digitaloft recently completed for an ecommerce company. This site admitted to having never audited blog content, some of which was written over 15 years ago. Unsurprisingly, blogs that summarised industry trends from 2009 were getting zero traffic.

Digitaloft’s main recommendation? Delete over 300 pieces of blog content, and improve the rest. The first phase of recommendations – the deletions – was actioned in September 2024, and has been marked on the below graph with an orange line.

The image speaks for itself – since deleting the low-quality content, the site has gone from strength to strength. But why? If the main change has been purely deleting content?

Another interesting finding from May’s Google Documentation leak was the existence of a QualityBoost signal, which appeared to look at a site’s quality holistically, as well as at a page-by-page level. Again, Google gave us little in the way of a wider explanation, but we can deduce from this that having vast quantities of poor, low-quality content on a site is likely to be negatively impacting Google’s perception of a site as a whole – instead painting a picture of a poorly-maintained site with irrelevant, out of date content. 

There are plenty of benchmarks for what makes content of a poor quality. You might want to consider improving or deleting content if:

• It doesn’t answer the user’s question (or not well enough).
• It offers a poor user experience.
• It copies what’s already on the internet.
• It has poor internal linking (too much, none at all, or poorly thought-through).
• It doesn’t prioritise information gain.

In this article, we’ve discussed just how impactful an ecommerce blog strategy can be – if executed well. Alongside this, we’ve also learned the pitfalls of having poor-quality content on your site, and how this could even be doing more harm than good.

What it boils down to, though, is pretty simple. 

Create genuinely helpful, user-first content that places your product at its core. Consider how relevant your content is and if it’s of a high enough quality to be shared across other marketing channels. And understand the power your informational content has to elevate your revenue-driving pages.

Keep that in mind, and you’re off to a good start.