Creating a Revenue-Generating Blog on BigCommerce

Is your blog a major revenue driver for your brand on BigCommerce?

If not, you’re missing a big opportunity.

The key is to create the right type of content that will bring in shoppers with a high buying intent–paired with the right design and calls-to-action that will convert that traffic into sales.

You need both to be successful.

In this guide, we’ll go over absolutely everything you must know to create a blog on BigCommerce that will bring in high intent traffic and help you convert that traffic into product purchases. 

Keyword Research and Topic Planning

Every SEO project starts with the same question — which keywords should you be targeting in the first place?

“Keywords” refers to the phrases that people plug into search engines to find content. To determine how search results are ranked for any given keyword, services like Google and Bing use complicated algorithms to evaluate how relevant each site is to what the user is looking for. 

At the very least, your blog post URL and heading will need to include the keyword you’re targeting. Otherwise, the algorithms won’t think it’s relevant and you won’t get a high ranking (on average, 76.1% of traffic generated by search engine results pages goes to the top four results). 

There are a few different ways to uncover golden keyword opportunities for you brand. The best place to start is typically with your sales data.

Using BigCommerce Sales Data for Keyword Ideas

BigCommerce itself can be used to help generate keyword ideas for your BigCommerce blog, as your sales data will show you which items in your catalog are performing the best.

It only makes sense to target keywords related to these high-performing products — after all, these products have proven that people often want to buy them, which improves the odds that your SEO efforts will actually lead to sales. The more traffic you can bring to your site that is related to your top selling products–the more you will sell of that product.

To determine which products in your catalog are top sellers:

• Log into your BigCommerce account and select the “Analytics” option in the left sidebar of the main control panel.
• Select “Overview”. 
• Scroll down to “Top products”.

Once you’ve identified your most popular items, you can look to find similar keywords that are related to that product.

Actionable Example

Let’s say that you’ve identified that one of your top selling products is a keyword and mouse combination that is used by gamers on the computer. From there, we can perform a quick Google search to discover what other keywords searchers are looking for related to “gaming keyboards”. A quick search reveals other related topics that would be great for blog posts, including:

• What keyboard do pro gamers use?
• What is the most clicky gaming keyboard?
• What to look for in a gaming keyboard?

In this example, all of these keyword topics would fit in naturally with the best selling product–so promoting that product within the content would help to bring more interested shoppers and lead to more sales.

Using Shogun to Find Keyword Opportunities

Shogun makes it easy to find the best keywords to target. 

Once you activate Shogun’s SEO Keywords Analyzer feature, a comprehensive report on the keywords you currently rank for will be produced in just about five minutes. 

The following details are provided for each keyword:

• Ranking: Where you currently rank on search engine results pages.
• CPC: The cost per click (CPC) rate for paid search ads targeting the keyword.
• Difficulty: How hard it would be to achieve a high ranking for the keyword. 
• Volume: How often people search for the keyword each month. 
• Intent: Whether the keyword indicates commercial or informational intent (or both).

This information will allow you to develop a more sophisticated SEO strategy. Your brand has a limited amount of bandwidth to spend on blogging, so it’s important to choose wisely when creating new content. The sweet spot should be:

• Relatively low ranking: This is where you can make the most improvement.
• Low difficulty score: Only particularly well-established sites will be able to rank for a broad keyword like “shoes” — you’ll have a better chance with more niche, less difficult keywords like “Special Edition Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Crocs Sandals”.
• Meaningful amount of traffic: Don’t waste your time targeting a keyword that barely anyone is searching for–but don’t disregard lower volume terms if you find a good opportunity.
• Commercial intent: This shows that the visitor is close to making a purchase, while those still in the informational stage likely won’t generate any revenue for you.

Google Analytics and Search Console

When it comes to help with SEO, who better to trust than the search engines themselves? Google offers several different resources for keyword research, including:

• Google Search Console: This tool shows you how Google sees your site. You can use it to discover more details about your rankings, including the total number of clicks and impressions for your top keywords. 
• Google Analytics: With this tool, you can see how visitors behave on your site — this will reveal where users tend to gravitate to on their own. You can then use SEO to amplify your most popular pages or direct some fresh traffic to pages that aren’t getting as much attention. 

Content Creation

After you set up your keyword strategy, the next step is to write content for your blog based on these keywords. 

When writing your blog content, keep these SEO best practices in mind:

• Include keywords in the most important parts of the page: Search engine algorithms pay especially close attention to the URL, title, headings, first paragraph, last paragraph, and meta description to determine what a page is about. Be sure to include your targeted keyword in these areas.
• Don’t go overboard with keywords: Again, keyword stuffing can get you penalized by search engines, so you must be careful not to get carried away. Of all the words on the page, the usage of your keyword shouldn’t make up more than 2% (this metric is known as keyword density). 
• Add external links: Search engine algorithms also look at which sites you link to in order to determine what the page is about. So, you should add links that are relevant to the keywords you’re targeting — for example, you can add stats to back up any points you’ve made in your blog post, then link to the sources of these stats. For best results, link to sources that are particularly well-respected and popular. 
• Add internal links: Backlinks, which are links from another page to yours, are known to be one of the most important ranking factors — search engines take this as a sign that your page is a trustworthy source of information. While backlinks from high-authority external sites are the most valuable, even backlinks from your own site (also known as internal links) will help. 

To start posting on your BigCommerce blog, simply follow these steps:

• Select the “Storefront” option in the left sidebar of the main BigCommerce control panel. 
• Select “Blog”. 
• Click on the “+” button to add a new post. From this dashboard, you can also edit previous posts, publish drafts, and revert published posts back into drafts. 

When adding a new post, you’ll see that there’s an optional “SEO” section — this is where you can customize the URL and meta description.

You can also use Shogun to set up and write for your BigCommerce blog:

• Once you’ve downloaded and installed Shogun, select the “Apps” option in the left sidebar of the main BigCommerce dashboard.
• Open Shogun. 
• Go to the “Pages” section of Shogun and hover your cursor over “Build or edit a new page”.
• Select “Create a blog post”.

There are a wide variety of pre-made templates to choose from for your blog post. 

If you’d prefer, you can use Shogun’s visual editor to create your blog post from scratch instead. You can then save any design you create as a reusable template, so either way it’s easy to scale a consistent design and layout for your blogs in Shogun.

And when it comes to the actual writing of your blog posts, you can use Shogun’s artificial intelligence capabilities to speed things up. 

You’ll find a “Generate content” button next to each of the keywords listed in Shogun’s SEO Keywords Analyzer. With this feature, you just need to add a URL, page name, and description of the content you want (e.g., “write a roundup of the latest news in the electric vehicle industry”). Your post will then be automatically created for you, and you’ll be able to go in and make manual edits as needed. 

It’s also worth noting that, with the Text element in the visual editor, you can use the AI writer to whip up content for any part of any page — it’s not just for blog posts. This will allow you to quickly develop your homepage, landing pages, Contact Us page, or anything else you may need for your BigCommerce store.

Promoting Products within Content to Drive Sales

To match up content with the appropriate products to sell, the best approach is to work backward. Which topics can you cover in your blog that would allow you to highlight the benefits of your products? Some of the most effective formats for this type of post include:

• How-to guides: What kinds of problems does your product solve? You can write step-by-step guides showing the reader exactly how to address such issues by using your product. 
• Product comparisons: You can compare multiple items in your catalog against each other to help potential customers make a purchasing decision (this is especially effective if you have a large catalog or many different product options to choose from). You could also compare your products to your top competitors to make a compelling case for why you’re the right choice. 
• Case studies: How have your products helped previous customers? Use case studies to provide exact figures (for example, instead of just saying that your products save time, you can use a case study to show that you saved one of your clients over 750 hours). While this type of content may take more effort to produce, it’s highly persuasive and offers a lot of potential for backlinking.

Whenever you mention a product in the body of your blog content, be sure to add an HTML anchor link to the text that leads back to the product page. This eliminates the extra step of the visitor needing to search for the product page on their own — and the easier it is for the visitor to take all the necessary steps to buy your product, the more likely it is that they will do so. 

Adding Product Boxes into Your Content to Drive Sales

Shogun allows you to get creative with your product mentions, as you can use the Product Box feature of the visual editor to add an especially eye-catching element to the page. 

Once you place a Product Box in your blog post, you can then drop in details such as the title, image, price, and customer reviews. This information will be automatically populated with your BigCommerce store data for the product — there’s no need to input it manually. You can even add a button that allows visitors to add the item to their cart directly from your blog post.

Common BigCommerce Blog Questions

How do you add featured blog posts to the homepage in BigCommerce?

This can be done through BigCommerce’s Home Page Carousel feature, which displays a series of slides on your store’s homepage. You can add up to five slides for your carousel, and each slide can be linked to a different page on your site (product pages, blog pages, Contact Us, etc.)

To customize the slides in your Home Page Carousel, select the “Storefront” option in the left sidebar of the BigCommerce control panel. Then, select “Home Page Carousel”. 

How do you customize how site search handles blog posts in BigCommerce?

Your blog posts will show up in the search results on your storefront by default. To customize how your site search handles blog posts, select the “Settings” option in the left sidebar of the BigCommerce control panel, and then select “Search”. 

In the “Default Content Sort” setting (this includes blog posts), you have three options:

• Relevance
• Alphabetical: A to Z
• Alphabetical: Z to A

You also have the following two “Storefront Search Logic” options to choose from:

• Show results containing one or more words if a search contains multiple words
• Only show results containing all words if a search contains multiple words

How do you use the BigCommerce Content API? 

BigCommerce’s application programming interfaces (APIs) make this platform highly flexible. 

APIs allow you to connect the third-party or in-house systems you’re currently using to your BigCommerce store, and they can also help you develop custom solutions to complex ecommerce problems. 

BigCommerce’s Content API makes many different customizations possible for your blog posts, such as:

• Use widgets to add dynamic content
• Associate custom templates from your BigCommerce theme with your blog pages
• Connect databases to power custom charts and visualizations for your posts 

Before you can use the Content API, you’ll first need to create an API account — this is how BigCommerce authenticates requests to their APIs. 

Select the “Settings” option in the left sidebar of the BigCommerce control panel. This is where you’ll find options for “store-level API accounts” (these correspond to a single store) and “account-level API accounts” (these correspond to all the stores within a BigCommerce account and can only be created by the store owner).

Once you’ve created your API credentials through these settings, you’ll then be able to read and change your store data with BigCommerce’s APIs.