Since the advent of the internet, many website owners have been concentrating on delivering content or Blogging in order to offer value to their visitors. Blogging still continues to be a marketing platform for telling stories to the audience. Although blogging as a marketing tool is an age-old concept, it is surprising that many eCommerce platforms still don’t have a business blog or not utilizing one they have to its complete potential. In this piece of write up, you will read about how to create a blog in Shopify.
Importance of Blogs on your Shopify Store!
You might find a ton of resources that talk about the importance of blogs for corporate and business websites, but hardly any on eCommerce sites. It is a well-known secret that blogging for businesses does a lot for enhancing organic online traffic to standard websites, but blogging also has a variety of other advantages that particularly benefit e-commerce sites too. The best part of the whole scheme of things that we are talking about is that not many e-Commerce websites are seriously putting their minds into business blogging. This should give you an opportunity to take advantage of the situation to pull in all benefits to your side.
If you are still skeptical about the importance of blogging for your online store, I am listing down some of the key benefits that any eCommerce website can have on its side –
- With content, you can add value to your readers by providing them information that otherwise they wouldn’t have found elsewhere. This makes them follow you where ever you go and eventually you have all the opportunities to convert them into leads and then sales.
- The more value-added content you have on your eCommerce website, higher the no of times search engines will crawl through it. This gives you every chance to impress Google by portraying what your website is all about and how it can add value to its visitors. Ranking higher on search engines against vital keywords will be just a matter of time.
- You get an opportunity to address problems faced by your readers by answering questions they ask. This greatly helps build a following to your blogs and then to your website.
- In order to attract higher no of organic traffic, you can start a discussion on a popular query by blogging. Furthermore, blogs are a great platform to share an experience or a relatable story with your audience.
Now that we have discussed the importance of blogging for eCommerce stores in general, let us delve into how to set up a blog for your Shopify eCommerce store in specific. Read on!
How to activate a blog for your Shopify eCommerce Store?
Blogs are nothing but pieces of content that add value to its readers and in turn to the store itself. Content placement within a Shopify eCommerce store can happen in different ways as long as your visitors are able to access them whenever required. In order to place content on a Shopify store that is structured and categorized for easy access to content can be set up in two ways. One way is to create content on pages and the other one as posts (also commonly known as blogs).
Setting Content Pages on a Shopify Store
In order to deliver content to your audience or visitors effectively, you can make use of pages, which offer a unique proposition to website owners. Pages are easy to design and plethora of features can be embedded in it without much hassle. In simple terms, a page can be made exactly the way you want it to look like, which is very difficult in case of blogs/posts.
Pages can be created to deliver different types of content such as – Generic content, FAQs, Glossary, Services, Features, Forums, Terms, and Conditions etc. In this section, you will read in detail, step by step process on how to add, delete and edit pages on Shopify.
Adding a Page to your Shopify Store
- Navigate to Shopify Admin panel, Click on Online Page > Pages
- Click on Add page button to navigate to a Page editor
- In the Page editor, add Title to the page along with the content. Edit the content as per your requirement. Add Images or videos to complement the content.
- Click Save to publish the page. In order to keep your page hidden from public and Search engines, Click on Visibility field either check on ‘Hidden’ or select a future publication date to keep the page from being visible for the moment.
Note: Published content cannot be navigated to unless a link is provided for the page.
Adding Content to a Page
When a page is created by clicking Add Pages button, a user is navigated to a rich text editor. Here in the editor, you can place different types of content in the Content field that and make it visible to your audience. You can format your text, change fonts and their sizes and colors per your need. You can also insert elements such as images, links, videos, tables etc
Editing a Page
- In order to edit an already published page navigate to Online Store > Pages.
- From the list of pages, find the one that you want to edit by clicking on its title
- You are navigated to the rich text editor where you edit your content or settings and click Save to publish the edited content.
- Navigate to the edited page to make sure all changes appear on the newly published page.
Making page/s visible or invisible to search engines
Search Engines display many entities of a web page when it is ranked on the results page. These entities include Title, Meta Description and Links/URLs of the page. These 3 entities convey a great deal of information to search engines about your website.
Shopify makes provision for these 3 fields to its users in order to achieve optimization of stores to search engines. Here is how you make changes to these 3 fields available for all pages of a Shopify store –
- Navigate to your Shopify Store Admin panel and go to Online Store > Pages
- From the list of pages, click on the one that you want to edit
- In the page, click on Edit Website SEO link under Search Engine Listings Preview section
- In the Page Title field enter search engine optimized Title – You can provide a title of up to 55 characters in size
- In the Description field, enter search engine optimized Description – You can provide a Description of up to 320 characters in size
- Make changes to the link under URL and Handle section
- Click on Save
Deleting a Page
- In order to delete a page on your Shopify store, Click on Delete page button on the page that you want to delete.
- A confirmation box will appear. Click Delete.
Setting a Blog on a Shopify Store
With every Shopify Store, you also get access to a built-in blogging search engine. As discussed earlier, blogging offers a variety of benefits to your audience which in turn helps you enhance your ROI. Let’s discuss in detail about how to manage a blog for your Shopify Store.
Adding a New Blog
Adding a new blog to your Shopify is more or less similar to how a page is added. A Shopify blog is built in and by default is labeled as News. You can keep or change this label to whatever you want. Here is how we go about adding a New Blog post.
- Navigate to Shopify Admin panel and click on Online Store > Blog Posts
- Click on Create Blog Post button
- You are navigated to a rich text editor, one similar to what we saw in case of adding pages. Add Title and Content to the newly created Blog page.
- Click on Save
Editing Blog Name or Content
- Navigate to Shopify Admin panel and Click on Online Store > Blog Posts
- Click on Manage Blogs link and then Click on blog title that you want to edit
- You are now on the blog post page. Click on Edit Blog button and make necessary changes to either the Title or Content of the blog.
- Click on Save
Making blogs visible/invisible to search engines
- Navigate to your Shopify Store Admin panel and go to Online Store > Blog Posts
- Click on Manage Blogs and then click on the blog title that you want to edit
- In the page, click on Edit Website SEO link under Search Engine Listings Preview section
- In the Page Title field enter search engine optimized Title – You can provide a title of up to 55 characters in size
- In the Description field, enter search engine optimized Description – You can provide a Description of up to 320 characters in size
- Make changes to the link under URL and Handle section
- Click on Save
Linking from Blogs to external sources
It is very important to link your pages and blog posts with 3rd party online properties of your business, including Facebook, Twitter etc. Shopify provides a way to make this possible, all you need to do is follow the below steps.
- Navigate to your Shopify admin panel and click on Online Store > Navigation.
- Identify the name of the menu where you want to add the link to external sources from and Click on Add menu or select an existing menu item to edit.
- Enter Blog into the Name field, which would be the Link name.
- Place the URL to your blog in the Link field provided.
- Click on Save Menu
Conclusion
Having blogs on your Shopify store is all about content delivery to the right set of people on a consistent basis while answering all their queries. As a Shopify store, one must take advantage of what blogging has to offer for it gives an efficient way to listen to your customers periodically. All that said, even with Shopify’s built-in blogging platform in offing for no cost to you, make the best use of this advantage to stay ahead in the e-Commerce competition.
