Just because you have an ecommerce site, that doesn't mean you have an excuse ignore the need for great content. In fact, ecommerce sites in many ways present unique opportunities for content that can really move the needle from both an SEO and sales perspective.

Write Product Descriptions That Don't Suck

Most ecommerce sites don't bother to write descriptions for their products. They take the "back of the box" description, couple it with specs and call it good. The problem of course is that it's not good. Product descriptions are probably the easiest way for companies to create unique content. I'm not saying that it has to be J. Peterman Urban Sombrero original, but it should speak to your customers in a way that both helps your customer make a purchasing decision and emotes your brand's personality. Before you grumble "yeah, but I sell the most boring stuff on the planet" consider this - we write hundreds upon hundreds of unique descriptions about 58" long pieces of wood and each of those pieces of wood does the exact same thing.

Our focus on quality descriptions began in earnest in 2009. In addition to having a positive impact on customer retention and sales, we also saw an overall lift from an SEO perspective, as our site entrances from product pages increased by 31.58%.

In addition to the increase in entrances, we also saw an 8.4% lift in the amount of time our customers spent on our product pages and a 10.6% decrease in exits from our product pages.

As with all content, ultimately it's all about understanding the needs of your audience. Because our audience is comprised primarily of pool players, we had pool players write our product descriptions. Additionally, because pretty much everyone who works at PoolDawg plays pool, we also tapped our own internal resources (customer service reps, our operations manager and even yours truly) to write product descriptions.

Give Customers Content they'll Actually Find Useful and Interesting

Just because the primary purpose of your site is to sell product, it doesn't excuse you from creating content that your customers will find useful, humorous or thought provoking. For example, we're in the business of selling pool cues, so one of the first pieces of non-sales based content that we created was our Anatomy of a Pool Cue infographic (way back in 2005). We didn't create it as "link bait" (although we did eventually add the linking code to the page). We created it because we had so many customers ask us what the different parts of the pool cue are. If other sites pick it up, all the better. Ultimately though, we just want to help our customers help themselves. That's the question we always try to ask when adding new non-product based content to the site.

Do Research and Report Your Findings

When you sell products that are in a niche, trying to find data can be a problem. We solved that problem by doing our own research. For example, every pool cue tip has a different hardness level. Most manufacturers simply list them as "soft", "medium" or "hard" which really doesn't help customers (there are varying levels of hardness within different brands of "soft" tips for example). We couldn't find data that was more granular, so we did our own study. We bought a Shore A Durometer (they're surprisingly inexpensive), set our test parameters and measured the hardness of all of our tips. The result allowed us to attach a specific number to each tip, allowing our customers to see the difference between tips and make a more educated purchasing decision. Because we're constantly getting new tip brands in, we can continually update the content on this page.

Give Your Customers Articles with Actionable Points

We talk to our customers. A lot. As a result, we know to a large degree what they like, what they hate and what's important to them from a pool playing perspective. They watch pool, they play pool, they eat, sleep and breathe pool. They are constantly looking for ways to improve their game, so contacted some pro players to see if they'd be interested in writing training articles for us. They obliged and for the past two years we've had a steady stream of original content that's highly relevant to what we sell, appreciated by our customers and is easily sharable (as we announce the release of each article via email, Facebook and Twitter).

Use Your Blog for More Than Just Self-Promotion

Blogging is hard, especially when it comes to creating corporate blogs. We don't blog nearly as much as we should, but when we do, we try and give customers information that they'd be interested in. The topics vary quite a bit, but we've found our most popular posts are ones that show our company personality. We did a series of posts looking at the innards of different pool cue shafts we sell (turning the proverbial lemons into lemonade by using shafts that were destroyed in shipment). We took advantage of last year's Tim Tebow craze here in Colorado by having a couple of our employees who happened to be fanatical Broncos fans Tebowing with our mascot. Recently we sent one of our employees to a 3 day pool playing workshop, so we had him report on his experience on going to pool school.

In the end, it's all about the audience. Whenever we write anything, we always try to make sure we're thinking first about what our audience will like. If it's valuable to our audience, the links and shares will come naturally. Even if we don't get links, we still know that it will create a superior experience for our customers and they're the ones that pay the bills and keep us in business.

Written By: Mike Feiman for PoolDawg