A blog is more than just SEO. Of course there are numerous other ways to increase SEO on your eCommerce site, and I’ll explain that later, but let’s start with the benefits of a blog.

• Blogs help you build up a fan following. With every blog post, you’re either educating or entertaining readers. Produce amazing content and people will keep coming back for more.
• Blogs are engaging. The longer your posts, the more time people will spend reading it, meaning they spend more time on your site. Blogs also allows readers to communicate directly with you and start a conversation in the comments or on social media.
• Blogs get shares. People typically don’t share product pages. Let’s face it, there’s nothing share-worthy about a product. But if you write a seriously good blog post, then people will share that.
• Blogs allow you to soft-sell. Your main site and product pages are for the hard sell. You display your products, explain why they are awesome, and ask visitors to buy. With blogs you can tell stories about how your customers use your products, inspiring readers and at the same time showing the impact of your product on people’s lives. The Fitbit blog is a fine example of this.
• Blogs build your brand. You won’t start making sales from your blog immediately. It might take 5 or 10 blog posts before a reader even considers your product. But when the time comes to make a decision, the reader will think of you first because they’ve been reading your content and seeing your brand so often.

So blogs do a lot more for you, especially in the long run. That’s not to say blogs are the only way to create quality content on your site. If you don’t have a blog, you can still do these things –

• Write creative product descriptions. Don’t create boring copy that’s filled with keywords. Think of your product descriptions as a conversation between you and the customer. Do you really think rattling off some specs will make them eager to buy it?
• Enable product reviews. Reviews means that there’s fresh, user-generated content being created. That means your product pages are regularly updated and Google likes that.
• Create a FAQ section. This solves two problems with one stone. It answers any questions your customers might have about products, while at the same time creating new content for SEO.
• Create videos. Videos are a great way to explain how your product works in visual format and also keeps visitors engaged for longer on your site. This indicates to Google that you have an interesting site.