Blogging and SEO for Shopify

Blogging is an essential part of an ecommerce site's success. It increases your brand visibility, drives traffic, and is a crucial part of a successful SEO strategy. If you're not generating blog content for your Shopify store, you're missing a great opportunity to grow your business. It's important to understand how blogs can help drive traffic to your site.

The importance of good blog content can't be overstated, as it's the foundation for achieving higher search engine rankings and driving organic traffic. Well-structured content with relevant keywords will create a signal to search engines, like Google, that your website is a valuable resource for users and thus should be treated as a high-quality destination. This is the reason you should always aim for quality content over quantity. If your blogs are just stuffed with keywords to try and "trick" Google, you're not going to get anywhere. Google's algorithms are very sophisticated and can tell the difference between a proper written blog versus text-blocks just stuffing keywords. Google will in-fact penalize your site if they feel your are trying to game the system.

So how can blogs help? Blogs get indexed by the search engines allowing customers to find your store via related searches. These search matches will drive more traffic to your store and increase the potential for new sales. By creating high-quality blog content, you're adding keywords to your store that Google reads as it crawls your site. Google will use this crawled data to paint a word-picture of your pages. The more relevant keywords you can use, the more potential you have for getting ranked. Investing in exceptional blog content benefits your SEO efforts and enhances your online reputation.

To get the biggest benefit, your blog should focus on content that is relevant to your ecommerce store's audience. This builds a trust relationship with your customers and leads to more visits. But let's get real, it takes a lot of time to dream up topics and write content, all while you're simultaneously trying to run your store. If only there was a tool that has the (artificial) intelligence to write blog content for your store...you know where we're going with this, right? Yup, our old friend ChatGPT and some AI magic is here to help you become a lean, mean blog-writing machine.

I'm Not a Writer, Help Me ChatGPT

Ecommerce blogs need to serve a purpose, which means they need to service your store. You have to put thought into your topics to ensure they are driving the proper customers to your site. For example, writing a blog about auto parts for a cosmetics store is the wrong way to go. You need to write about things that interest your customers. Your cosmetic store should have blogs that are relevant to your customers (i.e. people reading the blogs.) But what do you do if you're not an award-winning novelist with a knack for writing interesting blogs?

You don't have to be a professional writer to pull it off. All you need is a billion-dollar AI robot at your disposal. Yup, we're talking about everyone's favorite tool, ChatGPT. If you don't already know, ChatGPT is an AI-powered service that generates content based on your input. It can create articles, product descriptions and you guessed it, blog posts.

Let's first address one big issue that pops-up frequently when discussing AI content. Will your site be penalized for posting AI-generated content? We did the research and the consensus states that search engines generally will not frown upon AI-generated content, as long as it's relevant and of good quality. However, they may penalize your site if you use AI-generated content to manipulate or trick the search engine rankings. Google has provided a great blog about Google's policy on AI content. So now that's out of the way, let's dig into this combination of Shopify blogs and ChatGPT.

Shopify Blogs by ChatGPT

Let's say you're using your store to run a cosmetics company and you want to create blogs to attract the proper audience. If you're not sure of a good topic, you can turn to ChatGPT with a simple entry like:

"Write a blog for a cosmetics company"

ChatGPT will quickly generate some text based on your input and assuming you've reviewed it for accuracy (which you should always do by the way), you can then manually copy and paste it into Shopify. All good right? Well, what about the next time you need another blog? What are you going to enter into ChatGPT this next time?

"Write another blog for a cosmetics company"

And then the time after that:

"Write yet another blog for a cosmetics company"

As you can probably see, even using an AI tool like ChatGPT will eventually require some ideas on your part to prompt ChatGPT. Also, a basic prompt like this will probably yeild low quality results without additional context about your company. If the whole point of AI is to take the burden off your brain, what does it seem like coming up with topics is taking real work.

Well, here's an idea, what if we take a step back and ask ChatGPT to first generate a list of topics and then feed those topics back into ChatGPT? And then we could interject other external resources to further customize the blog. For example, our cosmetics store could feature summer-centric blogs to help with skincare or protection from the sun. When winter rolls around, we enter a prompt for cold weather skin tips. I'm sure you get the idea now. This seasonal and weather-based data can be part of your prompt to the AI to produce more topical responses. Don't look now but what we have here is the germ of an AI algorithm.

You can repeat this process every week and then manually copy data from ChatGPT into your blog. Sounds like a lot of work again, right? Wouldn't it be cool if some digital commerce agency used their smarts to create an all-powerful artificial intelligent ecommerce engine that can help with blog generation (among other things?) Hey, guess what, we did...

Put AI and Blogging to Work for You

We decided to tackle this blog algorithm idea and develop a reusable digital commerce AI service. The result is our new AI-powered ecommerce engine that solves blogging and other important digital commerce tasks. The system incorporates custom Machine Learning (ML) and AI content with the power of ChatGPT to solve common ecommerce issues. So what kind of blogs did it generate for our hypothetical Shopify company?

Using our new digital commerce AI engine, we activated the blog service and let it review the details of our store including the location, products, sales, shop info and industry. From that, it determined we were a "cosmetics retail" company selling skin and makeup products. It also determined it was currently winter and recognized that our "top selling" items were skin-care based. Using that data it generated the following blog topics:

• The Best Winter Skincare Tips for Glowing Skin

• How to Transition Your Makeup Routine for Winter

• The Best Winter Lip Colors for Every Skin Tone

• How to Choose the Right Foundation for Winter

The AI system then used the first topic and generated a blog post for our company. It searched our store and incorporated our top-selling skin-care item named, "Bronze Glowy", into the blog for a more relatable post. Here is the first part of that AI text:

And we didn't have to do anything but let the AI loose in our system. For this demo, we only prompted for a short paragraph. For the final blog, we would generate a more comprehensive blog. But how can the AI engine expand the blog and provide relevant details? The AI engine first analyzes the store details, products and sales to generate relevant details to help contextualize the blog post. Like all AI-generated text, you should review it for accuracy, but this is a great start. The system uses ChatGPT to automatically generate the blog text and then upload it to Shopify via an API-connected app. The blog is created as a hidden post for your team to review:

To make the most of blogging, it's best to post on a regular cadence to take advantage of SEO opportunities. Our commerce engine automatically schedules queries to produce weekly new content for your Shopify blogs.

Creating blogs is only the tip of the icebreg for our AI-powered ecommerce engine. We look forward to helping merchants get the most of their store.

Time To Get Blogging

Creating and maintaining good blog content is a crucial part of a successful SEO strategy. It will not only improve your website's search engine rankings but also establish your brand as a trusted authority. The key to long-lasting success is to establish your store as a trusted authority and prioritize the user experience. If you embrace this approach, you'll witness your website thrive via organic traffic to your blogs.

Introducing Our Digital Ecommerce Engine

We're bringing our 23 years of digital commerce experience to tackle the unique needs of ecommerce merchants. The result is our new AI-powered ecommerce engine that provides solutions for day-to-day digital commerce tasks. The system incorporates proprietary machine learning (ML) algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) content with the power of ChatGPT to solve common ecommerce issues. Here are some of the issues our digital commerce engine can solve:

• Generate product descriptions

• Write blog posts

• Image recognition and content moderation

• Text/tag extraction from images

• Next Store Action recommendations

• Competitive price analysis

• Sales analysis recommendations

• Data migration with AI enrichment

• And more!

We're just getting started with the power of our digital ecommerce engine. If you want to learn more or get a pre-release on your store, contact us today!