For an eCommerce website, content writing is necessary to establish a brand image and to market products and services to target audiences.
Well written content can be enough to influence someone to purchase a product or a service. However, content writing can turn away potential customers–especially if it’s full of unsightly grammatical errors and huge chunks of text.
If you’ve been doing content writing for long enough, you’re (hopefully) aware of the importance of proof-reading and making your content as organized as possible.
Still, there are many mistakes that an eCommerce website makes that extend beyond the realm of surface level errors and lengthy paragraphs.
Here are 5 problems you might not realize are negatively impacting your eCommerce website and what you can do to fix them.
1. Your Content Isn’t Readable Enough
Sure, you’ve been outlining your paragraphs to avoid huge chunks of text: that’s great, don’t stop. But have you been taking your readability levels into consideration?
Readability is how easy it is for people to comprehend your writing. When something has a low readability level, it’s more difficult for your readers to get at what you’re trying to say and is likely to tire out your readers. This is because readers have to spend more time and energy trying to decipher complex sentence structures and word choices, similar to if you’re trying to read an academic paper.
What Is A Readability Score?
A readability score is a number that indicates how easy it is for readers to read a certain piece of text. The Flesch-Kincaid formula is most commonly used for measuring how readable a certain piece of text is. Scores are measured between 1-100 and are based on the average sentence length and word length within a text. The higher the number, the higher the readability.
For content writing, you want to aim for a readability score of at least 60. A score of 60 means that your content will be easy for those who are able to read at an 8th-grade level (i.e. the average 13-year-old.)
How You Can Improve Your Readability Levels
- Avoid flowery language. You don’t want to sound as if you’re pulling out a thesaurus to select the most “smart-sounding” words. This doesn’t mean that you should completely avoid using them. Think of big words as spices. Adding too much spice can ruin your dish (your content). Instead, you want to use the right amount where it’s not so distracting to the reader.
- Eliminate fillers. Examples of fillers include “very,” “in order to,” “really,” “just.” When used in excess, these words only weigh down your writing. The goal is to write as concisely as possible without unnecessary words.
- Using an active voice instead of passive. Passive voice makes sentences read awkward and lower the readability level of a text. For content writing, you want to avoid using the passive voice as much as possible. If you can, try changing the subject of your sentence to rewrite it in an active voice.
2. You Only Talk About the Features
Details are important. But it can be hard not to get caught up in them, especially when a common mistake in content writing is talking exclusively about the features of a product or service.
You may FEEL like you need to include all the details, but it can do more damage than good. Including too many details can tire out your readers and muddles the purpose of whatever it is you are writing about. If you’re trying to convince your audience to purchase your product or service, you need to give them a reason to do so.
How You Can Fix This
Whenever you’re trying to sell anything or persuade somebody to perform a specific behavior, you must be able to answer the following question: “So what?”
People like to have reasons to purchase something. If you’re struggling to come up with an answer, ask yourself the following questions:
- Why should someone buy your product/or service?
- In what ways will my target audience benefit from purchasing this product/or service?
- Why is this product or service better for them versus other alternatives?
3. Keyword Stuffing
The primary purpose of content writing is to boost a web page’s ranking on search engines like Google through the use of keywords.
With this in mind, it’s easy to think: “If using keywords helps to boost my eCommerce website ranking further, then I should try to stuff as many as possible into my article to rank my article even higher!!”
Don’t do that.
While it may seem like the logical course of action to take, that is not how keywords work. In fact, overdoing keywords does more harm than good. This is known as keyword stuffing and ruins the flow of an article.
How To Avoid Keyword Stuffing
- Choose a primary keyword for your webpage/website. Ideally, choose one that best represents what your eCommerce business is all about.
- Include secondary keywords. Secondary, or long tail keywords, offer search engines more context and can rank your content higher.
- Use keywords in page elements. Add keywords to your meta titles, meta descriptions, main title, subheadings, and image tags to help elevate your content’s ranking.
4. Your Writing Lacks Empathy
One common mistake that content writers make is trying too hard to be persuasive, which comes off as dubious and overly-salesy. It’s important to persuade your audience, but doing too much can come off as unempathetic. Empathy is a crucial component of high-quality content writing. Without it, potential customers can feel as if they’re being taken advantage of.
How To Write With More Empathy
- Know your audience. This is an obvious one. You want to know about the demographics of your audience to appeal to them. For example, what age range is my audience? What jobs do they have? What are their values?
- Place yourself in the shoes of your audience. Great content writers understand the needs of their target audiences and the challenges that they face. How can they overcome their challenges? How can your product/service meet their needs?
- Be casual and conversational. Talk to your target audience as if you are one of them. Don’t be afraid to let your voice shine out and share a little bit of yourself. You want your audience to know you’re a human.
5. You’re Trying Too Hard To Appeal To Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is crucial to content writing. But can you know your audience a little too much?
The answer is yes. When writers are trying to appeal to a certain audience, they’ll want to include niche references and “buzzwords” popular among their target audience. Every now and then, some content writers go overboard when trying to appeal to their audience.
Say your target audience is Gen Z. There is a lot of Gen Z slang. You may feel tempted to squeeze as many slang words into your article like “slay!” and “edgy” or “lit!”
Doing this comes off as ingenuine and makes it seem like you’re trying too hard to be like your target audience.
How To Avoid This
- Don’t overgeneralize your target audience. This is a no-no. Avoid stereotypes at all costs.
- Mix up your references and buzzwords. Don’t just include buzzwords and references that only your target audience would be familiar with. It’s a great idea to mix up references and slang by including things that everyone (regardless of your audience) would know, along with references that are more niche to your audience.
- Don’t over include buzzwords. Remember the spice analogy from earlier? With buzzwords and references, less is more. You want to achieve a tasteful balance without overdoing it. Otherwise, you’ll look like the guy below.
Book a demo today and let Content Cucumber write for your eCommerce website!
