Nobody knows your products like you do. And the knowledge that you hold can be used to drive new people to your site and convert them to customers with a bit of work on your ecommerce website blog. 

I am a HUGE advocate of using your website to educate your customers and help them to make the best buying decisions. So in this guide, I’ve outlined a practical approach to writing buying guides that win customers through a range of channels, with a particular emphasis on SEO.

Consumers make lots of searches now before buying a product, particularly one where there are lots of options or where it’s a more considered purchase. Being visible to your customer in the process of their research and presenting helpful buying guide style content is incredibly valuable.

Buying Guides and Search Intent

Not all that many years ago, a Google search for “best home smokers,” or “best running shoes for wide feet” would often return ecommerce website category pages. Lots of ecommerce sites used to (and still) optimise their category landing pages for “best” variants of keywords.

For example, if someone sells running shoes, they might have a category for wide shoes that they want to rank in Google for “best running shoes for wide feet.”

But over the last few years, Google has been placing a lot more emphasis on what we refer to as “search intent.”

In other words, Google is trying to understand what a user wants before deciding what sort of content to rank in search.

Let’s stick with running shoes as an example. If we head to Google UK and we search “running shoes,” the first organic results we’ll see are these:

Both of these take you to pages where you can buy the shoes directly. They’re ecommerce category pages.

But if we make one tiny change to our search query and we type in “best running shoes,” it’s a different story.

You can’t buy shoes from any of these pages. The content is editorial. It’s guide content – not sales content.

In fact, there isn’t a single ecommerce category page that ranks in the top 10 for “best running shoes” (as of April 2024)

We see this over and over again across a whole range of products in search.

Why?

Well, ultimately it seems that Google has determined that someone searching “best running shoes” or any product, wants to read informative content, understand pros and cons and ultimately is looking for guidance rather than to make a purchase right now.

Does that mean ecommerce websites can’t rank in Google for “best” keywords?

Absolutely not.

It means they probably would be better off trying to rank with buying guides though, rather than category pages.

We see lots of ecommerce websites with buying guides ranking in search.

In this example, Sous Chef, an ecommerce website that sells specialist food ingredients, is ranking for “best balsamic vinegar.”

This website has a category style page where you can buy any of the balsamic vinegars it stocks. But that’s not the page that ranks. The one we get taken to here is a purpose created buying guide:

There’s a lot of editorial content here as well as easy access links to product pages.

I previously worked on a project for a supplements brand who knew that a great target audience for them was people who’ve already considered prescription medication for conditions like weight management or sleep problems before.

So I created guides for people now looking for alternatives to certain medications which then started ranking for alternatives centric searches:

In those posts, we included links to their products designed to help with those conditions. And because the quality of the editorial is really important, we also added information not related to their own products. This drives traffic in the form of people we know are looking for help with weight management but they’re looking for an alternative to a drug. Some of the people landing on this page go on to click through to the product page and ultimately purchase.

So it’s not impossible to rank for “best” type keywords. We’ve just got to consider that perhaps a category page isn’t the best place to send people looking for this type of information and instead look to our blogs as a place to create useful, compelling buying guides.

Writing Buying Guides – The Short Version

Want the quick version? Here it is in a nutshell. We’ve based this on approaching the comparison style buying guides (but we’ve summed up other types at the end too) – the ones where you look at multiple different product options and outline what the best is for certain use cases.

There are 2 reasons we love these ones:

• People looking for “best” anything are often, in our experience, likely to convert soon. Those queries often have incredible conversion rates and they’re heavily bidded on in PPC terms
• There’s a really straightforward formula you can use to create them if you have multiple products of any given type

Here’s the quick version.

1. Take a look at your product range, consider the questions you’ve previously had from customers before and make a list of the product areas you think people need help making buying decisions on. This will ultimately become your list of buying guides to produce (with some tweaking)
2. Head on over to Google and start typing in “what’s the best {product type} for…” and let Google finish your sentence for you. This will tell you specific questions relating to questions people ask when shopping for that product type
3. Keyword research (optional but advisable if you have access to a tool)
4. Write a page title and a meta description that incorporate “best” and {product type} plus reference to any special use cases you’re covering if you’re doing so. E.g. “Best running shoes for wide feet,” or “best ballet shoes for beginners.”
5. Open with a short summary paragraph
6. Include a summary table of your products at the beginning with the product name, price and maybe one or two key points
7. Include a paragraph then for each of the products in your round up with more details, pros and cons plus an image and a link to where they can buy this product on your website
8. Include a conclusion at the end and reference when it was last updated
9. Go back either annually or when there’s a key product range change that means you want to change the products in the guide and update it (then update that “last updated” date)

We’ve covered each of these points in more detail below.

What should you write about?

You have more information to guide you on this than you perhaps realise. We’re going to stick with a running shoes example here.

If you sell running shoes, you’ve probably had customers get in touch with questions before. Some of the common ones we’ve seen asked in this space:

• What are the best running shoes for flat feet?
• What are the best running shoes for wide feet?
• What are the best running shoes for shin splints?

And of course, just a simple “what are the best running shoes?”

Let’s break down one of these questions:

“What are the best running shoes for wide feet?”

There are 3 elements to this question:

1. The question, “What are the best?” which implies someone potentially shopping
2. The product type, which is running shoes in this case
3. The use case, which is “for wide feet” in this case.

A use case isn’t always present. Plenty of people simply search “what are the best running shoes,” but buying running shoes is such a considered purchase with so many individual needs of runners that there’s a lot of opportunity in buying guides for specific groups like this.

Think about your product types and use cases and shortlist a few ideas for your buying guides.

Find out what people ask Google about your products

Head off to Google and type in “what are the best running shoes” or “running shoes for” and you’ll see Google finishes your sentence for you by offering you a few suggestions.

These “autosuggest” suggestions are based on what people have previously typed in. And if someone has a question about running shoes, they’ve probably Googled it. So this is a great source of inspiration for buying guide use cases.

Pick out the most relevant of these and add them to that list!

Keyword Research

If you’ve got access to a keyword research tool, you can get an estimate (and do regard it as an estimate, not a completely accurate figure) as to how many times some of these questions are searched, plus find variations of them.

In the example here, we’re using Kwfinder.com, but if you have access to SEMRush, Ahrefs or any other such tool, that will work too.

We can see from kwfinder.com that this is searched, on average, 540 times per month (based on an average of the last 12).

But we can also see some similar keywords too:

This will definitely not be an exhaustive list. There’ll be lots of other variations too. But this confirms for us a short list of other keywords we should consider in our buying guide for wide footed runners and confirms there are over 1,000 related searches indicating someone looking for this sort of content every single month in Google.

Take a note of those extra keywords. We’ll use those later!

You can try kwfinder.com yourself:

Page Title and Meta Description

The page title is one of the single most important elements of any page in SEO terms. Within most ecommerce platforms there’s a place to manage key SEO elements like page title and meta descriptions.

Some people refer to the title as “meta title,” others as “SEO title.”

The meta description is often the snippet within your listing in search engine results pages (SERPs) that users see.

We want to include our headline keyword here, which contains “best,” our product type and our use case if we have one.

A loose structure would be:

Short Summary Paragraph

Don’t dive right in with products. Take a few sentences or a short paragraph to introduce your guide, explain what it’s about and reassure readers they’re in the right place.

You could even use this to establish the credibility you have to write the guide in the first place. Something like:

“With 30 years of experience selling running shoes and more than 50 years of experience using them as a wide footed, our CEO, {name}, tackles a question we get often from those looking to maximise their comfort on a run.”

Comparison Table

This is the quick view of products you’ll be including and should let users see, at a glance, a list of the products you’ve included in your guide as well as a key info and a price. Key information will differ from product type to product type. For this one, some key things to include might be:

1. Product name
2. Price
3. How wide is the toe box?
4. How wide is the heel?
5. Average user rating

This is ideal in table format for two reasons:

• Tables are easy for users to scan read
• We often see Google pulling information from tables for its featured snippets in search results (the summary answers that appear above results on some searches)

So a quick summary table outlining the specific products you’re going to be looking at is ideal here.

A Paragraph for Each Product

From then, we’re into the main bulk of content – information about each specific product. Each product within your round up should have its own paragraph with a subheading. Make this subheading a H2,

In the case of a buying guide, the subheading should simply be the name of the product.

From there, you’ll want to include (for each product):

• A product image
• The price
• A link to quickly and easily go through to the product page on the site and buy
• A paragraph or two of content covering the key features of the product that you think are most important in the context of the specific use case

A quick note on keywords: If you’ve got that list of a few additional variant keywords we took from our quick keyword research task, use these throughout the content. Don’t force them in – they should fit naturally. And don’t use them too many times. Once or twice where they fit best editorially is absolutely fine. 

Conclude it

Ending a buying guide without a conclusion feels like walking out without saying goodbye. It closes things off nicely editorially to conclude it with a short paragraph. You could even invite people to contact you or your sales team if they have any product specific questions. But it’s also an opportunity to fit some variant keywords in if you’ve struggled to fit them elsewhere.

Let’s go ahead and continue with our wide footed running shoes example. A conclusion might look something like this:

<h2>Picking the Best Wide Footed Running Shoes for You</h2>

We’ve pulled together what we consider the best wide fit running shoes for women and men in this guide. But we appreciate it’s a big decision. Get it right and you’ll be racing happy. Get it wrong and you could be looking a number of painful miles. So if you’ve any doubts at all and would like to speak to one of our advisers, grab us on the live chat or send an email to {email address}.

Guide last updated in September 2021.

Update it

Once it’s live, you can measure and tweak in the weeks that follow as required. But one of the biggest overlooked benefits with most types of content is a frequent refresh.

Updating your buying guides annually (or more often if your product range changes more) has some real benefits:

• You can put your newest products in and take out any you no longer sell which should help increase sales through the guide
• Once updated, you can update your page title and the “last updated” section to reflect the current year. People often search for all sorts with a year on the end so this can drive additional traffic

Other types of buying guide related content

We’ve focussed heavily in this guide on product comparisons with specific use cases. But there are other types of content related to helping customers too:

• “Alternatives to.” We covered an example at the beginning of this piece. But if you don’t necessarily have a product range large enough to do a detailed comparison led guide, then creating a piece around “alternatives to..” a product you don’t stock but that is one that does something similar to some you do stock is another great way to help prospective customers find you and make buying decisions. So if you sell a fitness tracker that is significantly lower cost than the Apple Watch of the Fitbit (but you only sell one or two brands so you can’t really justify a full “best fitness tracker” guide), you could create something along the lines of “Cheaper Alternatives to the Apple Watch for Runners”
• Answering common product questions in your blog. If customers contact you with questions about products on your site, then you can be pretty confident people are probably asking Google that question too. So creating a FAQs section in your blog where you type up answers to customer queries is a great place to send customers who need help but also to drive people to your site when they are actively researching a product you stock. For example, going back to running shoes for a moment, let’s say a customer contacts you to ask “should my running shoes be tight fitting” you could fairly assume that they’re not the only people to ask. A quick check shows 130 people a month search “should running shoes be tight,” in the UK and another 160 search “how tight should running shoes be?” So if you create a post answering this question, where the question becomes your page title heading and your answer is the body of the content, you end up with a piece of copy that’s useful to users and could be found by prospective customers

A measurable way to use content on your ecommerce website blog

I’m often asked what ecommerce businesses should blog about and of course, it very much depends on your goals. But if your goal is as simple as sales and new customers, then buying guides could be a superb way to get the most out of your blog.