Content strategy for product-led SEO
Somewhere between "we should have a blog" and "the blog nobody reads," most ecommerce content strategies lose the plot. The plot is simple: your catalog pages catch people ready to buy. Content catches them earlier - researching, comparing, learning - and walks them to the catalog. Content that can't trace a path to a product or collection page is a hobby.
The queries your catalog can't answer
Catalog pages match buying language: "linen shirts," "wool overcoat men." But demand starts earlier, in questions: "what to wear to a summer wedding," "merino vs lambswool," "how should a blazer fit," "is linen too casual for the office." Your collection page can't rank for these - the intent is informational - but a good guide can, and the guide links to the collection. That's the whole mechanism. It's also demand you can see: GSC queries you get impressions for but no clicks (wrong page type ranking), your site-search questions, and the questions customers actually ask support.
Formats that pull their weight
The workhorses, in rough order of reliability: buying guides ("choosing a wool coat: weights, cuts, and what to spend") - evergreen, high-converting, naturally linked to collections; comparison and explainer pieces ("merino vs. lambswool") - win featured snippets and AI citations, establish topical authority; care and how-to content ("how to wash linen so it lasts") - modest traffic, exceptional trust, and it serves existing customers too; size and fit content - unglamorous, permanently in demand, directly removes purchase objections.
Notice what's absent: brand news, campaign announcements, "our founder's journey." Fine content, real audience of nearly zero searchers. Publish it - just don't call it SEO.
Fewer, better, maintained
The math that surprises teams: ten excellent, maintained guides outperform a hundred thin posts, indefinitely. Every piece should be the best answer available for its question - which usually means your product knowledge, your photography, your data (Phase 2's structured attributes make surprisingly good content inputs: a fit guide built from your actual fit data writes itself). And maintained means revisited: a "2024 guide" ranking in 2026 decays; updating a proven piece is the highest-ROI hour in content.
The strategy on one line: list the questions your buyers ask before they buy, answer each one better than anyone else, link every answer into the catalog. Everything else is decoration.