Optimizing Your Blog Content for Conversions: 5 Simple Strategies

In order to optimize your blog content for conversions, write blog posts that focus on explaining problems and presenting solutions.

Keep in mind that your blog not only has the potential to be your proverbial face to the world, but can be a source of traffic conversion and ROI for your marketing efforts.

Here are five strategies for creating conversion optimized blog content.

Survey Your Audience

You can start optimizing your blog conversion rate by talking about the content your audience cares about.

If you don’t know which topics they care about, talk to them about what they think of your existing blog content. Rather than sending out emails or cold-calling, take advantage of your social media channels.

• Get direct feedback. Conduct a social media survey to determine whether people are interested in what your existing blog content. You can also find out what kinds of topics they’d like to see you write about, the kinds of problems they care about, etc.
• Take advantage of Private Messaging. Take the content suggestions you’ve received and share them with a select few subscribers via private messaging — preferably current customers who regularly consume your content. In this more intimate, privileged context, you can get more specific, in-depth suggestions and feedback.

Align Keywords to Blog Content

To create conversion optimized blog content, it’s not enough to use generic keywords. For instance, “online marketing” or just “marketing” is too commonly used to be helpful in search engine rankings and is too broad to generate conversions. The keyword phrase “online marketing to millennials”, however, is more specific, addresses a specific problem, and is therefore more likely to generate conversions.

These keyword phrases are called long-tail keywords, and they are typically 2-3 words long with a main keyword or “header”. Because they address specific issue, they have a lower competition rating, which means content containing those keyword phrases are more likely to show up in search engine results. Here’s how you can create a strong long-tail keyword strategy.

• Identify topics that your audience is interested in and want solutions from. Determine which broad keywords are relevant to those topics, and build long-tail phrases based on those short phrases.
• Use Google Analytics to determine which keywords draw significant traffic to your site, then use Google’s Keyword Tool to determine if there are any long-tail variations of those keywords. Only pick out the ones relevant to solutions for a given topic.
• Use Google’s search engine to develop long-tail keywords by entering the header and seeing which long-tail results come up.

Use Keywords Relevant to the Buying Cycle

When you’re crafting solution focused blog content, you’re targeting a specific audience who will be using specific keywords. Rather than using generic key terms, use keywords likely to be used by people in various stages of the [buying cycle](link to definition?).

• Some people are  just starting to understand the problem they have, use keywords related to phrases like “issue”, “risk”, “optimize”, or “prevent”.
• If they understand their problem and are looking for solutions, use keywords related to phrases like “solution”, “tool”, “device”, or “appliance”.
• For people who understand their problem, know their options, and want to invest in a particular solution, use keywords related to phrases like “compare”, “versus”, or “test”.

Optimizing your blog content to address these various stages requires developing a keyword database, and that means doing some research. Here’s what you can do to develop a buying cycle-sensitive keyword strategy.

1. Look at Your Ranked Keywords: Figure out which of your keywords are ranking well. Do this for all your keywords, but pay particular attention to keywords related to each stage of the buying cycle.
2. Create Long-Tail Keywords: If there are any single-term keywords lacking a long-tail partner, create one for them. You don’t have to get rid of single-term keywords, as there is a time and place for them. However, you want to ensure you’re optimizing your outreach to knowledgeable buyers.
3. Research on Google: Take the keywords you’ve recorded and developed, and take to Google. Not only note which related keywords come up in meta-descriptions, but look at the search suggestions that come up at the bottom of the page. You can use those to further develop your keyword database.

Create an Editorial Calendar

Use the information you gained from surveying your audience to create a blog content calendar with your writing team. Make sure the you have a substantial amount of blog posts focused on providing solutions to problems. Here are the details you need to work out:

1. Authors and Due Dates: Work out who will write each blog post and when you want the blog post to be completed and published. If time allows it, assign someone to read over their work to check for quality (it’s always good to have another pair of eyes).
2. Title and Content: Provide an SEO-friendly title and provide a few bullet points covering the content of the blog post.
3. Keywords and Target Personas: Since each blogpost addresses particular problems, provide keywords specific to the topic and specify the persona this blog post will be optimized for.
4. Call to Action: Specify what you want your readers to do after looking at your blog post (download content, sign up for updates, etc.).

Create Relevant Content Offers

To get more conversions from your blog traffic, offer special downloadable content at the end of your blog post. Make sure your…

• Downloadable content contains more information than the original blog post. Providing redundant information makes you liable to losing visitors and potential buyers.
• Downloadable content is relevant to the topics and problems your services/products address.
• Downloadable content appeals to different stages of the buyer’s journey. You should have separate kinds of content for people who are just beginning the research process, people who are now looking for specific solutions, and people who are ready to make a purchase.