How to Increase Conversions From SEO

TL;DR:

• SEO content may not convert due to reaching the wrong audience or an audience not ready to buy.
• You can increase conversions by sitting in on sales calls for insights, focusing on middle and bottom-of-funnel content, and tailoring CTAs to the right buyer stage can provide insights into customer needs for better content targeting

Your company has a great website. As the Content Marketing Manager, you've spent hours planning and writing compelling SEO content for the blog and the design team has done an excellent job on the visual elements. But there's just one problem. After all your efforts, your content isn't driving conversions in spite of high traffic.

In order to get the ball rolling on those conversions, you need to understand why your SEO content isn't doing the trick. At the moment, you have no idea why — and the longer this continues, the more unhappy leadership becomes.

We're here to clarify why your content isn't converting and here to offer you five ways to fix it.

Why Companies End Up With SEO Content That Doesn't Convert

There's nothing more confusing and frustrating than ranking for the right keywords, driving traffic, and sitting with no conversions.

You need to debrief and figure out why you're not converting. The most common reasons are:

1. You're reaching the wrong audience. The amount of eyeballs on your content doesn't matter unless they're qualified eyeballs. Getjerry.com, a car insurance company, was ranking for "Fast and Furious" and getting an influx of traffic, but those visitors weren't there for car insurance.
2. You're reaching an audience that isn't ready to buy. A lot of your site visitors are in the very early stages of the buyer journey and haven't even considered taking a next step.
3. Content is reaching the right audience who is ready to buy, but you're not selling your product enough. Maybe you don't have enough CTAs or the CTAs you do have aren't compelling. It's also possible that your content isn't highlighting the value and benefits of your product to your ICP.
4. You don't know that conversions are happening because of poor attribution. It's possible you're not aware of certain attribution channels, or don't have the right analytics set up to measure conversions.

How To Make SEO Content Convert to Paying Customers

#1: Sit In on Sales Calls to Better Understand Your Target ICP

Targeting the wrong audience is a familiar marketing misfire. It sounds simple, but you need to write content with specific target personas in mind if you want your content to land, and ultimately drive conversions.

A great way to align content with customer needs is to talk to existing customers. Sit in on sales calls to get a better understanding of:

• What problems they face
• What processes they're currently using
• Their worldview and aspirations
• What they care about
• What solutions they're looking for

Using sales calls as a marketer gives you unprecedented insight into your customers and help you write content that offers them the solutions they need.

Tip: Letterdrop integrates with Gong.io to extract marketing insights from sales calls for you

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#2 Focus on a Middle and Bottom of the Funnel Keyword Strategy

Prospects in the top of the marketing funnel are only just learning about the space. They're nowhere near a buying decision yet and are just finding their feet. Think about someone typing "what is sales enablement" into Google vs "best sales enablement platforms for professional services."

At the middle and bottom stages of the funnel, a prospect is further along in the buyer journey and are more likely to be in the market to buy. In general, search volume for related keywords tends to be lower, but the chance of conversion is much higher.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

At this point, a prospect has progressed through the initial awareness phase of the buyer journey and is actively weighing up potential solutions.

Content for this stage should aim to educate the reader as much as possible to help them make their choice.

Examples include aggregation pieces and case studies, and your prospects may be searching terms like "X product vs Y product" or "X product case study".

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

This is when prospects are one push away from choosing their solution and becoming paying customers.

Content at this stage should highlight the specific features and benefits of a product that position it as the best solution on the market. It should include compelling CTAs to drive prospects forward.

Customer testimonials are a good bet at this point, as are offerings like free trials. Your prospects might search keywords like "X product price" or "X product Case Study."

Tip: Target long-tail, middle and bottom-of-funnel keywords that you ‎find in your customer conversations and keyword research tools. They're more specific and are lower-competition, which increases your conversion likelihood.

#3 Write More Product-Led Content

Since SEO is one of the primary channels for product-led content, you need to make sure that you're writing enough of it to drive results.

Content isn't just for fun at the end of the day. It needs to sell your product. And product-led content helps you do that by presenting it as the natural solution to a problem. The soft sell is usually the winner since your prospects are looking for solutions rather than products.

For example, Metadata.io helps with demand gen, and they wrote an article that highlights the three best demand gen tools out there — including Metadata.

#4 Use Better CTAs

Every piece of content should have a CTA. They should be clear and visible — a scrolling CTA is a good choice since it stays in focus even while your prospect scrolls, and dropping one at the end of an article is also practical.

But you shouldn't just use any CTA, either. If you want your CTA to actually convert, should be specific to the piece and encourage an action that ultimately drives some form of business.

It's okay to push for softer conversions, too. You can encourage prospects to sign up for your newsletter to get regular and helpful industry tips rather than push them for a demo.

#5 Use Remarketing and Retargeting Strategies For Those Who Don't Convert

Sometimes, you won't get a conversion in spite of your best efforts. That's where retargeting comes in.

Retargeting involves tracking visitors to your website and serving them online ads as they visit other sites. By retargeting people who visited your highest-converting web pages, you can entice them to return and take the desired action.

For example, in 2019 United Airlines used retargeting to reach people who had viewed their ads and were considering booking a vacation. They promoted a 15-second video with a call-to-action, resulting in increased conversions.

To set up remarketing, you need to add a Google Ads Tag or tracking pixel to your website to collect visitor data. This can be done through the Google Ads admin by going to Tools & Settings > Shared Library > Audience Manager.

#6 Perform an SEO Audit and Make Improvements

You may be overlooking some technical SEO rules that are making for a bad user experience and causing prospects to bounce.

Here are some rules to look out for:

1. The title shouldn't be cut off in the SERP.
2. Images need alt text.
3. Images need proper file names.
4. You shouldn't have more than one H1.
5. You need at least two or three internal links.
6. You need least one high domain authority external link.
7. No broken links.
8. Optimize your Core Web Vitals (minify code, lazy load images, etc)
9. Create skimmable structure with bolding and lists.
10. Use your keyword naturally in the introduction to make it clear what this article answers.
11. Use your keyword naturally in the conclusion to make it clear what this article answers.
12. No keyword stuffing.

Taking care of these fixes across your site manually can be overwhelming. Letterdrop can identify and automate these fixes across your site.

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How To Track Conversions with GA4

It's pretty obvious that tracking 100% attribution on any marketing effort is impossible — but there are way rives conversions as it should, Google Analytics is a really great tool for conversion tracking and can help you tie content to revenue.

You can set up conversion events, ascribe value to them, and set up page tracking. Here's a video demonstration of how to figure out content-influenced conversions.

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You can also use and track attribution models in GA4. Something like first-click attribution allows you to determine if users sign up immediately or return multiple times before converting. And if you combine this with a "Time Lag" and "Path Length" report, you'll gain better insight into conversion timelines.

How To Track Conversions with HubSpot

Tracking conversions with GA4 might be free, but it's diffcult to determine what happens before or after the conversion event.

HubSpot, on the other hand, connects marketing and sales through an integrated CRM. That means you can see the entire "lifecycle" of a closed deal as it moves from marketing to sales, from first touch to final call.

Check out our guide on content attribution in HubSpot to learn how to do it yourself.

Get Your SEO Content Converting As it Should

Knowing your ICP is at the root of creating content that actually converts. As soon as you're aware of what your prospects need and what stage of the buyer journey they're in, you'll be on track to create helpful pieces with clear CTAs that can drive those conversions in no time.

We're actively thinking about the future of SEO at Letterdrop. If you want to learn how, feel free to reach out to us.